print revolution in India

Print arrives in India

The printing press in India was initially an instrument of commerce and colonial administration. Jesuit missionaries imported the first presses to the coastal city of Goa, setting up the first one in September 1556, at a time when Goa was under Portuguese rule. These early presses were used to produce religious literature in the Portuguese, Tamil, and Konkani languages. Although the East India Company introduced presses elsewhere in India from roughly the 17th century onward, they had little immediate impact because of political instability, the dominance of calligraphic manuscript culture, and limited demand for printed reading material in the region.

It was in Calcutta (in the Bengal Presidency; now Kolkata), the seat of the company’s expanding power, that India’s first newspaper was born. On January 29, 1780, James Augustus Hicky published the inaugural issue of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette; or, The Original Calcutta General Advertiser. The paper claimed to be “open to all parties, but influenced by none” and presented an outspoken campaign against corruption and abuse of power in colonial India. It soon became an instrument of personal grievance, aimed with considerable acrimony at Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India, and Elijah Impey, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, among others. Hicky was eventually imprisoned—his types seized and his paper discontinued in 1782. Following Hicky’s founding effort, several newspapers and a magazine proliferated in Calcutta, starting between 1784 and 1787, such as the Calcutta Gazette, the Oriental Magazine; or, Calcutta Amusement, and the Calcutta Chronicle. Other presidencies of British India—Madras in 1785 and Bombay in 1789—had their own papers.

These early newspapers had a predominantly European readership and focused largely on British governance. Yet they established the newspaper as a permanent feature of colonial India—and with it a continuing debate over press freedom and government authority. Colonial officials often responded to journalistic inquiry by expelling editors they deemed troublesome. William Duane, editor of the Bengal Journal, was deported from India in 1794, and James Silk Buckingham was forced to leave India in 1823 after using the Calcutta Journal to criticize official conduct and governmental institutions of the time. Although such actions silenced individual editors, they strengthened the broader case for a free press.

The reformist turn: Ram Mohan Roy’s press

The pioneering figure who transformed the Indian press from a medium largely serving the colonizers into one serving the colonized was Ram Mohan Roy—a reformer, philosopher, and formidable public mind of early 19th-century Bengal. He began publishing newspapers in Persian and Bengali, using bilingualism to reach a wider audience. On December 4, 1821, Roy produced the first issue of his Bengali weekly Sambad Kaumudi (“The Moon of Intelligence”). He created it for ordinary Bengali readers, utilizing its columns to carry civic petitions to the colonial government, present arguments for social reform, and put on record the indignities of daily life under British rule. He turned it simultaneously into the principal vehicle of his decade-long campaign against sati (the practice of a widow immolating herself after her husband’s death), helping to sustain public opposition until the practice was legally abolished in 1829.

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Roy added a second paper in April 1822 for an entirely different readership. The Mirat-ul-Akhbar (“Mirror of Intelligence” or “Mirror of News”), a Persian-language weekly, was addressed to the educated classes for whom Persian remained the language of intellectual discourse. Whereas the Sambad Kaumudi carried the grievances of ordinary people in the vernacular, the Mirat-ul-Akhbar engaged with colonial policy, international affairs, and questions of governance for its educated readers. It was pointedly loyal to Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, whose liberalization of the hitherto strict press regulations had made both papers possible in the first place. That loyalty could not survive Hastings’s departure. When John Adam, acting as governor-general, imposed the Press Ordinance (or Licensing Regulations) of 1823—which required every newspaper across the subcontinent to hold a government license revocable at will—Roy decided to shutter the Mirat-ul-Akhbar rather than publish under conditions he described as degrading.

In eastern India the press at Serampore Mission, founded by William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward, contributed to the reading culture from a different direction. One of the earliest Bengali printing presses began to operate from there in 1800. The first Bengali newspaper, Samachar Darpan, and a magazine for young readers, Digdarshan, were issued from Serampore beginning in 1818. These publications established, for the first time, a Bengali readership accustomed to receiving printed matter regularly.

The colonial response to the vernacular press

By the 1860s, Indian-language newspapers were increasingly focusing on politics and everyday life rather than social and religious reform. Papers such as the Somprakash, the Grambarta Prakashika, and the Amrita Bazar Patrika began reporting on how colonial policies affected ordinary farmers and workers while also giving voice to the growing demands of educated Indians for a greater role in public affairs.

The Indigo Revolt of 1859–60 showed the growing influence of the press. The Hindoo Patriot under Harish Chandra Mukherjee published columns revealing the exploitation of Bengali cultivators by European indigo planters. The newspaper’s coverage generated widespread public concern that prompted the colonial government to establish the Indigo Commission to examine the overall system of indigo cultivation in Bengal. In August 1860 the commission submitted its report, which sharply criticized the planters’ coercive methods and affirmed that farmers could not be forced to cultivate indigo.

Beyond newspapers, the growing opposition to the indigo planters was also reflected in literature, most notably through Dina Bandhu Mitra’s Bengali play Nil Darpan (1860; The Indigo Planting Mirror). The play’s powerful depiction of the atrocities committed by European indigo planters gained wide attention. The translation by Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt was funded by the Bengal government, and copies were officially distributed to newspaper editors. This provoked a strong backlash from the European planter community. The editors of the Englishman and, according to some accounts, the Hurkaru, acting on behalf of the Landholders and Commercial Association, filed a libel suit that resulted in the imprisonment of Irish missionary James Long, who had played a key role in facilitating the English publication of the play.

Both vernacular and English-language publications were circulated across India throughout the 1870s. Newspapers appeared in Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Hindi, Telugu, and other languages. Their circulation extended from Lahore in the northwest to Madras (now Chennai) in the south and from inland centers such as Allahabad (now Prayagraj) and Benares (now Varanasi) to the port city of Bombay (now Mumbai) on the western coast.

Government concern about the growing anti-colonial spirit of the Indian-language publications led to the Vernacular Press Act of 1878. Introduced by Viceroy Lord Lytton’s administration, the act allowed officials to take action against non-English newspapers that they considered seditious without first going through a court. Authorities could issue warnings, seize printing equipment, and confiscate publications, making it easier for the government to restrict critical newspapers and limit the spread of political opposition. English-language publications were exempt from the provisions.

The press’s responses were varied; some discontinued publishing, whereas others were served warnings. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, started in 1868 by Shishir Ghose and his brothers, carried out what became a celebrated act of editorial resourcefulness in the history of the 19th-century Indian press. The paper converted from a Bengali publication into an English one in a single editorial decision, placing it beyond the act’s reach and indicating that the legislation had been constructed specifically to suppress expression in Indian languages rather than to regulate journalism as a general matter. The act was repealed in 1881, after Lord Ripon had succeeded Lord Lytton as viceroy.

Publishers such as the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay extended the reach of vernacular religious and academic literature further in the 1880s.

Role of the Indian National Congress

The founding of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) in 1885 brought the press into closer contact with organized politics. Congress Party member Pherozeshah Mehta started the Bombay Chronicle, and Madan Mohan Malaviya edited the Hindustan. A considerable number of the delegates in the party’s first session in Bombay had a professional connection to the press. Surendranath Banerjee, a leading political figure associated with the party, played a key role in the founding of The Tribune in 1881. Banerjee persuaded businessman and philanthropist Dayal Singh Majithia to finance the newspaper. The Tribune covered the trials, hunger strikes, and executions of freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh and Jatindranath Das.

In 1881 Bal Gangadhar Tilak cofounded the Marathi-language newspaper Kesari (“The Lion”). Whereas the leading English-language newspapers mainly addressed the English-educated elite, Kesari brought political debate to a much wider Marathi-reading public. Tilak organized public festivals centered on the Ganapati deity (the elephant-headed god also known as Ganesha) and promoted popular identification with the 17th-century Maratha king Shivaji, using both as occasions for political messaging. For his criticism of the British government, Tilak was prosecuted under the sedition provisions of the Indian Penal Code: He was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment in 1897 and six years’ banishment to Burma (now Myanmar) in 1908.

The partition of Bengal in 1905 under Viceroy Lord Curzon accelerated nationalist Congress Party-led press activity across the country. Dozens of papers aligned themselves with the Swadeshi Movement (a campaign for economic self-sufficiency through Indian-made goods and the boycott of British imports). One of the party leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, conducted much of his public life through papers he edited, such as Young India, which he took charge of in 1919, and Harijan, founded in 1933 to advance the campaign against the social custom of untouchability. The civil disobedience (satyagraha) campaigns placed the press under sustained pressure from British officials. By July 1930, after Gandhi’s arrest during the Salt March against the British salt tax, the government had cracked down on numerous nationalist newspapers and required several others to deposit large security payments.

Women, print, and social change

For much of the 19th century, women’s literacy was generally frowned upon in India. These attitudes hindered many women from learning to read. From the 1860s onward, women who had gained literacy began writing about their lives. Kailashbashini Devi in Bengal described what women’s daily existence looked like. In the Bombay Presidency in the 1880s, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai detailed the particular hardships of upper-caste Hindu widows.

Rassundari Devi of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) taught herself letters in secret in the early 19th century, away from family members who would have put a stop to it. Her autobiography, Amar Jiban (“My Life”), was published in 1876 and is frequently alluded to as the first full-length autobiography in the Bengali language written by a woman. Composed in lucid prose, it recounts her childhood, her marriage at age 12 into a wealthy household, the unrelenting domestic labor that shaped her adult life, and the years she spent secretly teaching herself to read in her kitchen from a page torn from a religious manuscript.

In 1911 Bengali writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain founded the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School in Calcutta. She also addressed a conference in 1926, where she took apart the religious arguments used to keep women out of school. (To discover other educators, see Savitribai Phule, Sarojini Naidu, and Mahadevi Varma.)

Print, caste, and popular movements

The same reach that made newspapers useful to nationalist politicians also made print equally available to those challenging caste hierarchy. Jyotirao Phule, of what is now Maharashtra state, published Gulamagiri (Slavery) in 1873, comparing the condition of lower-caste people in India to the enslavement of Black people in the United States.

In 1920 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar founded the Marathi-language newspaper Mooknayak (“Leader of the Voiceless”), in which he set forth Dalit rights before a reading public that mainstream newspapers had largely ignored.

Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy Naicker, known widely as Periyar, spread the ideas of his Self-Respect Movement through Kudi Arasu (“Republic”), a Tamil weekly he founded in 1925. Through the weekly, Periyar approached subjects such as women’s rights—running articles on property inheritance, child marriage, widow remarriage, and women’s participation in politics—alongside his campaign against caste. Tracts, pamphlets, and small journals proliferated around particular protest movements, challenging the religious texts that provided justification for the caste order and putting forward alternative ways of organizing society.

By the time India achieved independence in 1947, it possessed a press that was diverse in its languages, committed in its politics, and experienced in the arts of both defiance and persuasion.