An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

The Bombay Samachar, in Gujarati, was founded in 1822 (it is still running, and proudly calls itself the oldest newspaper in Asia still in print) and a few decades later, two Bengali-owned newspapers followed suit in Calcutta, The Bengalee in 1879 (later purchased, and edited for thirty-seven years, by Surendra Nath Banerjea after he left the ICS) and the formidable Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1868 (which, after being founded as a Bengali-language publication, then became a bilingual weekly for a time, before turning into an English-language newspaper in 1878 to advocate nationalist interests. The Amrita Bazar Patrika became a formidable pro-Congress voice and survived till the late twentieth century, before closing in 1986). Other English-language, Indian-owned newspapers addressed themselves to Indian readers but in the awareness that their views would be paid attention to by the colonial authorities; this made them increasingly influential in the freedom movement. Arguably the most notable of these was The Hindu in Madras, established as a weekly in 1878 and converted into a daily from 1889, which the British came to regard for a long time as the voice of responsible Indian opinion. (The Hindu’s first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with ‘one rupee and eight annas’ of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers). In the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists began to establish newspapers explicitly to advocate their cause: the...