India's first free press battles

Hicky's Bengal Gazette

The untold story of India's first newspaper 

Andrew Otis 

Tranquebar 

317 pages 

Rs 899

James Augustus Hicky launched Hicky's Bengal Gazette or The Original Calcutta General Advertiser in January 1780. It was printed at his press at 67, Radha Bazar, Calcutta. The gazette came out every Saturday. It had four pages and sold for Rs 1.  

The first newspaper in India was an instant success, garnering many subscribers. It purveyed an odd mixture of scurrilous, gossipy anonymous letters targeting the high-and-mighty, advertisements, serious news, satire and thundering editorials railing against corruption and taxation without representation.

Contemporary accounts suggest Hicky wasn’t entirely sane. He had ungovernable rages, even in the court as a defendant. Apart from being verbally abusive, he had a penchant for drawing his sword, and getting into physical conflicts. He also had a huge chip on his shoulder about not being upper-class —a “subaltern” in modern terminology.

He was the first person to report on the nastier details of the inner workings of John Company. The paper provided a wonderful platform for whistle-blowers. It published anonymous accounts written by disaffected Company servants and soldiers, as well as letters of complaint from “natives” and Anglo-Indians.

The proprietor had worked as a printers’ apprentice, an able-bodied seaman in the Royal Navy, on slave ships and had been a surgeon’s assistant, among other things. He was in debtors’ prison in Calcutta when he cobbled together the resources to start a printing press, for job-work. A few years later, having gotten out of prison, he launched the paper.

Hicky’s struck the first blow for freedom of the press in India. It outlined a landscape of wholesale corruption. This book unearths much new detail. It fleshes out many things about Hicky, alongside some of his powerful enemies, and places them in the context of their times.

Mr Otis has done a fantastic job in terms of sheer dogged research, digging through dusty archives at Calcutta High Court, Victoria Memorial and the National Library. Readers familiar with those august institutions will marvel at what he’s managed to extract.

The last quarter of the 18th century was a period of incredible churn. A world war was being fought in slow motion across four continents, with the British taking on the French and the Spanish everywhere. Meanwhile, the American colonists also fought their own war of independence against the British.  In India, the East India Company was taking control of ever-larger tracts of the subcontinent. However, the Marathas and the Mysore Sultans were still powers in the land and the British were not strong enough to dominate India’s landscape completely.  

The institutionalised corruption of John Company seems incredible even by the standards of today’s cronyism. “Loot” may have been the first Indian word to enter common English parlance. Europeans, who possessed the courage or desperation to risk the awful climate and endemic disease could make huge fortunes.  

The Company’s servants accepted and disbursed massive bribes for personal benefit; they defalcated their employer and embezzled funds as a matter of course; they set up shell companies to win contracts from the Company; they looted conquered territories in wars won by a combination of military skill and chicanery. They employed each other’s relatives in sinecures. They forged documents to steal fortunes and frame their enemies. Everybody from the governor-general and the chief justice down to mere lieutenants and colonels was involved.

Hicky’s paper lasted barely two years in the face of opposition from the Company’s bigwigs. Initially, he was denied free postage. Then, he was directly censored by an order of the governor-general that forbade the paper being distributed by the postal service. A rival, The India Gazette, was subsequently financed and given free postage.  None of this stopped the Bengal Gazette from being widely read.  

Eventually, Hicky was sued on several counts of libel by the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, whom he had accused not only of corruption and cowardice, but also of erectile dysfunction! He was also sued by a Protestant missionary who objected, among other things, to accusations that he had “sold consecrated type”. In open court during his trial, Hicky accused the Chief Justice, Sir Elijah Impey, of conflict of interest.

Oddly enough, give stacked juries, he was declared “not guilty” on several libel charges but he was indicted on some, and thrown into prison. For a while, he ran the paper out of prison. But the prison sentence eventually broke him and led to his utter financial ruin.  However, his charges led to Impey and Hastings being impeached by British Parliament. It also triggered the imposition of stronger political oversight on the Company, via the East India Company Act of 1784.

Hicky was a flawed man who operated in a horrendous environment. His willingness to risk life and livelihood for the sake of free speech should be inspirational. In taking on an entire toxic environment, he refused to bend, let alone crawl.