BOOK
REVIEW
TITLE:
HICKY’S BENGAL GAZETTE-The Untold Story Of India’s First Newspaper
AUTHOR: ANDREW OTIS
PUBLISHER:
TRANQUEBAR, WESTLAND PUBLICATIONS, 2018
PRICE: Rs. 899/- in Hardback
NOT
ONLY INDIA’S FIRST NEWSPAPER BUT ONE THAT CHAMPIONED THE UNDERDOG
Does history repeat itself in the media, just
as it does in politics and governance? What are the origins of India’s
particularly vibrant freedom of the press? This delightful book from an
American PhD scholar, Andrew Otis, at the University of Maryland Philip Merril
College of Journalism, suggests it all began in the 1780s.
Otis researched this book in Delhi, Kolkata, Germany
and England over a period of six years. He gained a unique perspective on the
establishment of “Company Raj”, Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, and their imperial
times. And 90 years after the
establishment of the British in Calcutta, came India’s first newspaper.
James Augustus Hicky was a “subaltern”, a poor
Irishman out to make his mark in India. He could only afford to live in the
“Black Town” of Calcutta, and not amongst the bungalows and gardens of the
privileged. He was sent to common jail for being in debt, first for a failed
trade, and the latter incarceration was for libel.
But throughout, once started in 1780, Hicky
gave voice to the underdog with his newspaper, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette or The Original Calcutta General Advertiser,
which became an instant sensation. So much so, that Governor General Warren
Hastings, moved quickly to try and limit its rapidly growing influence. The
story of this short-lived but highly influential newspaper, and the dramatis personae of the time, is
fascinatingly laid out in this book.
Hicky’s Gazette was priced at Re. 1, expensive
for the 1780s, but equivalent to newspapers in England then. It was printed
weekly, four or five pages long- two or three of them containing news and
opinion letters, and the other two featuring advertisements. The printing press
was located at 67, Radha Bazar, Calcutta.
Competition from the establishment that Hicky
targeted, came later in the same year. Backed by Hastings, the rival paper was
circulated free and without postage via the Indian postal system.
The
India Gazette, founded by Bernard Messink and
Peter Reed, propounded British superiority, the viewpoint of the East India
Company, and the upper-class. Its advertisements were from private boat rental
companies, for hunting dogs, garden houses and dinner clubs. A popular and
repeated advertisement was for the buying and shipping of diamonds “home to
England”, presumably for corrupt
Companymen, and some of their many contractors.
Hicky, convinced that the powers-that-be were
out to ruin him, undertook a series of exposes
. This earned him even more repression. Warren Hastings now banned even the
paid circulation of Hicky’s newspaper via the postal system, and ordered that mail that enclosed cuttings from
Hicky’s newspaper be stopped too.
This hurt Hicky’s profits and wider circulation,
but made his paper more popular in Calcutta itself, where it was now
distributed via runners or hircarrahs,
and the number of his subscriptions there increased markedly.
Hicky’s Gazette was the anti-tyranny,
anti-corruption, and pro-free speech campaigner of its time. People depended on
it to spot and expose “malfeasance, fraud, abuse of power”. Hicky adapted and :
“embraced notions of rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that
were coursing through Western Europe and America”.
This tonality and content annoyed most high
government functionaries, particularly because of Hicky’s relentless exposure
of abuses of power in the government and judiciary, patronage as bribery, and
rampant corruption in government contracts.
Hicky’s newspaper often also gave voice to the
grievances of the common soldier both British and native, the Anglo-Indian, the
injustices borne by ordinary people, the rapaciousness of the evangelical
clergy involved in commerce rather than the harvesting of souls, the
subversions practiced by a biddable judiciary, and the like. Hicky’s Gazette
was also popular for its humorous pieces, satire, and human interest stories.
Soon assassins, fortunately discovered in time,
came for Hicky in the dark of the night. And Hicky, in turn, turned up the
journalistic heat. He began suggesting, via anonymous articles using various
pseudonyms like Cassius and Britannicus, that it was not a good idea to fight
in expansionist wars initiated by Warren Hastings that sacrificed common
soldiers for his “personal dreams of conquest”. This, and similar pieces took
Hicky to the “edge of sedition”, especially when the articles printed in his
paper, suggested mutiny, and the carrying out of a coup.
In consequence, Hicky was slapped with criminal
charges of libel against both Hastings and a rich clergyman Kiernander, his
bail being set at Rs. 40,000/-, twice his annual income. This forced Hicky to
stay in jail.
The newspaper continued however, with Hicky
running it from inside the jail, now lampooning all his tormentors including
those in the judiciary, with biting satire. After a tumultuous trial, the 24
member jury, many of them East India Company men themselves, returned a Not Guilty
verdict. Otis sees this as a landmark judgement for the early “freedom of the
press” in India.
There were multiple and separate trials with
regard to the priest Kiernander and even
sundry others Hicky had offended. Some of these trials returned indictments. In
one mounted by Hastings, against Hicky’s paper urging soldiers to mutiny, he
was sentenced to a year in jail with fines.
But all this railing at Warren Hastings’
tyranny and corruption had begun to have its effect back in Britain. This, even
as the continuous litigation pauperized Hicky and closed down his paper, when
his press too was seized in 1782.
The litigation and adverse publicity also drove
Kiernander into bankruptcy and penury in his old age.
Next came the karmic retribution for Hastings.
The East India Company Act of 1784 put severe curbs on the powers of the
Governor General and subordinated his actions to control from the Crown. Hastings
decided to go home at this, after three decades in India. But, perhaps as a
public relations gesture, not before asking the Supreme Court in India to
forgive the rest of Hicky’s fines and let him go free.
Now it was Hastings’ turn to be put under the
lash. Parliamentarian and political theorist, Edmund Burke, mounted a bid for
his impeachment with twenty-two separate
charges, in the House of Commons.
After 8 years of gruelling parliamentary investigation, through both the House of
Commons and Lords - in July 1795, Warren Hastings was eventually acquitted. But
not before his reputation and fortune had been destroyed.
Hicky
died at sea aboard the ship Ajax en route to China in 1802. But clearly, he was
not the only protagonist in this drama that ended his days in penury.
For:
The Sunday Pioneer BOOKS
(1,074
words)
June
1, 2018
Gautam
Mukherjee
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