‘The craving for fresh news was then not general’: technologies and politics of news-making in colonial India and beyond

Even a cursory glance at the wide variety of newspapers published in colonial South Asia in the nineteenth century is sufficient to convince the contemporary reader of their ideological and informational diversity. The news (and views) they disseminated reflected various levels of spatial aggregation, ranging from the local and the regional to the national, imperial and global. This intelligence was also topically diverse, as political and financial information vied for the attention of readers alongside reports about the weather, crime, natural and human-made disasters, but also religion, literature, science and sports. News was also a source of education and inspiration and the newspaper itself a vehicle through which to engage and participate in public debates, to call for socio-political reform or express support for the imperial cause. Finally, newspapers were a source of amusement, entertainment, and gossip as well as an instrument of reassurance or distress for those anxiously awaiting the safe arrival of a steamer or the results in the matriculation examination. But how did such information end up in the pages of the newspaper press in the first place? How did it travel within the Indian subcontinent, between Britain and India and beyond? How did news reporting and the newspapers themselves change with the introduction of new technologies of communication like steamers, railways and electric telegraphs in the nineteenth century? And how did journalists deal with some of the political and ethical dilemmas of their age, including the dissemination of false news and official censorship? This paper engages with these questions, showing that newspapers in colonial South Asia and beyond were interconnected projects that drew on each other for information and opinion. While new technologies of communication like the electric telegraph facilitated the rapid exchange of information, these transformations were gradual and piecemeal. News in colonial India was thus the site of many contestations, as imperial politics, capitalist enterprise, and individual agency shaped access to the latest technologies of communication, ultimately also shaping the content and form of reporting.

△ Photographic print by E.O.S. and Company showing workers hand-setting type in Bombay in the news composing room of Times of India, November 1898. (Image reproduced with permission of the British Library Board, Shelfmark: Photo 643/(14), The British Library, London)

Amelia Bonea is Research Fellow at the Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg. She was educated at the Universities of Tokyo and Heidelberg and worked for five years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. Her work focuses on the modern and contemporary history of South Asia and the British Empire, with a particular interest in media, science, technology, and medicine. Her projects to date have explored the incorporation of ‘new’ technologies of communication into journalism in the nineteenth century and the relationship between technology and public health/medical practice. Her first monograph, The news of empire: telegraphy, journalism, and the politics of reporting in colonial India, c.1830–1900 (Oxford University Press, 2016), was awarded the 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize by the American Historical Association for the best book on the history of journalism in any area of the world.

Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: the story behind India’s first newspaper

In this talk, Andrew will outline the little-known history of Asia’s first newspaper – from its apolitical origins to its dramatic, and untimely, end as the strongest public critic of British East India Company rule. The paper will discuss the impact of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette on society, history, and traditions of journalism in South Asia. By the late eighteenth century, the British were well-ensconced in Bengal, but not yet an empire. Indian princes posed a danger to the East India Company’s plans of commerce and domination, while Warren Hastings, the British governor-general, was attempting to consolidate power over the Company. Into this time of intrigue walked James Augustus Hicky, a ‘wild Irishman’ seeking fame and fortune. Sensing an opportunity, he decided to establish a newspaper, the first of its kind in South Asia. In two short years, his endeavour threatened to lay bare the murky underside of the early British Empire, resulting in the departure or disgrace of many high officials. Not only is this story a microcosm of global affairs and colonialism, but it is a reminder of the importance of freedom of the press through culture and time – we learn, through Hicky’s Gazette, lessons about how individuals can best speak truth to power. The paper aims to analyse how this history is relevant today through talking about the forces Hicky came up against, the authorities determined to stop him, and of Hicky’s resourcefulness in responding to obstacles. Andrew will also speak about his five years of research piecing together the tale of India’s first newspaper in archives spread across India, UK, and Germany.

△ From Views of Calcutta (1788), Thomas and William Daniell. The Supreme Court House on the right, and the Writers Building on the left, were the centre of the British East India Company’s government. (Image courtesy of Norman R. Bobbins and S.P. Lohia Rare Books Collection)

Andrew Otis is a journalist and historian. He published Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: the untold story of India’s first Newspaper in 2018, and he is currently a PhD student at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Andrew was a Fulbright Fellow to India from 2013 to 2014 and lived in Kolkata while researching early journalism in South Asia. He was also a 2011 Joseph P. O’Hearn Scholar, researching early British colonial newspapers in London. He has a BA in History from the University of Rochester and lives in Washington D.C.

National Salvation Daily, a Chinese wartime newspaper: fighting for victory through word and image

Jiuwang Ribao 救亡日報 (National Salvation Daily) was first published in Shanghai in August 1937, at a time when the war with Japan had been underway for just a matter of weeks. Eighty-five issues of the newspaper were issued before the publishers were forced to relocate to Guangzhou and subsequently to inland cities as war pursued them. This, the official organ of the Shanghai Cultural Community National Salvation Committee, was unusual in that, at least superficially, it was published with the backing of both sides of the political divide, Nationalist and Communist. It was later claimed that those on the left simply used the prestige of important right-wing figures to secure the publication of what was effectively a communist newspaper. Two of the central figures involved in its publication were the playwright Xia Yan and the leading cultural figure Guo Moruo. A weekly pictorial supplement was also published, and contributors to it included the cartoonists Lu Shaofei and Zhang E, and the woodcut artists Huang Xinbo and Yang Newei. Artist Yu Feng was both editor and contributor, and is notable for being one of just a handful of women involved in the promotion of art as propaganda during the war. Surprisingly, despite her importance in this field, she is often omitted from the list of important players in the history of journalistic and artistic propaganda in China. Jiuwang Ribao is of central importance to the history of journalism and newspaper production during China’s war with Japan. It tells us much about the left-wing approach to reporting and to the production of propaganda art in China. This paper will explore the content, distribution and readership of the newspaper, through an examination of the people who contributed to it, with a particular emphasis on Xia Yan and Yu Feng.

△ (Left) Manhua by Yu Feng 郁風 ‘Do not allow a single friendly worker to stand outside the organisation!’ From the ‘pictorial’ page of National Salvation Daily 救亡日報, Guangzhou, 1 May 1938. (Image from private collection)

Paul Bevan is Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum and has taught modern Chinese literature and Chinese history at the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and SOAS. His primary research interests concern the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Period (1912-1949), particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. His research on artists George Grosz, Frans Masereel, and Miguel Covarrubias, all of whom worked for Vanity Fair, has resulted in extensive research on both Chinese and Western pictorial magazines. Paul’s first book A modern miscellany: Shanghai cartoon artists, Shao Xunmei’s circle and the travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938, was hailed as ‘a major contribution to modern Chinese studies’. His second, ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’, an urban montage: art and literature in pictorial magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age, is currently with the publishers.

The role of Urdu periodicals in the Indian Muslim women’s movement, 1898–1961

Urdu women’s periodicals for Indian Muslim women increased in their circulation and acceptance among Ashraf Muslim society during the early twentieth century. The importance of education and social reform in the wider movement for Muslim regeneration and social progress provided the context within which Muslim men initiated reforms for Muslim women. The development of Urdu women’s periodicals was a part of this social climate, established and developed by Muslim male reformers for the promotion of female education and social reforms for Indian Muslim women, encouraging them to take up journalistic pursuits. As their circulation and popularity amongst Muslim women increased, these periodicals came to acquire a central place within the Indian Muslim women’s movement, as they began to organise and campaign for their own reform. They became spaces within which meetings were organised, national and international matters were discussed, and changes to laws and legislation advocated. It became one of the primary sites within which Muslim women were able to express their perceived oppression under patriarchal familial structures, which would eventually lead to discussions of women’s rights under Islamic law. Through an exploration of two Urdu women’s periodicals, Ismat and Tahzib-un Niswan, published between 1898 and 1961, this paper will demonstrate how Urdu periodicals for women were central to both the development of ideas of reform and social changes for Muslim women. The restrictions of purdah and codes of behaviour placed upon Muslim women had previously obstructed their awareness and involvement in matters of social reform. Urdu periodicals provided a forum for these women to share ideas and create a greater awareness of the need for change and women’s rights. Urdu women’s periodicals contributed to an increase in Indian Muslim women’s literacy and activism, which subsequently empowered them to voice their demands for their rights.

△ Front covers of Tahzib-un Niswan (1932, Lahore) and Ismat (1934, Delhi), two popular Urdu women’s periodicals from early twentieth century that promoted female education and social reforms for Indian Muslim women. (Image courtesy of British library, London. Tahzib-un Niswan: EAP566 project link. Image rights Mushfiq Khwaja Library and Research Centre, Karachi)

Sabera Bhayat is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Warwick. Her research explores the interlinking cultural and legal histories of Muslim women in late colonial India, with a focus on the problem of polygamy amongst Indian Muslims during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an exploration of Hindi, Urdu, and English texts and periodicals she has examined how the practice of polygamy came up as a social problem in need of reform and how it was articulated as a problem by different groups in India. Her research interests include the history of modern South Asia, gender, sexuality and feminisms, and the history of Islam in South Asia.

A shrimp between whales: silencing a voice for Korean independence

Founded by Dr Jaisohn in 1896 and closed by the Joseon government in 1900, The Independent (독립신문) was ‘a Korean paper for the Koreans’. The paper was published, however, in both Korean and English, and according to advertisements was circulated ‘throughout Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Siberia, and America’. The Korean edition was ‘extensively read by all classes of the community’ at a time when only 10% of the world’s adult population could read, when text in Korea was written in Chinese. The English and vernacular Korean versions of The Independent were published against a background of shifting tectonic plates of power in East Asia. The Qing Dynasty had been transformed from an all powerful empire under Qianlong and Kangxi (to whom Korea willingly paid tribute), to decline and decay under the Cixi Regency. With the decline of China, the Japanese and Russian governments became increasingly aggressive in their interventions on the Korean peninsula. A British man, McLeavy Brown, had been sent by Sir Robert Hart from China to manage the Korean Customs Department. Individual American missionaries were also extremely active—motivated not by control of the peninsula but salvation of the population. The Korean elite was itself divided between conservatives who advocated a return to the Confucian wisdom from before the Sino-Japanese war and the modernisers who wanted to follow western enlightenment. The Independent professed to be a neutral voice, but only four years later ceased publication in somewhat mysterious circumstances. Five editors took the helm: Seo Jaepil, Yun Chi-ho, H.G. Appenzeller, H. Emberly, and finally John O’Shea. Dr Jaisohn and Yun Chi-ho were born into the Korean elite, John O’Shea was born to a middle-class Irish family of journalists prominent in both America and Shanghai. This talk will look at the reasons a newspaper with an almost religious devotion to the cause of making Korea great was silenced by the government.

△ Dr Jaisohn’s final issue of The Independent, May 17th 1898. (Image from author’s private collection)

Solvig Choi graduated with a BA in Chinese and Management (SOAS and Birkbeck) and an MA in Literary Linguistics (Nottingham). After her BA and time studying Chinese in Paris, she has worked as a cotton trader in Liverpool and as a translator at a law school in Beijing. She now teaches corporate English in Korea and independently researches how narratives develop across time and space. In her spare time, she is writing a detective novel and trying to master classical Chinese, Korean, and Bulgarian.

Buddhism in print: Japanese Buddhists and the periodical press in the early Meiji period

Unlike the Enlightenment in Europe, the Japanese Enlightenment did not come about as a response to new scientific discoveries. For Japan, it was rather a matter of ‘civilising’ as quickly as possible along Western lines. Behind Japan’s civilising rush was its wish for a revision of the unequal treaties that it had concluded with a number of Western powers beginning in the mid-1850s. The Japanese Civilisation and Enlightenment or bunmei kaika movement of the 1870s was therefore a government-sponsored programme of sorts. The need to civilise was, however, not only felt in the political world. The short but violent anti-Buddhist movement during the years surrounding the Meiji Restoration made Japanese Buddhism aware of the need to modernise in line with the state’s ‘civilisation’ project. Whereas the Enlightenment has traditionally been regarded as a secular movement, more recent scholarship has emphasised the need to consider religion as a partner of the Enlightenment in the secularising process and to move away from the term’s traditional definition as a merely philosophical and anti-religious movement. Moreover, recent studies on the Enlightenment increasingly challenge its Eurocentric character, emphasising instead the global conditions and interactions through which it emerged, and tracing its trajectory throughout the nineteenth century. These approaches enable us to reconsider the Japanese Enlightenment movement of the 1870s. While Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), the intellectual society Meirokusha and its journal Meiroku zasshi are considered the paragons of the Japanese Enlightenment and have received considerable academic attention, the Buddhist presence in this movement remains understudied. In this paper, I will discuss the appearance of the first dedicated Buddhist journal Hōshi sōdan and the Buddhist involvement in the publication of the journal Kyōzon zasshi in the context of the Japanese Enlightenment Movement and of Japan’s journal and newspaper publication landscape of the 1870s.

△ (Left) Front page of issue no.1 of Meiroku zasshi, undated, c. March 1874 (Image courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan) and (Right) front page of the Appendix to issue no.2 of Hōshi sōdan, September 1874 (Image from author’s private collection)

Mick Deneckere obtained a PhD in Japanese Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2015. Her doctoral thesis focused on the life and work of the True Pure Land Buddhist Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911), who opened up debate on the separation of state and religion in Japan in the 1870s, after a study trip to Europe. Currently, she is a visiting lecturer of Japanese Studies at Ghent University, Belgium, where she also continues her research as a senior postdoctoral fellow of the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO). She has published in Japan Forum, Japan Review and Global Intellectual History and has contributed chapters to several edited volumes. Building further on her PhD research, she is working on a book project tentatively titled Buddhism and the Japanese Enlightenment: the role of True Pure Land Buddhism in the early stages of Japan’s modernisation.

The Missouri ‘news monopoly’ in Shanghai: journalism education and colonial narratives in early twentieth century China

In 1908, American journalist Walter Williams (1864–1935) founded one of the earliest institutions of professionalized journalism education in the United States: The School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. In addition to promoting journalism education in the US, Williams also sought to establish a professional network in East Asia. This paper will focus on the connections of the Missouri School of Journalism in China, particularly in Shanghai. The Missouri-Shanghai connections manifested themselves in multiple ways: on one hand, they resulted in a constant stream of Missouri-trained American journalists who traveled to Shanghai and began to work in local Missouri-graduate-run English-language newspapers and periodicals. Simultaneously, Chinese students went to Missouri in order to study journalism. On the other hand, this travel flow of alumni also led to the establishment of pioneering journalism programs designed by Missouri graduates, the first one of which opened in 1921/22 at St. John’s University (聖約翰大學 Sheng Yuehan daxue), an American missionary school in Shanghai. This paper will examine how the status quo of the Chinese press landscape was assessed by members of the Missouri journalism education community during the 1920s. To do so, a special focus will be placed on the contemporary writings of Missourians Don Denham Patterson, who had been in charge of the initial organization of the journalism program at St. John’s, and Maurice Eldred Votaw (1899–1981), Patterson’s successor. In analyzing this source material in the context of Shanghai’s diverse multi-lingual press landscape, this paper will examine views about the ideals of journalism and newspaper publishing held by Missouri-trained American educators and publishers. By discussing the hidden colonial narratives present in the sources, this paper will examine the mechanisms of journalistic discourse in Shanghai at a time of asymmetrical political power relations.

△ Jesse Hall, main administrative building of the University of Missouri. The University’s School of Journalism was founded in 1908 by American journalist Walter Williams (1864-1935). In Shanghai, the presence and work of Missouri graduates resulted in the emergence of the term ’Missouri news monopoly’ in the 1920s. (Image courtesy of the author)

Anna Elisabeth Herren obtained her MA in East Asian Art History and Chinese studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2016. She is a recipient of a Doc.CH grant awarded in 2017 by the Swiss National Science Foundation and she is currently conducting her PhD research at the Institute of Art History, Section for East Asian Art History at the University of Zurich. Her research focus is on visual representation of China in newspaper photography from 1925 to 1949 and her research interests include photography, photojournalism, and journalism in and on China during the Republican era.

Scripting ‘public opinion’ through translation: the bilingual Uttaya Tarakai of Jaffna

The Uttaya Tarakai: Morning Star was the first bilingual (Tamil-English) journal that began to be published from 1841 in Jaffna by two Protestant Tamils under the patronage of the American Baptist Society in Ceylon. The Uttaya Tarakai was one of the earliest journals to be set up in South Asia carrying editorials, news items, opinion pieces on key debates of the time, and importantly, letters from its subscribers and readers. Printed twice a month for the next ten years (then undergoing significant changes from the 1850s), it is a mine of information on a range of issues that concerned both Europeans and Tamils in northern Sri Lanka and Tamil-speaking South India. The journal’s editors self-consciously present it as a broad-based periodical offering a range of perspectives to a reading ‘public’ seeking to persuade by appealing to ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ even as they endeavoured to define these categories. This paper investigates three significant strategies deployed by the editors to fashion a ‘rational’ public opinion: first, by maintaining the bilingual nature of the periodical the journal presents translation as key to facilitating public debate between European and Tamil intellectual positions. Second, by keeping the journal open to all spheres of knowledge, ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, historical and contemporary, the editors indicate how they view Tamil intellectual culture fitting within a scheme of progressive rationality and ‘modernity’, however nebulously defined. Third, by actively inviting critiques of established opinions and practices, the editors offer a public space where differences in perspectives (especially between religions) could apparently be aired in a democratic manner. Although not always explicitly stated, I argue that this enterprise to set the agenda for debate and shape a ‘reasonable’ public opinion is envisaged as part of a ‘Protestant’ engagement with rationality, where the Protestant perspective is and functions as the ‘rational’.

△ Uttaya Tarakai: The Morning Star, 19 February 1885. Tamil-English bilingual journal published semi-monthly from Jaffna. (Image from Hathi Trust Digital Library, courtesy of New York Public Library)

Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her current research interests include translation and religion, literary translation, literary practice, and translation in South Asia. She led an AHRC-funded research project (2014–2017) under their ‘Translating Cultures’ theme, focusing on the role of translation in the movement of religious concepts across languages and the ways in which this impacts religious conversion and autobiographical writing about conversion experiences. Her monograph Religious transactions in colonial South India (2011) offers an analysis of the translated Bible as an object of cultural transfer in South Asia in the context of evolving attitudes to translation in the Tamil sacred landscapes from the eighteenth century onwards. She has guest edited (with John Zavos) a special section on Indian traditions of life writing on religious conversion for South Asia (41:2, 2018) and a special issue ‘Translation and Religion’ (2019) for Religion (with Matthias Frenz).

British and American covert news operations in India: a case study of Forum World Features and Near and Far East News, 1952–1974

In the 1960s and early 1970s much of the foreign news in small and mid-sized Indian newspapers came courtesy of ‘bogus’ news agencies secretly financed and run by the British Foreign Office and the American CIA. The British Near and Far East News (NAFEN) and the American Forum World Features carved out a niche supplying news, features and commentary at cut-rate prices to newspapers that could not otherwise afford them. Much of the British and American copy was political news picked and framed to give the western perspective on world affairs, or at least to pre-empt the Soviets’ similar efforts to plant news. A sizeable percentage was custom-written propaganda to get useful facts into circulation. Each agency was part of a larger global operation. Forum began as a branch of the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1958 but moved directly under the CIA in 1966. Just before it closed in 1974, Forum was selling news in 52 countries. NAFEN ran a multinational Afro-Asian News Service and was part of a constellation of clandestine collaborating agencies in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Pakistan. Some journalists suspected covert backing, but used the agencies anyway. India was a major market for both NAFEN and Forum. At one point in the early 1960s Forum supplied articles in 10 languages to 93 newspapers. NAFEN in 1965 was supplying more than 6,000 columns of news a month not only in India but also southeast and east Asia. Although they concentrated on mid-level papers, they regularly sold to influential newspapers such as Times of India, The Hindu and Amrita Patrika Bazar. This paper presents an in-depth examination of the aims, management, and operations of these agencies in India, drawing on American and British archival sources, many of which only recently have become available.

△ Cuttings of articles provided by the covertly financed and operated Near and Far East News agency to The Mail of Madras in 1965. (Images reproduced from Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 168/1887, The National Archives of the UK, Kew)

John Jenks is Professor of Communication and History at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, with a doctoral degree in History from the University of California-Berkeley. His research specialization is in the intersection of propaganda and journalism in the Cold War era. Jenks has published British propaganda and news media in the Cold War and numerous articles, including recently ‘The scramble for African media: Reuters, Thomson, and Britain in the 1960s’ in American Journalism, and ‘“Crash course”: the International Press Institute and journalism training in anglophone Africa, 1963-1975’ in Media History. He is currently revising a study of covertly funded and managed global news-feature agencies.

The 1882 ‘newspaper funerals’ in Kochi (Japan): visualizing dissent in regional Japan

This paper takes a closer look at the two ‘newspaper funerals’ that were held in the city of Kōchi, Japan in the summer of 1882. These funerals clearly were not meant as religious events, although they showed all the characteristics of a regular ceremony. They were conscious displays of protest against government censorship. I will depict the course of events leading up to the prohibition of the newspapers: the growth of newspapers in a regional city in early Meiji Japan, the oppression they faced, and the attempts to evade it. Through my description of the actual funerals, the participants, and their effect within and outside of Kochi, I seek to explore their discursive and visual impact in the social-cultural context of the early Meiji period. The paper will argue that the funerals were more than a whimsical demonstration of dissatisfaction of regional fringe groups. Newspapers were seen as a very effective means to mobilize support for the increasingly popular Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (a nation-wide movement of which Kochi was a stronghold). At the same time, the Movement was expanding into social groups whose literacy could not be taken for granted: speech meetings and other visual displays also were an important part of its success. Whereas the newspapers themselves contributed to the creation of a new national discourse, it can be said that the funerals were attempts to gain a foothold within the arena of a newly emerging visual public sphere. In fact, funerals of men of power or fame in the Meiji era became increasingly lavish, and within a decade after the funerals the state had moved into that same sphere using national symbols and state-sponsored displays of progress and political consent.

△ Doyo Shimbun, 30 June, 1882, the main vehicle of dissident opinions in the Tosa region. (Image courtesy of the Memorial Museum for the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, Kochi City, Japan)

Joel Joos graduated from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), acquired an MA in Political Thought at the University of Okayama, Japan in 1996, and a PhD in Japanese Studies at his alma mater in 2001. After working at the Mission of Japan to the European Union in Brussels, he undertook a post-doctoral stint at the University of Leiden between 2002 and 2005 and was a JSPS Fellow at the University of Okayama between 2005 and 2007. He has been working since 2008 at the University of Kochi, Japan, specializing in intellectual history of the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods, and focusing increasingly on the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights and media history. Recent publication include ‘The newspaper funerals revisited: its role within the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights and aspects of popular participation’ (in Japanese), Kochi Kenritsu Daigaku Bunka Ronso (March 2019).

Mightier than the planter’s gun? Print activism and the movement against indentured labour in colonial India

‘… The Sahibs have long threatened: the contributor of the Sanjibani shall be the first victim of the planter’s gun’, reported Ramkumar Vidyaratna, in the 25th Jaistha, 1885-edition of the Bengali periodical Sanjibani. His resolute pledge in response, of continuing to enlighten the world about the plight of the hapless coolies and never succumbing to the pressure of the plantocracy, perhaps perfectly captured the unflinching spirit of the many constituent newspapers and periodicals of the movement against indentured labour in nineteenth century India. Right from the proliferation of Indian indentured labour, following the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1834, newspapers and periodicals, such as John Clark Marshman’s The Friend of India, had become influential spaces for debate and dialogue on the system’s tentative resemblance with slavery. By the mid-nineteenth century, as ownership and editorship of print-media transcended the ambits of the Europeans, new ‘native’ voices furthered the indenture-slavery debate and waged an active movement against the indenture system, eventually calling for its abolition. This paper would seek to consider such voices, both in English (such as The Bengalee) and in the vernacular (such as Dhaka Prakash, Sanjibani, Somprakash, Gramvarta Prakasika) to map a history of resistance not only against the proverbial ‘planter’s gun’, but against colonial policies on labour in general. In the process, the paper will address questions on the presence of the subaltern in Indian print and understand its echoes and conflicts with the ‘moderate-nationalist’ narrative of the late nineteenth century.

△ (Left) Bengali weeklies Grambartaprakashika and Sanjeebani (Image courtesy of National Library of India, Kolkata and Dr Kanailal Chattopadhyay respectively) and the English newspapers The Friend of India and The Bengal Hurkaru (Image courtesy of The British Library). (Right) Part of a news report titled ‘“Free Labour” slavery in India’, from The Friend of India, and ‘Cachar o Assam deshe coolie’ (The coolies of Assam and Cachar) from Grambartaprakashika. (Image courtesy of The British Library and the National Library of India respectively)

Sudipto Mitra is a doctoral researcher and Advanced Crossland Fellow at the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. He researches the lives and functionalities of intermediaries involved in the recruitment of Indian indentured labour in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has served as a Doctoral Teaching Assistant in the department and has also been elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He completed his BA and MA in History from Presidency University, followed by a Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics from the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He was also the Lamp in the Lotus Fellow at the Jadavpur University Press.

Becoming Kamala Satthianadhan: The Indian Ladies’ Magazine and female editorship in late colonial India

In 1901, a new women’s magazine in English launched itself into the populous and multilingual world of Indian print culture. Published under the editorship of Kamala Satthianadhan, The Indian Ladies’ Magazine quickly evolved into a platform where the future of Indian womanhood was fiercely debated, though Satthianadhan always maintained a balance between challenging the patriarchal and colonial status quo, and a radical upending of social norms. Despite a steady stream of subscribers and positive reviews, the journal folded in 1913 due to financial reasons. Deeply committed to the venture, Satthianadhan attempted to revive it three more times, before handing over editorial control to her daughter Padmini Sengupta in 1927. Publishing anonymous writers alongside household names like Sarojini Naidu, The Indian Ladies’ Magazine made a crucial and sustained intervention in the ongoing conversation about the public and private roles of Indian women at a time when both colonial rule and patriarchal notions of domesticity were being unsettled. In spite of this singularity, both Kamala Satthianadhan and The Indian Ladies’ Magazine have largely been relegated to the margins of history, mentioned only fleetingly in accounts of women’s involvement in the making of modern India. This paper participates in the recovery of this exceptional woman and her equally exceptional periodical enterprise. It examines the inventiveness at work in Satthianadhan’s careful self-formation and the editorial strategies she used to propel her magazine into the literary marketplace. Tracing the entwined stories of the journal and its editor also involves a consideration of the ways in which both challenged gender and generic conventions, insisting on carving out a space for women’s articulations of self. Though any semblance of a complete life is not possible, this is an attempt to piece together Satthianadhan’s life and editorial persona through the fragmentary and slanted sources to which we have access.

△ The cover page of The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, published from Madras. Volume 18, issue 5, November 1917. (Image courtesy of South Asia Open Archives)

Tara Puri is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Bristol. Her work focuses on Victorian periodicals and print culture, women’s writing and history, representations of empire, late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian literature, art, and politics. Her monograph (co-authored with Benoit Dillet) The political space of art: the Dardenne brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial was published in 2016. She is currently preparing another monograph, provisionally titled ‘Legible bodies: dress, desire, and the female self in Victorian literature and culture’, which looks at the construction of selfhood in nineteenth century literature and culture.

The politics of regulatory regimes and the periodical press in colonial French India: the case of the prohibition of Prajabandhu in 1889

The Prajabandhu, a weekly Bengali newspaper, was brought out between 1882 and 1889, from Chandernagore, which was then a French comptoir. The ‘unmaking’ of Prajabandhu is of particular interest because of its singularity: while being regulated by French laws, it was also contingent on British press policies and censorship along with being dependent on the various provinces of British India, especially Bengal, as its primary market. The paper was put out of circulation and the Byas Press from where it was being published bankrupted by the decision of the colonial British government in 1889 to prohibit it, under the provisions of Section 19 of the Sea Customs Act, VIII of 1878, and Section 60A of the Indian Post Office Act, XIV of 1866. This needs to be seen in the larger historical context of the French colonial presence in India (which was assumed to have all but ended following the rout of 1761), being tied up with their rivalry with the British. At one level, the five comptoirs to which French India had dwindled after the treaty of 1815 foregrounded its economic and political insignificance. However, recent research has shown that India continued to be ‘culturally important’ in the French imagination post 1816. In this paper, reading the case of the prohibition of Prajabandhu by locating it within the intersecting French and British colonial discourses, the attempt is to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of print cultures in the Indian subcontinent, which has been erroneously synonymous with the experiences and paradigms of British India. In using both the French archives and the India Office Records, the attempt is also to emphasize the fact that the colonial relationship between France and India cannot be understood through a binary prism, and needs to be located within the triangular model that has been posited for comprehending the Franco-British-Indian relationship, with France’s subordinate status in the sub-continent playing a major role in it.

Shubhra Ray is Assistant Professor of English in Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening) of the University of Delhi and has a PhD in English Literature from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently pursuing a fellowship (2018-2020) at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi on print cultures in colonial French India. She has contributed articles to edited books and national and international journals published by Duke University Press, Zubaan, and Routledge amongst others, addressing her areas of interest which are Book History, Gender Studies and Autobiographical Studies. She was the recipient of a Charles Wallace India Trust Research Grant (2016-17). She also translates from Bengali and won the Katha Award for Translation in 2005.

‘Making the paper come alive’: newspaper reading groups, the People’s Daily, and socialist news cultures in China, 1949–1956

This paper investigates ‘newspaper reading groups’ (读报组 dubaozu) in the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1956, analysing how these groups reflected the daily practice, possibilities, and limits of newspaper culture in China under high socialism (1949-1978). Pedagogical pamphlets designed to instruct local newspaper reading group leaders on propaganda techniques reveal that these actors were tasked with translating local, provincial, and national news into locally intelligible form for uneducated or undereducated audiences. But as these ‘newspaper reading group’ leaders engaged in translation of newspapers for their mostly illiterate listeners, they were forced to combat boredom amongst audiences by choosing sensational news stories and transmitting news in an overtly entertaining fashion. The addition of music, theater, and storytelling methods to embellish the ‘dead’ text of the newspaper at hand effectively ‘unmade’ the newspaper’s original intention to transmit a unified party line and foster a uniform political consciousness within its audience – the precise goal of China’s most recognizable national newspaper, the People’s Daily (人民日报 Renmin Ribao). This paper proposes that the use of entertainment to elicit emotion was at once critical in convincing audiences of the legitimacy of the Communist Party and its socialist values system, but that this method of information transmission also fragmented national news stories into entertaining soundbytes which reflected audiences’ interests rather than any central political message. This paper uses the newspaper reading group to revisit the role of emotion and entertainment in creating political meaning among consumers of the news in what has been deemed one of the most propaganda-oriented societies of the twentieth century, reframing our understanding of propaganda systems in Chinese historical contexts.

△ ‘Depiction of newspaper delivery’, artist unknown c.1950s. The People's Daily Newspaper (Renmin Ribao) and the Red Flag political journal (Hongqi) being delivered by motorbike to residents in an unknown, and quite probably imagined, destination in rural China. (Image from author’s private collection)

Donald Santacaterina is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. His research interests include global propaganda systems, information ecosystems, and news cultures in the People’s Republic of China from 1949-1978. Donald’s research investigates the various informational ecosystems created through national news production (the People’s Daily newspaper), local and provincial newspaper cultures (Anhui Daily, Hefei Daily, Anqing Daily), localized news dissemination techniques (newspaper reading groups), and global propaganda institutions’ role in shaping domestic Chinese propaganda cultures (The Voice of America and the BBC). Donald’s research also leverages ‘sinological garbology’ to acquire difficult-to-locate historical documents in flea markets and rare book shops and to challenge narratives produced by traditional repositories of historical information, such as state-controlled archives.

Representation on the front lines: the Sino-Japanese War and the modern Japanese paper empire

This paper explores the rapid expansion of the Japanese periodical press in tandem with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, a pivotal turning point in the institutionalization of typographic print as a staple medium for Japanese political and cultural discourse. I focus on two periodicals, Record of the Sino-Japanese War (Nisshin Sensô Jikki), and The Nation’s News (Kokumin Shinbun), to demonstrate how technologies of telegraphy, photography, and industrial printing opened a new era for Japanese publishing, as these media produced the war as a spectacle that simultaneously produced them. Influenced by trends in British colonial photography and the techniques of the Reuters newswire service, Record of the Sino-Japanese War was the first true best-selling periodical in modern Japan. The employment of an official photography brigade led by Ogawa Kazumasa, who advanced Japanese dry-plate photographic processing technology and light science research, allowed readers to regularly behold high-quality printed field images of modern war, to the success of five million total copies sold. These mass-reproduced images mobilized support for the imperial project and made conquest visible to domestic viewers, but government restrictions on photographic documentation of the battlefield also encouraged new forms of literary reportage in popular print. To give readers ‘the most complete picture of the war on land and at sea’, and compete with illustrated gazetteers like Record of the Sino-Japanese War, The Nation’s News utilized not photography, but subjectively tinged journalistic dispatches by the writer Kunikida Doppo, sent to the front on the battleship Chiyoda. Doppo was tasked with opening a space for literary writing in national newspapers and finding a new prose form with which to appeal to a mass audience. The presentation thus details this dramatic expansion of the economic and stylistic possibilities of the modern Japanese press at a mass scale.

△ Lithograph cover of the 1895 magazine Nisshin Sensô Jikki (Record of the Sino-Japanese War), Japan’s first modern mass-produced illustrated magazine, depicting a battle between Japanese and Qing imperial forces. (Image from author’s private collection)

Nathan Shockey is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he teaches Japanese literary, cultural, and media history and sits on the steering committee for the Center for Experimental Humanities. His research is concerned with the shifting relations between prose, politics, and print capitalism in the era of Japanese mass-market newspapers, magazines, and books as ubiquitous media for discourse and thought. His first monograph, The typographic imagination: reading and writing in Japan’s age of modern print media (Columbia University Press, 2019), investigates how writers and thinkers sought to reconstruct their social world through the circulation of printed language as a commodity amidst Japan’s early twentieth-century commercial publishing revolution.

Visual metaphors: Oudh Punch and a new vocabulary of cartooning in the Urdu periodical press

This paper – part of an ongoing research project on Oudh Punch (1877–1938), a vernacular rendition of the satirical Victorian magazine Punch (1841) – examines how Western cartoons were re-appropriated to suit local agendas of social reform and political dissent. This re-appropriation constituted a strategic response to intensifying colonial censorship, especially with the infamous Vernacular Press Act of 1878 that selectively curtailed the freedom of the native press while allowing the Anglo-Indian press to prevail freely. The regional Punches spoke vehemently against this duplicity where the ‘tutor’ was allowed to go scot-free and the ‘pupils’ were chastised. The avowal of their textually derivative nature was a tactical move to dodge allegations of being seditious. Alongside their selective translations and adaptations, the other tactic used was visual metaphorisation and literalisation that made these early cartoons distinct from their cross-cultural forbear Punch. With abstract colonial policies, acts, and famines objectified as vampires, blood-sucking leeches, monsters, dragons, and so on, the Urdu Punches starting with Oudh Punch inaugurated a new form of perceptive visual vocabulary premised on an oblique mode of representation. This was a response suited to the oppressive regime they were operating under, that was also, in its yoking together of incongruous objects, eo ipso humorous. Analysing the native Punches, this paper examines how satire and playfulness in the colonial periodical press worked to deflate social and political anxieties, and how the ambiguous mode in which the press operated took on a strategic role in keeping public opinion alive.

△ Cartoon from Oudh Punch, 6 Dec 1906, titled ‘Taqsīm e Bangāl’ or the ‘Partition of Bengal’ with Viceroy Curzon literally carving out a fruit labeled Bengal with a knife labeled ‘Hikmat e Amli’ or ‘Strategy’ and offering a raw deal to the unimpressed natives. (Image from Mushirul Hasan, Wit and humour in colonial India, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007)

Maryam Sikandar is a final-year doctoral researcher at the Department of South Asia, SOAS, University of London. Her doctoral project, funded by the SOAS Research Studentship, is tentatively titled ‘Oudh Punch (1877–1938): satire in the colonial contact zone’, and it examines the transcultural and recontextualized presence of the Victorian magazine Punch in colonial India. She received her BA (Hons), MA, and MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi. Her MPhil thesis, titled ‘Munshi Sajjad Husain (1856–1915): print, satire and the early Urdu novel’, looked at the role of satire in the generic constitution of early Urdu novels serialized in the periodical press.

Journal of Business Girls: opportunities and limitations for working women in interwar Japan

Between July 1927 and October 1928, a small Japanese publishing house called Women and Business Co. distributed a monthly magazine titled Journal of Business Girls. ’Business Girls’ referred to the shokugyō fujin, who were the growing number of women that sought white collar work in the urban areas beginning in the 1920s. The magazine served as a guide for women in a male dominated workplace, and offered them information about essential business skills. The contributors to the journal consisted of economists, educators, and literary figures, and they showed great optimism concerning the opportunities that these new occupations presented to Japanese women. They celebrated the increasing presence of ‘Business Girls’, viewing white collar work as a chance for women to assert their independence and to participate in Japan’s economic growth. Their vision challenged the ‘good wife, wise mother’ ideology that had loomed large in Japanese society since the late nineteenth century, which primarily viewed the role of women as caregivers within the domestic sphere. This presentation discusses the ways in which the Journal of Business Girls imagined an alternative role for women in interwar Japan. It considers the numerous opportunities presented to working women right before Japan descended into a period of militarism. Although contributors were progressive in their views, this talk will also discuss the ways in the Journal of Business Girls created and perpetuated gender stereotypes concerning working women.

△ Journal of Business Girls, June 1928 issue. (Image courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan)

Emilie Takayama is the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School. She earned her PhD in modern Japanese history from Northwestern University in 2018. Her dissertation examined the social and cultural history of the beauty industry in Japan and Korea, focusing on the strategies and mentalities of the first generation of cosmetics developers and medical professionals. She is currently researching the history of female entrepreneurs in early twentieth century Japan.

Tahzib-e Niswan, Muslim women, and print culture in colonial India

At the turn of the 20th century periodicals in the subcontinent had become an outlet for the dissemination of the reformist’s political, social and moral ideals regarding gender ideology. Though there were many male voices that took up the issue of Muslim women’s rights and responsibilities, the female voice remained, for the most part, absent from these discourses. The print culture at the time was very commercial and popularity amongst the masses alone could ensure the longevity of a periodical. People at the time were not really in favour of women-centric publishing ventures. For example the first women periodical the bimonthly Akhbar-un-Nisa published in 1887 by Sayyid Ahmad Delhavi had to close after a brief run. However in 1898 Tahzib-e Niswan began to be published; a periodical that not only solicited female contributions and female readership but also had a woman as its first editor. The periodical, as it actively sought contributions from its female readers, provided a much needed homosocial space for Muslim women in print where they could drive debates on politics, education, purdah, social practice, popular reading and everyday life itself. The initial period of its publication was particularly difficult. When Maulvi Mumtaz Ali sent complimentary copies, they were often returned unread and with abuses written on their covers. There were social anxieties associated with the new found identity of Muslim women and it was not easy for its editor as well as contributors to work under strict patriarchal scrutiny and constant pressure to define and defend their position within nationalist and reformist agendas. The periodical’s role in bringing Muslim women on stage of history is largely missed in current scholarship. What were the women authors and readers of this periodical like? Were they unquestioning products of social discourses or were they protesting against their confining, subordinating or marganalizing position? To what extent was the periodical liberating women from the stereotypes in which they were cast? Addressing these question and intersecting them with the periodical’s struggle to sustain itself, I look at the way it shaped Muslim women readership and left its mark on the shaping of gender ideology in the subcontinent.

Sarah Abdullah is a Lecturer of English Literature at Lahore College for Women University. Her research interests include South Asian literature, comparative literature, drama and gender studies. She is currently researching on discursive constructions of gender in early Urdu prose texts.

Akbar or Aurangzeb? Imperial crisis, Indian publics, and state censorship, c.1875–1878

The Indian press in the late nineteenth century was a site of experimentation with new genres and new ways of integrating news and entertainment to sell copy and to shape and court public opinion. The Indian-language press was, from the outset, more popular than English language venues, to the dismay of the colonial state. By the late 1840s, systems had been implemented to monitor the press, which would then be institutionalized across British India after the rebellion of 1857. Press monitoring intensified during the 1870s, when fears of further unrest were used as justification for the extension of state surveillance and censorship. In talking about ‘sedition’ we usually fast-forward to the period when revolutionary nationalists were being brought to trial in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and an international revolutionary underground began to operate across the Indian ocean, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Yet we need to understand the concerns of Indian-language news and print in contexts other than those set by the singular analytical demands of ‘the nation’. Debates on (and in) Indian newspapers remind us that journalism took shape within diverse and deep-rooted indigenous intellectual and public spheres. Indian editors, for example, in offering historical examples to critique contemporary empire, sought to use Persianate discourses of virtue, civilization, and ‘just rule’ to offer a vision of a different kind of empire, one comprising a ‘nation of nations’. In reporting on the Russo-Turkish and Afghan wars of the late 1870s, these older ideas of a plural imperial order motivated editors and readers to rethink their world picture, and to offer advice to their government. I argue, following Bryna Goodman, that South Asian language media across North India were part of a fluid, volatile, and entangled ‘blurry network’ in which multiple perspectives overlapped, and for which the frame of reference was global, comparative, and historical. This paper seeks to disrupt the primacy of national boundaries and borders in our analysis of print publics, focusing on Ottoman-Indian connections. It also argues that diverse Indian reading and listening publics constituted ‘critical’ rather than simply ‘representative’ spheres in the period before the emergence of constitutional and revolutionary nationalism.

△ 1 February 1878 edition of the Hindi Pradip, published from Allahabad. (Microfilmed image courtesy of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi)

Leigh Denault is a Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, where she is Lecturer in Modern South Asian History. She completed her PhD at Cambridge, during which she held a State Department Critical Language Scholarship in India. Her work has focussed on Hindi and Urdu public spheres and print culture, social reform, and vernacular debates on colonial law. She is currently completing a monograph on colonial transformations in everyday life, titled Intimate borders: family, community, and belonging in colonial India. She has recently started a digital history project using GIS and social network analysis to map topics, debates, and connections across late-nineteenth century Indian newspapers.

Armando Menezes, an intellectual, a journalist, a writer: intertextualities in The Goan World

The Goan intellectual Armando de Menezes was a university professor in Bombay, an editor of The Goan World during the 1930s. He manifested his nationalism either through fiction and literary studies or through a cultural and political posture that focused on journalistic intervention on the colonial context, which, despite being under two different empires, brought together the places that constructed and deconstructed his practice as an active intellectual: Goa, where he was born; the Portuguese metropolis against which he fought even though he admitted the crossing of stories and cultures for hundreds of years; and the space of exile, the city of Bombay in British India, where the struggle for independence from the British empire was already a reality. The Goan World translated this complex and multilingual existence, which shared networks of opposition and resistance to colonialism. However, at the same time it was up-to-date, commenting on current and globalized politics and culture. The paper will aim to establish the importance of this magazine and this intellectual in the network of contributions to the making and the unmaking of the history of emancipation struggles, creating ruptures and continuities in the debate for an autonomous Goa in a federation of independent states in the Indian subcontinent. It will also present the intertextualities brought to surface as a result of the different readings of the same texts to highlight the many levels of consequences generated and discuss the role of the types of censorship in such contexts.

△ The Goan World, January 1939, intellectual review edited by Goan migrants exiled in Bombay (Mumbai), from 1924 to 1942. (Image courtesy of Goa State Central Library, Panjim, Goa)

Adelaide Vieira Machado received her PhD in History and Theory of Ideas (FCSH-UNL) and is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the FAPESP-financed project based at University of São Paulo ‘The cultural impact of the Colonial Act of 1930 in the Portuguese empire: a Goan perspective’. This project is part of ‘Thinking Goa: a peculiar library of Portuguese language’ international project. She is a founding member of the International Group for Studies of Colonial periodical press of the Portuguese empire (IGSCP-IP). With a vast curriculum of study of the periodical press, particularly of intellectual movements magazines and of intellectual colonial periodical press, she is interested in topics that combine the colonial press with the idea of democracy and the importance of intellectual networks in the emergence of a culture of opposition and resistance to dictatorship and colonial empires in the first half of the 20th century.

Gandhi’s Indian Opinion and the making of independent India

Between 1903 and 1915, whilst he was based in South Africa as a lawyer, M.K. Gandhi published a newspaper Indian Opinion. The paper was integral in Gandhi building a sense of self as well as his concepts of ‘satyagraha’ – loyalty to truth or ‘soul force’. The newspaper, published in multiple languages and scripts, featured different genres from news to philosophical extracts, and was aimed at a broad intercultural and international audience. Over the years, Gandhi used the paper to test out theories of how printing and publishing could create new kinds of ‘ethical selves’ and built a concept of an ideal reader, one who was free from constraints of market and nation. Building on the work of Hofmeyr (2013), this paper looks at Gandhi’s ambitions for a transnational publication in the context of today’s international and intercultural world where news is absorbed by multiple audiences and readers. It provides a view of the practices and challenges undertaken by Gandhi, and its impact, reflecting on its relevance to printers, publishers, and readers today. Essentially an oral and manuscript culture, it can be argued that Indian typographic and publishing practice has absorbed Western typographic norms to such an extent that vernacular ways of designing, publishing, distributing, and receiving texts are often usurped by so-called 'global practices'. However, as noted by Fry (2017), there is much work to be done in 'how design is understood, transformed, and practiced in the Global South' and this requires a conscious and critical reflection of heritage and current practice. This paper posits a case study of an independent publishing venture with ambitions for transnational publication. It places this within the context of publishing, a market-driven industrialized practice as well as within today’s international and intercultural world where news is absorbed by multiple audiences and readers.

△ The front page of Indian Opinion, no. 30, volume 12, 29 July 1914. (Image courtesy of The British Library, London)

Rathna Ramanathan is Reader in Intercultural Communication, and Dean, School of Communication, at the Royal College of Art, London. Her research focuses on intercultural typography, graphic design, and experimental publishing practices. She has over twenty years’ experience in diverse contexts: professional (design research, publishing practice, and design education), cultural (South Asian, European, and American), and organisational (academic, commercial, and non-profit). She has worked in international cross-disciplinary teams for BBC World, British Council, UNICEF India, World Bank, Harvard University Press, and Tara Books. Rathna specialises in the research, design, and curation of marginalized content and endangered practices within intercultural publishing with South Asia as the site of investigation. Research interests include the politics of typography, relevance of tangible and intangible heritages in communication, and dialogues between people, politics, and place.