Journalism in the Subcontinent in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

by Naresh Nadeem

The first half of the twentieth century holds a unique place in the history of mankind. On the international plane, this was the period when the old-style colonialism entered the phase of imperialism. John Atkinson Hobson published his book Imperialism in 1902, and Lenin offered a cogent explanation of this phenomenon one-and-a-half decades later, showing that the interests of various colonial powers of Europe were mutually clashing so acutely that there was no scope of their reconciliation for the time being. While the world had had to suffer the horrors of two world wars as a result, this also led to a socialist revolution in Russia, with which human history entered a new era.

Subsequently in the same period, the nations of the world had to suffer the horrors of a naked dictatorship of the monopoly bourgeoisie in the form of fascism. But this was also the period when fascism suffered total rout and the world heaved a long sigh of relief.

On the other hand, if we look at our subcontinent, it was also the period when the Indian bourgeoisie reached the stage of maturity, and the national liberation movement began to gather strength after the partition of Bengal in 1905. In this very period, the country threw off the yoke of British imperialism under the leader-ship of political representatives of the modern bourgeois class, but it was also vivisected as a result of an imperialist conspiracy, and we are still suffering the fallouts of this event.

Character of the Press and Its Metamorphosis

In this situation, journalism too took a new turn in the history of the subcontinent and the Indian press gradually reached a stage where it could begin to influence the country’s economics, politics and culture. Here we are talking of a period when the Indian press was confronted with the might of British imperialism in whose domain the sun never set, as was the common refrain. Hence the role of the press in the first half of the twentieth century deserves special attention.

Long back, in 1843, Marx had commented that a material force of course needs to be confronted with a material force but an idea itself becomes a material force once it grips the masses. The press in the Indian subcontinent developed precisely on this line in the period under discussion—as a material force pitted against colonialism and imperialist tyranny. Marx had also commented in 1853, while discussing about the probable results of British rule in India, that this was the first time a free press, owned by the common inheritors of Indians and Europeans, had originated in Asiatic societies, and it would become a new and powerful instrument of India’s regeneration. Insofar as the first half of the 20th century is concerned, the press played precisely this role in our subcontinent.

However, here we must bear in mind yet another fact though we are not directly concerned with it, and it is that the evolution of the press took place in the subcontinent on a totally different line after the country’s independence and partition in 1947. I am not entitled to talk about the status or position of press in Pakistan, but the institution underwent a fundamental transformation in the part of the subcontinent I belong to. The Indian Press Commission, formed under the chairmanship of J. Natarajan in 1952, thus drew our attention to this aspect in the first part of its report, submitted in 1955:

“Formerly, most of the Indian Press had only one objective and that was political emancipation of the country. Most of the journalists of that era were actuated by fervent patriotism and a feeling that they had a mission to perform and a message to convey. (But) Political emancipation having been achieved, the emphasis has shifted and the newspapers are no longer run as a mission, but have become commercial ventures.” (GOI, p. 482)

In the same report the Commission also commented that now the big newspapers, in particular, either kept mum on important occasions or hesitated from leading the public opinion, because they have to take care of certain business interests; they moved very cautiously and they had to act on the orders of the powers-that-are.

Therefore,

“Some of them are partisan in the presentation of news in respect of the financial interests with which they are allied; there is a certain timidity to expose courageously the short-comings of those who are in a position of power and authority; there is a tendency to suppress facts which are unfavourable to their own interests or to the financial interests with which they are associated.” (Ibid.)
It was precisely this press which the late V.K. Krishna Menon, an important member of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet, had dubbed as “the Jute Press”. The Mahalonobis Committee, which developed the Second Five-Year Plan of the country, also made very trenchant criticism of the role the press played in the concentration of wealth in a few hands.

The Educated Middle Class

But, before 1947, the institution of the press in the subcontinent was different in the sense that it was to a great extent working in the mission mode though it had had its own class character. The new social classes that emerged after the establishment of British rule in India included the urban middle class that was armed with modern Western education, with its members engaged in medicine, law and several other modern professions. Journalism was one among these very modern professions. Nay more, this class played a leading role in the country’s struggle for independence and, quite naturally and necessarily, it used the institution of the press to take its mission of independence forward.

But this was also a period when the rates of education and literacy in India moved up very slowly because of the policies of the British empire and the rate of economic growth was still lower, and therefore a substantial section of the middle class suffered from unemployment. (See Desai, p. 199) On the other hand, this class had had only minimal representation in the parliamentary and urban local bodies that were formed after the uprising of 1857-58, in the sense that some leading Indians championed the interests of this class in these institutions but till 1947 this class, by itself, remained deprived of the right to contest for these bodies and even of the right to vote. It was not surprising, therefore, that the interests of this educated middle class, now more, now less, clashed with those of the British regime. It was thus that starting from the demand of representation in councils and government jobs, this class reached up to the demand of “home rule”, and then after having demanded “dominion status”, it began to raise the slogan of complete independence.

We would like to quote here an instance of the role of this class in the struggle for national liberation from imperialism. During 1917-18, from Dacca and Mymensingh to Lahore, Gujranwala and Multan, there were incarcerated in jails a large number of Indian youth who were called “terrorists” in British imperialist parlance and whom we call national revolutionaries. When the British Indian Government constituted the Rowlatt Committee in order to study the so-called destructive activities in the country, it attempted to approach these imprisoned youth with a questionnaire which was later reproduced in an appendix to the said Committee’s report. Though most of these youth tore their copies of the questionnaire under the sentiment that they had had nothing to do with British imperialism, a few of then did fill up this form, and these data too, limited though they are, throw sufficient light on the fact that the national revolutionary movement was a middle class movement and that the urban middle class youth formed a majority of its participants. This was precisely the reality which the Communist Party’s paper, Workers’ Weekly, pointed out in its issue of November 30, 1930, concluding that poverty and the lack of rights determined the conflict of this class with imperialism. According to the paper, “The Lahore comrades” (meaning Bhagat Singh and his comrades) “headed this tendency”, and, further, “It is not merely empty hostility to imperialism but a determination to overthrow it.” (See Ranadive, p. xviii)
It was this very class that was instrumental in the growth of journalism in the first half of the 20th century, and this took place in an environment when the chances of adjustment of this class’ interests with imperialism were progressively diminishing.

Growth of the Bourgeoisie

However, while talking of the growth of the educated middle class, we must not forget that the existence of this class depended, directly as well as indirectly, upon the modern bourgeoisie. An interesting point here is that when the governance of India passed from the East India Company over to the British Crown in 1858, it may be described as a victory of the industrial bourgeoisie over mercantile bourgeoisie (Moitra, p. 131), and this was the period when modern enterprises began to grow in India—a trend that acquired still more strength in the first half of the twentieth century. According to a study conducted by the Gokhale Institute of Pune in 1951, Indian capital registered fast growth in big industries between 1915-16 and 1943-44.

In this context, basing themselves on a number of authorities, Aditya Mukherjee and Mridula Mukherjee have presented a summary of seven important trends of the Indian economy in this period. They say that a high rate of import substitution was one important characteristic of India’s economic growth in this period, and the First World War greatly strengthened this trend. While India imported even needles from abroad before the establishment of the Tatas’ iron and steel works, she had become self-reliant in all the important consumer goods by 1939. A pertinent point here is that largely the domestic capital pushed this process of import substitution.
A second important trend was that producers now began to turn to the domestic market, and those hitherto producing for international markets now began to concentrate on the home market. A third trend was that the volume of inland trade grew fast while there was a decline in the country’s international trade after the First World War. Fourth, the direction of capital transfers too changed for a variety of reasons; capital came out to an extent from traditional occupations like trade, landlordism and usury, and moved to industries. Fifth, the character of India’s international trade also changed to an extent—the share of finished products in her imports declined and that of manufactures in her exports progressively increased. Sixth, the influx of foreign capital in India declined in this period and the rate of capital formation within the country increased to an extent. Lastly, as a cumulative effect of all the above-mentioned factors, the Indian bourgeoisie received so much boost that it was able to gradually establish its dominance on the whole of the Indian economy between 1914 and 1947.

While the growth of the Indian bourgeoisie’s economic strength also led to the creation of organisations like the FICCI to further its interests, the latter also found a prominent place in the politics of the Indian National Congress. But a far more important point is that in the then obtaining conditions this class was able to link its interests with those of other classes and a consciousness of commonality of interests gripped all the classes (Desai, pp 215-217), though the Communist Party, then newly formed, failed to grasp this reality and paid a heavy price for it. The enhanced role of domestic sources in capital formation, expansion of education and literacy, creation of new job opportunities, an enhancement of the people’s purchasing power and expansion of the domestic market as a consequence, the growing representation of Indians in councils, their increasing presence in high positions of governance, etc.—all these demands were in the interest of the other classes as well as that of the bourgeoisie, and a consciousness of commonality of interests was naturally advantageous to the bourgeoisie. It was thus that the latter’s ideological dominance over our national liberation movement was established.

Avoidance of Direct Investment

Insofar as the growth of the press and journalism was concerned, this correspondence of the bourgeoisie’s interests with those of the common people was mainly to the advantage of the bourgeoisie, in particular industrial bourgeoisie. Here we must bear in mind that if we talk of the bourgeoisie’s growth, it is only in a relative sense; otherwise this class had not yet reached the stage where it could directly challenge the imperialist power. In the layman’s language, in our subcontinent this class was still tearfully engaged in making money and was not yet in a position to throw it laughingly.

The result is that in this whole period we find only limited instances of the bourgeoisie’s direct participation in establishing newspapers and periodicals; insofar as our survey goes, we found only three such cases. The first case is of G.D. Birla’s association with The Hindustan Times. This paper was established in 1924 when the Akali movement was at its peak; it was an Akali paper, edited by Sardar K.M. Panikkar, and was somewhat inclined towards the Congress. But when the Akalis faced difficulties in running this paper, it went to a consortium with Madan Mohan Malviya, Lala Lajpat Rai, Raja Narendra Nath and M.R. Jaykar as its Directors. Later, G.D. Birla purchased some of the shares and joined the Board of Directors. A company was then formed to run it, but it came under Birla’s sole proprietorship by 1932 though the editorship changed thrice in these years. The paper is still the property of a section of this very family.

Secondly, the same G.D. Birla started a paper, titled Arjun, from Delhi in 1923, but the government soon arrested its editor. A few months later, the government demanded a security of Rs 10,000 under the Press Ordinance and the paper had to be closed. The paper reappeared later after the security demanded was reduced to Rs 4000. The government harassed this paper in a number of ways, and it was closed down. And then it was restarted in 1938 as Veer Arjun.

The third instance we have is of the agency Free Press of India which S. Sadanand started in 1927, in order to provide news to the Indian newspapers at a low cost, in competition with the pro-imperialist Associated Press. However, when Sadanand realised that Indian papers were avoiding his agency for some or other reason, he launched the Bombay Free Press Journal on June 30, 1930. It was a low-priced paper, selling at 2 paise per copy, and it was getting public acceptance. But the class cowardice of the bourgeoisie came to the fore here. When Sadanand had started his agency in 1927, it had five more Directors besides him, and they all were industrialists. These were M.J. Jaykar, G.D. Birla, Purshottamdas Thakurdas, Sir Feroze Sethna and Walchand Hirachand. But precisely when the agency was on its way to becoming self-reliant despite the newspapers’ hesitancy to subscribe to it, the government intensified its pressure, and four out of the five said Directors dissociated themselves from the company in 1929. Moreover, when the government imposed severe censorship over the agency’s news under the Press Ordinance in May 1930, and initiated stern actions against the newspapers subscribing to it, the fifth Director also resigned and Sadanand now found himself alone to cope with the government’s assault. Later he started a chain of newspapers and periodicals in Tamil, Marathi, some other vernacular languages and English, and these were published from several cities. These publications did receive cooperation from the Indian bourgeoisie, but none of the latter directly joined the endeavour.

It is to be noted that before Sadanand breathed his last in November 1953 after several years of illness, he had already faced the wrath of independent India’s government and the then Home Affairs Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, had told him in plain terms that “We are interested in newspapers which will support us wholeheartedly. To say you will support us when we are right is meaningless. For why should anyone oppose us then?” (Quoted by Moitra, p. 19, from S. Natarajan, A History of the Press in India, p. 313)
One of the reasons for the Indian bourgeoisie avoiding to invest in newspapers and perio-dicals was of course that the press was still far away from becoming a full-fledged business. In an estimate made in 1876-77, Dr Sir George Birdwood had noted how many publications were coming out in which languages in various provinces and presidencies, and the finding was that there were about one lakh readers for all these publications and that 3000 was the maximum circulation of a paper. (Moitra, p. 161) About five decades later, the Free Press Journal was selling about 4000 copies, which was then regarded to be a big achievement. However, though this was no doubt a big figure in those days’ conditions, it was also true that no business could be based on this kind of circulation.

Another important reason behind the bourgeoisie refraining from investing in newspapers and periodicals was its class cowardice, as demonstrated above. The truth is that if at all this class confronted the Raj on occasions, it never allowed this confrontation to go beyond a limit, and if Gandhiji withdrew all his all-India movements (1921-22, 1930-32 and 1942-44) at a point, the reason was precisely the fear of a “red anarchy” which the bourgeoisie dreaded most of all.

Chain of Prohibitive Laws

On the other hand, the government, that was well aware of the newspapers’ power in the 18th and 19th centuries, also refrained from giving the newspapers any freedom beyond a limit, and here we may well remember Marx’s celebrated remark that if the colonial powers moved about in the garb of civilisation in master countries, they preferred to go naked in subject countries. It is true that Indian publications had had a comparatively better atmosphere up till 1857, but a report in 1859 did make “the categorical assertion that if the North Western Provinces newspapers had been carefully studied in 1856-57, the rebellion could have been anticipated and prevented”. (Natarajan, p. 97)

It must be clarified here that Uttar Pradesh of today more or less coincided with what was then called the North Western Province (it was the outermost limit of the empire before the British conquest of Punjab), and it was this province that became the centre of revolt at the time. This was the understanding that led the Governor General in Council to pass a law on June 13, 1857, after much hesitation, and that came to be popularly called the Gagging Act. And it was first used against a paper called the Friend of India when it published an article on the first centenary of the war of Plassey and the government viewed that article to be “dangerous and provocative”. Though this law was scrapped within a year, “with a few zigzags, the general policy of the government was to increasingly curtail the freedom of the press”. (See Moitra, pp. 130-33)

In this context, even if we do not talk of the Acts that harmed freedom of the press in the 19th century, we do find a whole series of prohibitive laws in the first half of the 20th century. Some of them were as below:
1) The Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act 1908.

2) The Indian Press Act 1910, which was the most draconian law till that time.

3) The Telegraph Act.

4) The Indian Press Emergency Powers Act 1931; the Emergency Powers Ordinances were incorporated into it in 1932 in order to make it still more stringent.

Apart from the above laws that were directly related to the press in India, the government could prosecute Indian newspapers and periodicals under certain other Acts as well. Some of these were:

1) The Defence of India Rules 1818.

2) The Press and Registration of Books Act 1867.

3) The Post Office Act, under which packets of books could be opened in a post office itself.

4) The Sedition Act 1919.

5) The Official Secrets Act.

6) The Public Meetings Act.

7) The Explosives Act.

8) The Sedition Law.

9) The Foreign Relations Act 1932, under which a newspaper could be charged with having adversely affected through a write-up the government’s relations with a friendly country.

10) The Indian States (Protection) Act 1934, according to which no paper or periodical could write anything against a principality even though these princely states were notorious for their autocratic and tyrannical governance.

This was the environment in which the emerging Indian bourgeoisie refrained from directly associating with the world of news-papers and periodicals. However, its class cowardice remained veiled because of the fact that those associated with the world of newspapers and periodicals were in any case championing the interests of this class. These people were associated with the middle class, in particular its upper sections, and as the Congress as well as the Muslim League conducted its proceedings in English (Desai, p. 197), middle class individuals with higher education emerged as leaders of these two parties. Moreover, in the situation then obtaining, the most important politicians of the day belonged to the urban areas and more so to the metropolitan cities. With its eyes on the global developments because of its mastery over the English language, and armed with modern sciences and arts, this class inevitably emerged as the flag-bearer of press freedom and journalism in the subcontinent.

Characteristics and Trends

One of the consequences of this peculiar behaviour of the bourgeoisie was that weeklies formed a very big chunk of the Indian news-papers and periodicals. This is not to say that dailies were non-existent; The Hindu, Amrit Bazar Patrika and The Tribune, among others, had carved an identity of their own. One of the factors behind this preponderance of the weeklies was perhaps the realisation that the dailies mainly disseminate news, and not views.

Another trend of the period was that English periodicals formed a good chunk of the publications. This was because of two compulsions. First, English could be a better means of conveying one’s viewpoint to the government, and, secondly, the youth in search of government jobs and other employment avenues preferred to read English papers. However, some 4000 publications (including dailies) were coming out in 17 languages by 1941, and vernacular papers formed a very big proportion of this lot. We also see the publication of some bilingual papers, for example, English-Bengali, English-Marathi, Hindi-Urdu, etc., but this experiment did not score much success.

A third trend was that English language papers too were raising the problems facing the people. Before the publication of Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1876, a good part of its content had already appeared in his paper, Rast-Guftar. This trend of raising the people’s issues continued upto 1947, just as some city-based lawyers kept taking up the rural cultivators’ problems of rent, land revenue and indebtedness. It is another thing that these people did not directly address the rural masses the way some politicians and journalists did after the rise of the Gandhi phenomenon and start of mass politics in the country.

Fourth, reform of religion and society was one of the dominant themes of this period, though this trend had begun much earlier, with Raja Rammohan Roy (d 1833) and his Brahmo Samaj. In 1878, when Keshav Chandra Sen, a high-ranking leader of this organisation, tried to fix his minor daughter’s marriage to the minor king of Coochbehar, opposition to the move came first from within his own Samaj, though this opposition could not prevent this marriage from taking place. Some of the students opposed to this marriage soon emerged as leading figures in politics and journalism, for example, Bipin Chandra Pal, Anand Mohan Bose and Ramanand Chatterjee. (Moitra, p. 151)
Similarly, in Mumbai during the 1880s, when Rukhmabai, an educated girl, refused to live with her drunkard and good-for-nothing husband, and her husband moved the court to get his wife compelled to come to him, this gave rise to a protracted and heated debate in news-papers, and all the ills and wells of the Indian society came to the fore through this debate. While a socially conservative B.G. Tilak opposed the girl’s idea of living independently, the Indian Spectator weekly championed the cause of women’s rights; its editor was a Parsi gentleman called Behramji Malabari. This basic tune of reform in religion and society continued in all Indian language papers up till 1947 and, on the whole, conservative papers failed to stand up to the pro-reform ones.
An important characteristic of journalism in the period under discussion was that most of the papers continued to confront the law and government, and fought for freedom of speech and association, processions and demonstrations, and other civil liberties and democratic rights. Some of the papers did follow the policy of simultaneous confrontation and compromise, but the growth of the mass movement ensured an upper hand for the element of confrontation.
We see yet another trend in this period. Earlier we referred to the policy of import substitution which gave the bourgeoisie in the subcontinent a base to flourish. When the Swadeshi-Boycott agitation started in 1905 in protest against the partition of Bengal, this policy received further boost and it formed a core of Gandhian politics since 1920-21. But we see this policy being implemented in the field of journalism too. The Times of India, The Statesman, Civil and Military Gazette, The Pioneer and Madras Mail were some of the prominent pro-British papers at the time and though they came out from Indian cities, their content came mainly from England. For instance, The Times of India used to reproduce much that was already published in The Times of London. If Sadanand established the Free Press News Service in opposition to the Associated Press, this too was a case of import substitution in this particular field.

In the same way, the declared aim of Leader, Allahabad, was to ensure the downfall of The Pioneer which was a champion of imperialist interests and claimed to be an all-India paper. It was the same Pioneer which the renowned Urdu poet, Akbar Allahabadi (1847-1921), thus ridiculed—

Ghar ke khat mein hai ki kal ho gaya Chehallum unka

Pioneer likhta hai beemar ka haal achchha hai.

[The letter from home says his Chehallum (Muslim rituals on the 40th day of one’s death) took place yesterday, The Pioneer says the patient is in a good condition.]

And the Leader took up cudgels at a time when the government was helping The Pioneer in every possible way. What finally happened was that the former’s circulation steadily increased while The Pioneer suffered a decline in the same pro-portion. The emergence of Leader may also be regarded as an instance of import substitution.
The net result of all these characteristics and trends was that as the national movement grew in strength, journalism also gathered strength in the subcontinent in the same proportion, and its vocalism increased despite various prohibitive laws.

Mission Mode

The mission mode that we see in the subcontinental journalism in the first half of the 20th century, may also be traced to this direct link of the educated urban middle class with this activity and the bourgeoisie’s refrain from investing in this field. Most of the papers of the time were dependent upon local urban bodies which purchased copies of these papers for free distribution among libraries and schools. Some of the papers also had bigwigs like jagirdars, princes and queens as patrons, and got small sums of money from that source. As Munshi Premchand had once been the editor of Zamana (Kanpur), what Pundit Omkar Nath, the editor of daily Bijli in the novel Godan, says about journalism may well be taken as based upon this great writer’s first-hand experience. On the occasion of a function in Rai Sahib’s village, Pundit Omkar Nath says that the life of an editor is a long elegy that does not evoke any sympathy from the people; it rather makes them shut their ears. The poor fellow cannot do any good to himself or to others. He is expected to be in the forefront in any movement, go to jail, get beaten, get his house and other belongings forfeited, but no one pays attention to his difficulties and compulsions. However, it was the same Omkar Nath whose voice Rai Sahib stifles by subscribing to a hundred copies of his paper. While writing about Meeraji, Manto has still more powerfully described the plight of this community in those days. He says that was a time when “poets, journalists and editors sat naked in laundries to get their clothes washed at double the rate”. In his radio drama Journalist, the central character is Abdul Bari, Manto’s own mentor, and through him Manto brought to light all the excruciations of the journalists of his age.
Another facet of this mission mode is to be seen in that, though for a different reason, Indian journalists of yore were no less mobile than today despite all the backwardness of means of transportation and communication. However, this trend had started much earlier. We see Sitala Kant Chatterjee of Bengal working in The Tribune of Lahore in 1881, where Bipin Chandra Pal too worked in 1887, but the journalists’ movement from one part of the country to another had much increased in the period under review. When Motilal Nehru dissociated from Leader and started The Independent, Benjamin Guy Horniman of Bombay Chronicle rendered him invaluable help, and brought along with him Syed Hosain for the editor’s work. Nagendra Nath Gupta of a Bengali family came to Karachi to edit Phoenix that was started by Jaffar Fardoo. Gupta later moved to Allahabad to edit Indian People, and still later to Lahore to edit The Tribune. In fact the last-named paper then had a high reputation about attracting to it talented journalists, and many leading light of journalism, like C.Y. Chintamani and Kalinath Ray, were associated with it. Kalinath Ray had started his journalistic career from Surendra Nath Banerji’s The Bengalee; then he went to Assam to edit Citizen, and then came to Lahore in 1911 as the editor of Punjabee, and assumed the editorship of The Tribune on December 12, 1917. He took the paper to such heights that it was often referred to in the British parliament. In Sind, when Sadhu T.L. Vaswani started the New Times after the closure of Phoenix, he brought Punniah as the editor from distant Andhra and the same Punniah later became the editor of Sind Observer. In his time, the paper gave strong competition to the pro-government Daily Gazette that was later converted into the Karachi edition of the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore. When Sandesh began publication from Kanpur, its editor was A.B. Kolhatker, a renowned journalist of the time. V.S. Venkataraman of the Madras presidency edited the Daily News of Kanpur. Before it, he had edited the weekly Hitavad for 12 years.

Many more examples of this kind may be cited, in which journalists moved to distant parts of this sprawling country to bring out papers. While they were moved by a feeling of commonality of the goal, the expansion of the railways and other means of transport did aid in this venture. There are also a good number of instances in which a paper was closed and its editor arrested, but then a new paper came out soon with somebody from a distant part of the country as its editor.
This method helped Indian journalism withstand British repression for a long time in the first half of the 20th century. And when a number of Indian papers were forcibly closed down in 1942, the organisation of a joint conference of theirs was an indicator of the sense of mutual solidarity that pervaded among the journalists of the age.

[This is a slightly modified version of the paper that the author presented at the “International Conference on Struggle for Independence 1857 and Freedom of the Media in the Subcontinent”, organised by the Department of Mass Communication, Federal Urdu University of Arts, Sciences and Technology, in the Arts Council
Hall, Karachi on June 24-25, 2008.]

References

Barns, Margarita (1940), The Indian Press, London.

Desai, A.R. (1993), Social Background of Indian Nationalism, Bombay: Popular Prakashan (revised edition); first published: 1948.

Government of India (1955), The Report of the Press Commission, New Delhi: Publications Division.

Moitra, Mohit (1969), A History of Indian Journalism, Kolkata: National Book Agency. (This book covers the subject only till the 1880s, as the author died while he was still working on the book. As a result, the book is based on only such chapters as he had written by the time of his demise.)

Mukherjee, Aditya and Mukherjee, Mridula, ‘Imperialism and the Growth of Indian Capitalism in the Twentieth Century’ in Chandra, Bipan (ed.), Modern India, New Delhi: Orient Longman.

Natarajan, J. (2000), History of Indian Journalism, New Delhi: Publications Division (second reprint); first published: 1955. (It is Part 2 of the same report submitted by the Indian Press Commission, whose first part has been mentioned above. It was following the government’s decision that it was published in the name of J. Natarajan, the Chairman of the said Commission.)

Ranadive, B.T. (1986), Introduction, in Verma, Shiv (ed.), Selected Writings of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Delhi: National Book Centre; first edition: 1986.

The author is on the Editorial Board of People’s Democracy; however, the views expressed here are his own.