Journalism, Democracy and Civil Society in India

Shakuntala Rao, Vipul Mudgal

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138240162
• eBook ISBN: 9781315293790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since independence in 1947 India has remained a stable and functioning democracy in the face of enormous challenges. Amid a variety of interlinking contraries and a burgeoning media – one of the largest in the world – there has been a serious dearth of scholarship on the role of journalists and dramatically changing journalism practices. This book brings together some of the best known scholars on Indian journalism to ask questions such as: Can the plethora of privately run cable news channels provide the discursive space needed to strengthen the practices of democracy, not just inform results from the ballot boxes? Can neoliberal media ownership patterns provide space for a critical and free journalistic culture to evolve? What are the ethical challenges editors and journalists face on a day-to-day basis in a media industry which has exploded? In answering some of these questions, the contributors to this volume are equally sensitive to the historical, social, and cultural context in which Indian journalism evolved, but they do not all reach the same conclusion about the role of journalism in Indian civil society and democracy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

INDIAN JOURNALISM IN THE COLONIAL CRUCIBLE
A nineteenth-century story of political protest

Prasun Sonwalkar

India’s imperfect democracy may be underpinned by an equally imperfect journalism, but the symbiotic relationship between the two is rarely acknowledged or highlighted. The fact remains that India’s democracy is enabled and enhanced by its roots in the ancient tradition of dialogue, debate and argument, which was transformed by the growth of print journalism since the late eighteenth century. In the modern sense, this tradition matured in the acid bath of India’s freedom struggle, when journalism and journalist-leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru played a central role before independence in 1947. This paper focuses on a forgotten chapter in India’s modern political history, when the idea of a free press became the locus of the earliest example of constitutional agitation. In the colonial cauldron of the early nineteenth century, protest by Indian and British liberals against press licensing and other restrictions imposed by the East India Company took the form of “memorials” (petitions) addressed to the Supreme Court in Calcutta¹ and to the King-in-Council in London. The agitation begun in Calcutta in 1823 was carried forward in London, which later curbed the Company-state’s restrictive acts towards the press in India, until the Mutiny of 1857. The agitation also included the daring act of Rammohun Roy to close his Persian journal, Mirat-ul-Akhbar, to protest against restrictions imposed by acting Governor-General John Adam. Recalling this chapter of political protest enhances our understanding of the dominant theme of politics in Indian journalism, which continues today, despite rampant commercialisation and corruption.

Introduction

The 2014 general elections in India—considered the largest democratic exercise in the world—provide a convenient backdrop to explore the symbiotic and deep relationship between politics and journalism in India. Superlatives are often used to describe various aspects about India, from its 1.2 billion plus population, to levels of poverty, to the growing number of millionaires and billionaires. Superlatives are also used to describe the ways in which the Indian news media covered—or did not cover—the 2014 elections. In the context of deepening of the corporate–politician nexus since the liberalisation of India’s economy in the early 1990s, there are indications that the 2014 elections witnessed unprecedented levels of commerce and compromise on the part of the news media. Large numbers of candidates, constituencies, parties and issues were systematically marginalised in news discourse in favour of certain politicians and their parties. American-style branding of candidates and parties was taken to new highs of manufacturing consent as thousands of techno-savvy volunteers lent their expertise (including holograms) to selectively influence the discourse. Manoj Ladwa, who was the head of public relations of Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign, said after the party’s landslide electoral victory: “We studied the Barack Obama and Tony Blair campaigns, but this was a [Narendra] Modi campaign and it will be seen as a benchmark in political communication on media courses” (Sonwalkar 2014, 11).

The news coverage of the elections presents itself as a rare case study of professionalisation of political communication and western-style methods being deployed in a traditional society that is undergoing transformation at various levels, but continues to face serious challenges of poverty, health, education and security. If the news coverage of the 2014 elections is seen as plunging new depths of corruption, misuse and manipulation—partly captured in the phrase “paid news”, which means politicians paying for propaganda masquerading as news content—it also reflects and reiterates a reality that is so banal and boring that it is rarely acknowledged or noticed. It is the reality of politics being the default setting of Indian journalism, an aspect that defies Murdoch-style dumbing down of news content for commercial gains. Since the early 1990s, news content has become light as part of the “Murdochization” of Indian journalism (Sonwalkar 2002), with increasing focus on celebrities, cinema, crime and cricket, but the historical hard-wiring of politics in Indian society, as reflected in journalism, has retained its salience. Political events and issues are often narrated in Bollywood-style imagery and idioms, particularly on television, but despite the rapacious pursuit of profit and corruption by news organisations and some journalists, the dominance of politics, party leaders and issues has continued across the news media, including print, radio, television and the rapidly expanding social media. This article focuses on this core, umbilical link between journalism and politics in India, and recalls the first—but largely forgotten—chapter of protest in the early nineteenth century that set the template for subsequent political agitations, culminating in India’s independence in 1947.

The origin of modern journalism in India in the late eighteenth century presents a unique case study of the idea of “British journalism abroad”, of how the ways of doing journalism travelled from England to various colonies of the British Empire, how the “model” was received, adopted and constructively adapted by the local elites, and how journalism of this period prepared the groundwork for the use of the press as a powerful weapon during freedom struggles, particularly in non-Dominion or non-Settler colonies such as India. According to standard historical accounts, Indian nationalism began in 1885 with the formation of the Indian National Congress, or during the preparatory phase of agitational politics in the preceding decade. However, the vast material comprising hand-written records of the East India Company (EIC) and surviving copies of the first English and Indian-language journals suggest that by as early as 1835, print journalism had emerged as a site where the first impulses of Indian nationalism were being expressed. Journalism had also become an effective tool for social and religious reform. It had become a key aspect of what was then a new form of political protest—constitutional agitation—which included petitions to EIC officials, town hall meetings in Calcutta, seeking legal alternatives and raising issues through the press. Later, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of India’s freedom struggle followed the example set by the the first leader-journalists such as Rammohun Roy, H. L. V. Derozio and Bhabani Charan Bandopadhyay, and used journalism to powerful effect. By 1835, Indians were already using print journalism to lecture to the British on how to run their empire, and writing extensively about the Irish and the revolutionary struggles in Spain and Italy as part of veiled attacks on the company’s rule in India. This focus on politics in the early phase of Indian journalism helps partly explain the persistence of politics as the dominant theme in modern India’s news media.

The next section places the origins of modern journalism in India in historical context and summarises key developments until the early nineteenth century. Journalism itself became the focus of the first political struggle in the colonial cauldron at the time, as top officials of the EIC saw the press as a threat and imposed severe restrictions. Matters came to a head in 1823, when acting Governor-General John Adam took two steps: deporting the irrepressible editor John Silk Buckingham, whose Calcutta Journal often launched scathing attacks on the Company government and its leading individuals; and issuing a Press Ordinance that imposed severe restrictions on the press. It is the response to this Press Ordinance by leading Indians in Calcutta that provides a remarkable and first example of modern ideas and the press being used in political protests in colonial India. As Gaonkar (1999, 17) observed, “Modernity is more often perceived as a lure than as threat, and the people (not just the elite) everywhere, at every national or cultural site, rise to meet it, negotiate it, and appropriate it in their own fashion”. The Indian response to the Press Ordinance took the form of two memorials (petitions)—one addressed to the Supreme Court in Calcutta and the other to the King-in-Council (so-called when the sovereign is acting on the advice of the Council); and in an act described as “daring” at the time, social reformer Rammohun Roy closed his Persian journal, Mirat-ul-Akhbar, in protest. As historian R. C. Dutt put it, “It was the start of that system of constitutional agitation for political rights which their countrymen have learnt to value so much in the present day” (Majumdar 1965, 234). The response also included transnational protest when Buckingham, deported to England, continued his diatribe in print against the Company government from London. This article, however, focuses on the Indian response: the two memorials and the closure of Roy’s journal.

The Context of Early Indian Journalism

This period in Indian journalism history was marked by political flux, when the Mughal Empire was in decline and a commercial enterprise from England—the East India Company—was coming to terms with the reality of having assumed political power over most of the sub-continent. It was a period of much uncertainty, when nothing was a given. In mid-eighteenth century Mughal India, slowly but surely, the old was giving way to the new in complex ways. The Mughal Empire was losing its influence, while the EIC gained political power and influence after the Battle of Plassey (1757), Battle of Buxar (1764) and the Treaty of Allahabad (1765), in which the Mughal Emperor formally acknowledged British dominance in the region by granting EIC the diwani, or the right to collect revenue, from Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The Supreme Court was founded in Calcutta in 1774. The EIC ceased to be simply a trading company and transformed into a powerful imperial agency with an army of its own, exercising control over vast territories with millions of people. As Thomas B. Macaulay said during a speech in the House of Commons on 10 July 1833: “It is the strangest of all governments; but it is designed for the strangest of all empires”. Elsewhere, the close of the eighteenth century was a period of cataclysmic change: American and French Revolutions had a profound influence not only on rulers in England but also on officials of the EIC. Radical politics began to emerge in England from the 1750s, which was strongly resisted by the forces of status quo. The same fears gripped the early officers of the expansionist EIC as it established itself in Calcutta and spread its influence across India.

Journalism emerged amidst such conditions and uncertain attempts by the Company government to introduce new, modern ways of governance and other measures, most of which proved controversial and faced opposition from Indians. The Company government, at the time engaged in battles across India, watched uneasily as English-language journals were launched from 1780 onwards, when James Augustus Hicky published the first journal, Hicky’s Gazette Or Calcutta General Advertiser. Alert to the dangers of Jacobinism, the EIC tried to control the press and prevent its growth from as early as 1799, by when British entrepreneurs and agency house came together to launch more journals. The question of freedom of the press first exercised colonial authorities at the time of Richard Wellesley’s governorship (1798–1805), when the Company government interpreted any criticism in journals as lurking Jacobinism. In 1799, Wellesley introduced regulations for the press, which stipulated that no newspaper be published until the proofs of the whole paper, including advertisements, were submitted to the colonial government and approved; violation invited deportation to England. Until 1818, the regulations applied only to the English journals, because until that year, there were no journals in Indian languages.

The Company government succeeded in controlling the press until 1818, by when the combination of a proliferating commercially driven print culture, a growing British community, a new generation of British editors and administrators, Christian missionaries and Indian elites alert to new ideas and impulses, ensured the growth of journalism and the idea of a free press. Several English-language journals followed Hicky’s journal, as members of the small British community in Calcutta sought to recreate the British world and cultural conditions in England: “[As] the German demands his national beverages wherever he settles, so the Briton insists on his newspaper” (Mills 1924, 103). Calcutta became the setting for the origins of Indian journalism and the crucible of the first sustained cultural encounter between Indian intellectuals and the west. In the late eighteenth century (1780), the white population in the town was less than 1000; in the 1837 census, 3138 English were returned, with soldiers forming the main element of the community. A part of Calcutta came to be known as the “white town”, where the British based themselves and sought to recreate British cultural life through news, goods, music, theatre and personnel that arrived and left for England by sea. As Marshall (2000, 308–309) noted, the “vast majority of the British were not interested in any exchange of ideas with the Indians. They did not expect to give anything, still less to receive. They were solely concerned with sustaining British cultural life for themselves with as few concessions as possible to an alien environment”.

Yet, members of the Indian intelligentsia, such as Rammohun Roy, living in Calcutta responded in creative ways to aspects of European culture that became available to them. Some members of the British community, on their own, developed cultural contacts with the local population, notably Sir William Jones, Nathaneil Halhed, Charles Wilkins and, for evangelical reasons, the Baptist missionaries in nearby Serampore. Indian scholars employed at the Fort William College also brought them in close contact with the British. As EIC’s presence spread and grew in its influence, Calcutta became the centre of governance, attracting unofficial Britons seeking to make a fortune, thus setting the scene for discursive interactions with the local population at various levels, including in the field of journalism (such as it was then). Indian intellectuals such as Roy were quick to absorb new ideas from the west. At the time, as Raichaudhuri (1988, 3) noted, “The excitement over the literature, history and philosophy of Europe as well as the less familiar scientific knowledge was deep and abiding”.

At the heart of this “excitement” was the technology of print, which enabled the flow of ideas and news from the metropole to the colonial periphery, vice versa, and slowly beyond Calcutta to the other two presidencies of Madras and Bombay and elsewhere. The printing press first arrived in India in Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century. Several religious texts were later printed in Konkani, Tamil and other Indian languages, but it was not until the late eighteenth century that the first English-language journals were launched in Calcutta, followed by journals in Bengali, Persian and Hindi in Calcutta, and in other Indian languages in Madras and Bombay. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, “Calcutta rapidly developed into the largest centre of printing in the sub-continent … appropriate to its paramount importance to the British as an administrative, commercial and social base” (Shaw 1981, ix).

Hicky catered to the small but expanding British community, which was able to sustain more English journals, some of them launched with the support of the EIC. As Marshall (2000, 324) noted, “White Calcutta sustained a remarkable number of newspapers and journals in English. Between 1780 and 1800, 24 weekly or monthly magazines came into existence … The total circulation of English-language publications was put at 3000 … These are astonishing figures for so small a community”. It was the era of journalist as publicist, as editors—in England and in colonial India—stamped their personalities on their journals, often entering into vicious attacks against rival editors and officials of the EIC. Hicky bitterly attacked Governor-General Warren Hastings, chief justice of the Supreme Court Sir Elijah Impey and others in the British community in Calcutta. The English journals were mainly non-political in character, sustained by advertising and had the British community as its audience. Besides some criticism of the EIC by mostly anonymous letter writers to the editor, the journals published orders of the colonial government, Indian news, personal news, notes on fashion, extracts from papers published in England, parliamentary reports, poems, newsletters and reports from parts of Europe. Editorials and other content would mainly interest the British community.

If Hicky’s journal is better known historically for publication of scandals, scurrilous personal attacks and risqué advertisements selling sex and sin, he was also the first to fight against the colonial government, then almost single-handed, to defend the liberty of the press. He wrote: “Mr Hicky considers the Liberty of the Press to be essential to the very existence of an Englishman and a free G-t. The subject should have full liberty to declare his principles, and opinions, and every act which tends to coerce that liberty is tyrannical and injurious to the COMMUNITY” (Barns 1940, 49, italics and capitals in original; in the days of letter press, “G-t” stood for “Government”). Hicky was soon hounded by Hastings and Impey, fined, imprisoned and his journal closed in March 1782. He died in penury in 1802. He was the first of several editors of English journals to invite the wrath of EIC officials who were wary of the effects of the ideas spawned by the French Revolution in India, and were highly sensitised to any threats to the existing order. By 1800, some journals closed for want of advertising and subscription, while others closed when British editors were deported to England after publishing material that was considered unacceptable by the EIC. Editors who attracted EIC’s ire and found themselves on ships back to England i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Democracy, civil society andjournalism in India
• 1. Indian Journalism in the Colonial Crucible: A nineteenth-century story of political protest
• 2. Popular Cinephilia in North India: Madhuri shows the way (1964-78)
• 3. A Media Not for All: A comparative analysis of journalism, democracy and exclusion in Indian and South African media
• 4. Phantom Journalism: Governing IndiaÂ’s proxy media owners
• 5. Shaming the Nation on Public Affairs Television: Barkha Dutt tackles colorism on We the People
• 6. Playing Reporter: Small-town women journalists in north India
• 7. The Potential and Limitations of Citizen Journalism Initiatives: Chhattisgarh’s CGNet Swara
• 8. Connecting Activists and Journalists: Twitter communication in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi rape
• 9. How Well do India’s Multiple Language Dailies Provide Political Knowledge to Citizens of this Electoral Democracy?
• 10. Our Media, Our Principles: Building codes of practice for community radio in India
• Index