THE COMPANY-STATE AND THE BIRTH OF INDIAN PRINT CULTURE

By trying to police English print, the Company midwifed a bigger revolution: vernacular publics forged by Serampore’s presses and Calcutta’s classrooms, where tracts, gazettes, and news taught Indians to read—and argue—as citizens.

- TDG NETWORK

The late 18th and early 19th centuries witnessed a rapid expansion of print under the East India Company.

In Calcutta, the appearance of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette in 1780 marked the birth of newspaper journalism in India. This colonial venture immediately met with censorship: Governor-General Wellesley’s 1799 Press Act required all journals’ proofs to be submitted to the Company government before publication (violation could mean deportation). Nonetheless, the Company’s demand for printed materials and the missionaries’ zeal produced a new vernacular reading public. Mission presses and colonial initiatives (like Fort William College) combined to translate and print textbooks, dictionaries, and religious texts in Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and other Indian languages. Paradoxically, even as the Company-state clamped down on the English-language press, print culture in Indian languages quietly flourished, laying the foundations of a “vernacular modernity” in late colonial society.