THE proliferation of cheap printing presses all over Calcutta and its neighbourhood in the early 19th century threw open a vast avenue for writers and publishers who discovered the potentialities of a new communication media – the periodical. Such presses offered new opportunities for daring individuals – both Europeans and Bengalis in Calcutta of those days – to publish weeklies, fortnightlies or monthlies, to report daily events, as well as critique official policies. In Bengal, the British colonial administrators (for their administrative needs), and the Baptist missionaries in the Danish enclave of Srirampur (renamed by them as Serampore), had to propagate their religious faith, set up printing presses. They unwittingly opened the floodgates for a tide of printed manifestations of protest against the administration.¹

Curiously enough, the first generation of such protesters were English citizens of Calcutta. It was an Englishman, James Augustus Hicky, who set the tone for journalism of dissent and protest by starting Calcutta’s first weekly called Bengal Gazette on 29 January 1780. Through its pages, Hicky exposed the misdeeds of Governor General Warren Hastings, the judge Elijah Impey, and other officials of the East India Company, who were ruling Bengal at that time. In retaliation, the Company banned Bengal Gazette, and put Hicky behind bars – the first historically recorded instance of suppression of freedom of press in Bengal. Hicky’s tradition was kept alive by another Englishman, James Buckingham who brought out Calcutta Journal in 1818 – which came out against the oppressive policies of the colonial administration. Quite predictably, Buckingham’s journal too was banned, and he was forced to leave India.

But the tradition of dissident journalism, as established by Hicky and Buckingham to challenge the ruling powers, was taken over by a new generation of radical Bengali intelligentsia in the early decades of the 19th century. Apprehensive of the spread of anti-colonial sentiments through the press, in 1823 Governor General John Adam enforced a law that required publishers to get a license from the administration for bringing out any newspaper – a license which could be cancelled, and a fine levied on the publisher, if it was found to publish something ‘objectionable’.

The first to challenge this law was the famous social reformer and public intellectual Rammohan Roy, who at that time was bringing out a weekly (begun in Calcutta 1822) which can be described as a ‘little magazine’ by today’s standards, having a limited circulation. Incidentally, this weekly was in Persian (a language in which Rammohan was deft in reading and writing). It was called Mirat-ul-Akhbar (Mirror of News), which was mainly aimed at the Muslim readers, and dealt with social evils and questioned the policies of the British administration. (Simultaneously, Rammohan was also bringing out a Bengali journal called Sambad Kaumudi, voicing similar concerns affecting Hindu society, and pleading for social reforms).

Protesting against John Adam’s law of licensing, Rammohan stopped the publication of Mirat-ul-Akhbar, addressing its readers and distributors in its last issue in the following words: ‘You earn your respect in every drop of blood in your heart. I request you not to sell it to a gatekeeper, expecting some grace or favour.’² In a follow-up to his decision to discontinue his journal, Rammohan sent an appeal to the Supreme Court against John Adam’s law, and succeeded in rallying contemporary personalities like Dwarkanath Tagore, Prasanna Kumar Tagore, Gauricharan Banerjee and others to sign his appeal. Quite predictably, little came of that appeal.

 

A few years later, a young Eurasian teacher of Calcutta’s Hindu College, H.L.V. Derozio inspired a group of his Bengali students to set up the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge in 1838, and publish a journal called The Bengal Spectator (1842-43), carrying articles both in English and Bengali. Initially started as a monthly, it was soon turned into a weekly because of its popularity among the Bengali readers.

The Bengal Spectator had a life-span of a year or so. But during that brief spell, it set a precedent for what was to be known later as the ‘alternative media’, or a parallel stream of journalism that ran counter to the newspapers controlled by the state or the privileged elite. In fact, this journal can be described as the ancestor of today’s little magazines that give voice to the popular protests (unreported in the mainstream press), and critique the state’s anti-people policies and actions.

The Bengal Spectator for the first time undertook a research into the plight of the poor peasants in Bengal under the prevailing colonial land tenure system (in its issue of July 1843). It was also the first to expose the oppression of Indian porters by British administrators in the Himalayan region. In its successive issues from May till September 1843, it reported on the agitation against such oppression that was launched by Radhanath Sikdar, the famous Bengali official of the Dehradun based Survey of India. The journal carried blow-by-blow accounts of the case that followed. It reported how Sikdar had to face retaliation from an English magistrate, A.M. Vansitart, whom he had confronted with hard evidence of his ill-treatment of Indian porters, and yet the court imposed a fine on Sikdar.³

 

The latter decades of the 19th century in Bengal saw the birth of a number of English periodicals run by Bengali editors – prominent among which was the newspaper Hindoo Patriot, edited by Harish Mukherjee, who through its columns carried out a relentless battle against the oppression of Bengali peasants by British indigo planters. The choice of English as the language of communication by these Bengali editors was dictated by a need to challenge the mainstream English newspapers like the Friend of India, John Bull, Englishman and Indian Observer among others, which were mainly run by British business magnates and were overtly racist against Indians in their reports and editorials. At the same time, Harish Mukherjee’s friend Shambhuchandra Mookerjee brought out a magazine called Mookerjee’s Magazine (1861; 1872-76).

Shambhuchandra’s Mookerjee’s Magazine can be described as setting the template for the periodicals of dissent that were to follow. A mix of belles-lettres, brief reports of, and critical commentaries on, contemporary events, essays on controversial issues, book reviews, etc., the magazine soon became popular among the English reading Bengali public. It drew in its list of contributors both Indian and English intellectuals like W.C. Bonnerjee (the first president of the Indian National Congress), the poet Madhusudan Dutt, the Reverent James Long (who agitated on behalf of the Indian poor), Charles Henry Tawney (a well known professor of philosophy in Calcutta’s Presidency College), and the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay among others.

Despite support from such a galaxy of contributors, and popularity among readers, Shambhuchandra could not sustain the magazine for long because of paucity of funds – a perennial problem that continues to plague today’s little magazines. The magazine folded up in 1876, but instead of frustrating its followers, inspired a new generation of young journalists in Bengal to bring out periodicals in both English and Bengali – a topic which I shall deal with in a while.

 

Parallel to this stream of English journals run by both English business houses and Bengali intellectuals, there was a current of Bengali journalism which began from the early decades of the 19th century. One such Bengali weekly was published by the Christian missionaries of Srirampur (near Calcutta) called Samachar Darpan in 1818, and another which came out in the same year from Calcutta called Bangal Gejeti, edited by Gangakishore Bhattacharya. This was soon to be followed in the next decades by papers like Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay’s Samachar Chandrika (1822) on the one hand, which propagated Hindu orthodox values and customs that the Bengali conservative society felt threatened by Christian missionaries and western education, and Rammohan Roy’s Sambad Kaumudi (1821) on the other, which openly challenged both Hindu orthodoxy and Christian missionary proselytization. Bengali journalism began to acquire an increasingly anti-colonial stance in the late 19th century, exemplified mainly by the appearance of a weekly called Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1868, started by Shishir Ghosh from Jessore in East Bengal; it shifted its headquarters to Calcutta in 1871.

 

The British government, threatened by the spread of Bengali printed tracts that reported atrocities by its officials and indigo planters, among other cases of oppression, sought to muffle the Bengali press. In 1878, it enacted the Vernacular Press Act which legalized censorship of journals published in vernacular languages (including Bengali). In a swift step to outwit the British administrators, Shishir Ghosh overnight turned his Bengali weekly into English, carrying the same name Amrita Bazar Patrika. From a little magazine, it turned into a daily English newspaper in 1891, and continued to play a major role in the national political movement till its demise in the 1980s. Amrita Bazar Patrika gradually got co-opted in the post-Independence period into the mainstream of the establishment, through the political connections that the descendants of its owners (Tusharkanti Ghosh and his son Tarunkanti) maintained with the ruling Congress party.

 

The fortunes of Bengali periodicals that started as little magazines (mainly carrying literary pieces and commentaries on social issues) during the 19th century and early 20th century, went through ups and downs. For instance, Bangadarshan (founded by the famous novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in 1872), gradually developed into a widely circulated established journal all over Bengal. But it collapsed after a few years. Rabindranath Tagore tried to revive it for a few years – ending in failure. The latest attempt to bring it out again is by my dear friend Satyajit Chaudhury, from Naihati in the North 24-Pargana district of West Bengal (from where Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay started the magazine).

The other Bengali periodical that began as a little magazine and established itself as a widely circulated journal in the 20th century was Prabashi, founded and edited by Ramananda Chattopadhyay. It encompassed the best of the tradition of cultural journalism – combining literary pieces like poetry and fiction, with critical commentaries on social and political issues. It attracted contributions from contemporary personalities like Rabindranath, and others. Simultaneously, Ramananda published the English periodical The Modern Review, which threw open its columns for voices of political dissent.

The disappearance of Prabashi (and contemporary popular small magazines like Bharati, and Basumati) from the later Bengali cultural scene can be traced to a number of factors – lack of financial resources, depletion in editorial staff, decline in the economic fortunes of the family owners, new tastes among the readers that were being shaped by the changing political and socio-economic scenario in mid-20th century Bengal.

 

But apart from these serious journals, there was a tradition of Bengali humorous little magazines that catered to the popular desire for gossip, scandal and light-hearted satire. Samvad Prabhakar brought out in 1831 by the poet Ishwar Gupta (1812-49) eminently served this purpose. Often accused by some modern commentators of obscene repartee, Samvad Prabhakar, however, introduced a new genre – the satirical journal. Along with exposing scandals in Bengali high society, it lampooned contemporary political leaders and social bigwigs – and even dared to make fun of Queen Victoria and her loyal Bengali subjects, as in the following lines addressed to her in one of his poems – ‘You are a generous mother,/And we are your tame cattle.’

Following that tradition, a young Bengali litterateur Prananath Dutta, from an old Calcutta aristocratic family, started a monthly called Basantak in 1873. Apart from exposing the corruption of both British and Bengali administrators of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation through sarcastic commentaries, it introduced cartoons in its pages – from which the readers could easily identify the administrators who were being targeted. Although Basantak folded up after sometime, satirical periodicals continued to come up in 20th century Bengal, with magazines like Shonibarer Chithi and Sachitra Bharat.

But the most famous among them all was Achal Patra (1948-52; 1961-72). This monthly brought out by Diptendra Kumar Sanyal struck a stunning note in the Bengali publishing industry by introducing itself in an advertisement in the following words: ‘The issues of this journal are meant for reading by adults, and burning for warming milk for children.’ Achal Patra faced persecution from the administration for its witticisms that invariably cut the then Congress government close to its bones. To give two examples – one of its cartoons depicted a Congress goon with a dagger at the throat of a man demanding: ‘Declare that you believe in non-violence!’ The other was a damning one-line comment – ‘The Congress was founded in 1885, and dumbfounded in 1947.’

 

Significantly enough, some of the Bengali ‘little magazines’ that emerged during the late 19th-early 20th century period reflected the interests and demands of the depressed sections of the Bengali community – like Bharat Sramajibi edited by Shashipada Bandyopadhya which reported the plight of industrial workers, and Sulabh Samachar run by the Brahmo Samaj reformer Keshab Sen who sought to attract the attention of the middle class educated Bengali readers to the fate of the deprived rural poor. Interestingly enough, a debate between orthodox and liberal values among Bengali Muslim journalists broke out towards the end of the 19th century, through the columns of their little magazines (that catered primarily to the Bengali Muslim readers) like Sudhakar (1889), Islam Pracharak (1891) and Mihir (1891).⁴

At the turn of the 20th century, a new genre of little magazines appeared in Bengali – revolutionary periodicals that openly propagated armed resistance against British rule, provoked by the British plan to divide Bengal in 1905. The two major organs were Jugantar, a weekly started by a band of young revolutionaries in March 1906, and Sandhya, a periodical which was edited by a rebel intellectual known as Brahma Bandhab Upadhyay. Quite predictably, the colonial administration clamped down upon them by enacting the Newspapers (incitement to offence) Act VII in 1908, as a result of which Jugantar had to close down. Similarly, Sandhya came under the scanner the same year, and Brahma Bandhab was arrested and died in police custody during the trial.

It was the exciting period following the end of the First World War, the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the resurgence of working class struggles in India, that was to give birth to a spurt of leftist small magazines in the next decades. The Bengali rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam started the journal Dhumketu in the 1920s, and he was imprisoned for his writings. Other similar leftist periodicals like Langal, Agrani, Arani appeared on the scene soon after. Some were circulated through underground channels. They disseminated reports of the socialist experiments in the Soviet Union, industrial strikes and peasants’ movements in India, and provided a forum for debates on socialism for Bengali progressive intellectuals. In the 1940s, Parichoy (which had its beginnings in the 1930s) emerged as a major literary magazine for Communist writers, followed by Sahityapatra, Kranti (more inclined to the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India) and Marxbadi (the latter more of a polemical nature for debates between cultural commissars of the then CPI and dissidents).

 

The tradition of dissident little magazines in Indian English journalism saw a revival in post-Independence India with the pioneering effort by the late Sachin Choudhury, when he founded the Economic Weekly in Bombay (1949) followed by Economic and Political Weekly in 1966. In 1959, Romesh Thapar brought out Seminar from Delhi, and a little later Nikhil Chakravartty began publishing Mainstream. In Calcutta, the poet Samar Sen started the weekly Now, which he left after a tiff with its owner Humayun Kabir, and in 1967 founded the now famous Frontier magazine – which despite many setbacks (including state persecution) has survived to remain a front-ranking radical journal.

 

In Bengali too, the tradition of the little magazine displayed a new face with the publication of Ekshan, which in the 1960s became a leading literary journal attracting the best of talents from all fields of culture, its cover regularly designed by Satyajit Ray. It was also during this decade – seething with the debates in the Communist movement, Che Guevara’s call for international solidarity with the Vietnamese liberation war, the civil rights agitation in the US, and more importantly, the outbreak of the Naxalite peasant movement in India – that a large number of little magazines appeared on the scene. Some were political organs of different Naxalite groups (like Chinta and Deshabrati, which were suppressed by the state), while others combined literature with political debates, like Aneek and Anushtup. These two magazines still enjoy a wide readership covering the left-liberal-secular spectrum. Joining them is the new born periodical Arek Rakam, recently brought out by the veteran economist and author Ashok Mitra.

While the old left literary journals like Parichoy and Baromash continue to hold sway over the intellectual readership, new voices are emerging from amidst Bengali dalit writers, and other oppressed communities, reflected in the quarterly Chetana Lahar published by the Democratic Action Forum of Dalits, Women and Minorities, as well as various small periodicals coming out from the suburbs of Bengal. Their voices and journals will no longer remain ‘little’.

 

Footnotes:

1. For an excellent, well researched account of the role of the printing press in the empowerment of the colonized people in 19th century Bengal, see Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006.

2. Sisir Kar, Bengali Books Proscribed Under the Raj. Samskriti, New Delhi, 2009, p. 11.

3. Gautam Chattopadhyay (ed.), Bengal: Early Nineteenth Century (Selected Documents). Research India Publications, Calcutta, 1978. Incidentaly, Radhanath Sikdar, while working for the Dehradun based Survey of India, was the first to estimate the exact height of the highest peak in the Himalayas. His scientific achievement however was usurped by the British colonial administration which named the peak Everest – after the name of his English boss George Everest.

4. Wakil Ahmed, Unish Shatoke Bangali Musalmaner Chinta-Chetanar Dhara (Vol. 2). Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1983.