Amrita Bazar Patrika: The English Switch History

The first issue of Amrita Bazar Patrika came out on 20 February 1868 in a village in Jessore district, then part of the Bengal Presidency and now in Bangladesh. Its founders were two brothers, Sisir Kumar Ghose (1840–1911) and Motilal Ghose (died 1922), sons of a merchant family from Palua-Magura. The family had built a bazaar in the village and named it after the brothers’ mother, Amritamoyee. The village became Amrita Bazar, and the paper took its name from the village.

It was a Bengali weekly, printed, according to most accounts, on a small wooden press. Its early subjects were local: the treatment of peasants by indigo planters, the conduct of district officials, and rural grievances that Calcutta’s big papers ignored. It made enemies quickly. Within months of launch, a British sub-divisional officer sued the editor for criminal defamation. The court acquitted him.

Sisir Kumar Ghose was more than an editor. He had been in the first batch of students to pass Calcutta University’s entrance examination in 1857, founded the India League in 1875 to stir national feeling, and later wrote widely on Vaishnava devotion, including Lord Gauranga (1897).

In 1871 an epidemic swept the Jessore countryside. The Ministry of Culture’s district repository and most histories describe it as malaria (one widely copied account says plague, which did not reach Bengal until the 1890s). The Ghose brothers moved the press to Calcutta, the capital of British India. The Ministry’s record gives the first issue from the new Calcutta press as 21 December 1871.

In Calcutta the paper began to print in both Bengali and English. That mattered for two reasons. Calcutta was where the Viceroy’s council, the High Court and the English-owned press all sat, so English columns let the Patrika argue with officials in their own language. And a bilingual paper was already half-way to the decision it would be forced to make seven years later. A Bengal administration report of 1872 noted that the Patrika was “believed by some to be more extensively read than others”.

On 14 March 1878, the Viceroy’s council under Lord Lytton passed the Vernacular Press Act, unanimously. It applied to “publications in Oriental languages” across British India except the south. Under it, a district magistrate could require a printer or publisher to sign a bond promising not to publish material likely to excite “disaffection” against the government, and could demand a security deposit that would be forfeited if the paper broke the bond. The magistrate’s decision was final: no appeal to a court. Critics called it the “Gagging Act”.

English-language newspapers were not covered. The law assumed that the danger lay in papers the mass of Indians could read, not in papers aimed at officials and the educated elite. Proceedings were brought against Bengali papers such as Som Prakash, Bharat Mihir and Dacca Prakash.

The Patrika, which was widely believed to be the Act’s main target, did not wait to be served. It dropped its Bengali section. On 21 March 1878, exactly one week after the Act, it appeared as an English weekly. The language had changed; the tone had not. Because it was now an English paper, the Act simply did not apply to it.

The popular version says the switch happened “overnight”. The record supports “within a week”, which on a weekly paper means the very next issue. Either way, it was one of the fastest and most effective legal workarounds in the history of the Indian press.

Lytton left India in 1880. His successor, Lord Ripon, a Liberal appointee, reviewed the Act, and his government withdrew it in 1881. Bengali papers were once again under the ordinary law.

The Patrika did not go back. By then it had three years of English readers, English advertisers and an English reputation. The front page below, from 8 September 1881, shows what the switch had produced: The Amrita Bazar Patrika, “Published Every Thursday”, an English weekly from Calcutta, in its fourth volume of the new series. The workaround had become the paper’s identity.

The most famous story about the Patrika belongs to the time of Viceroy Lord Lansdowne (1888–1894). As the paper’s own tradition tells it, someone connected to the Patrika recovered a torn-up letter from the Viceroy’s office wastepaper, pieced it together, and found plans concerning the future of Kashmir and its ruler, Maharaja Pratap Singh, who had been stripped of his powers in 1889. The Patrika published it. The account says the Maharaja used the disclosure to lobby in London.

The details vary between versions and cannot all be checked. But the story is regularly linked to the Indian Official Secrets Act of 1889, which made it an offence to publish official documents obtained without authority. If the link is right, one newspaper’s scoop helped create a secrecy law that India still lives with in its 1923 form.

In 1891 the Patrika became a daily. (A British Library catalogue gives 1895 for its conversion to an English daily; 1891 is the date most histories use.) The paper remained openly nationalist. In 1897 Sisir and Motilal raised money for the defence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak in his sedition trial. During the 1905 Partition of Bengal, its office served as a meeting point for opponents of the plan, and it described Lord Curzon as “young and a little foppish, and without previous training but invested with unlimited powers”. When the Press Act of 1910 brought security deposits back, the government demanded Rs 5,000 from the Patrika.

Sisir Kumar Ghose died on 10 January 1911. Motilal Ghose ran the paper until his death in 1922.

In 1931, Tushar Kanti Ghosh (1898–1994), Sisir’s son, became editor. He would hold the job for about sixty years, almost to the paper’s last issue, and was later called “the grand old man of Indian journalism”.

His first great test came in 1935. On 23 March 1935 the Patrika published material that questioned the conduct of British judges. The Calcutta High Court held it in contempt and sentenced Tushar Kanti Ghosh, as editor, to three months in prison and Tarit Kanti Biswas, printer and publisher, to one month. On 2 May 1935, Chief Justice Derbyshire and Justice Costello refused them a certificate to appeal to the Privy Council, holding that contempt was not part of the court’s “original criminal jurisdiction”.

In 1937 the group launched Jugantar, a Bengali daily. Sixty years after the 1878 switch, the family was back in Bengali, now with two titles: the English Patrika for officials, lawyers and the national audience, and Jugantar for the Bengali mass readership. By 1945, the Patrika was counted as India’s seventh-largest newspaper, with more than 30,000 subscribers.

In August 1946, the Great Calcutta Killings left thousands dead in days of communal violence. The Patrika responded with silence: it left its editorial columns blank for three days. (Some later accounts say it was the whole front page; the paper’s Wikipedia history says the editorial columns.) It was a protest made with white space, a technique The Indian Express would use against censorship during the Emergency blank editorial of 1975.

On Independence, the Patrika’s editorial caught the mood of a divided Bengal: “It is dawn, cloudy though it is. Presently sunshine will break.”

After 1947 the Patrika no longer had a colonial government to oppose, and its tone changed. Tushar Kanti Ghosh became a figure of the press establishment: he led the International Press Institute and the Commonwealth Press Union, and received the Padma Bhushan in 1964.

The Emergency of 1975–77 is where the Patrika’s story departs from the heroic version. Many accounts put every old nationalist paper on the side of press freedom. The Patrika was not one of the resisters. Journalist Manojit Mitra, quoted by ThePrint, described it in that period as “an out-and-out Congress newspaper” whose Emergency coverage was tepid. The paper that had outwitted a Viceroy’s press law in 1878 did not take on its own government’s censorship a century later.

By the mid-1980s the group had moved from its old home at Ananda Chatterjee Lane to a larger building on Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road in central Calcutta. Contemporary reporting by India Today linked this period to a sharp fall in fortunes. According to that reporting and later accounts, monthly advertising revenue fell from about Rs 1 crore to about Rs 20 lakh, and competitors such as The Telegraph (1982) were taking readers and advertisers.

Salaries went unpaid. Debts reached about Rs 21 crore. In February 1991 the Patrika stopped publishing, and Jugantar with it. India Today’s July 1991 headline summed it up: debts had killed a 123-year-old English daily. The end was grim for its staff; ThePrint records that a proofreader, Chandi Ghosh, hanged himself in the office. Tushar Kanti Ghosh died on 29 August 1994, aged 95.

The symmetry is hard to miss. In 1878, the paper survived a government’s attack on its language by changing language. In 1991 the threat was debt, and there was no loophole.

The paper’s back files survived. The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta holds a run of the Patrika and Jugantar, and the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (project EAP262) digitised it, with support that included the papers’ own former employees’ association. Hundreds of issues from the 1880s and 1890s are now public on Wikimedia Commons, including the 1881 weekly shown above and daily issues from 1897 to 1900. The German South Asia library service FID4SA also hosts the early run. Anyone can now read the English Patrika of the 1880s page by page, rather than rely on the stories told about it.