The Hindu History Timeline: From Weekly to National Paper

In 1878, T. Muthuswamy Iyer was appointed to the bench of the Madras High Court, the first Indian to hold the post. The city’s English-language papers, run by and for the British community, attacked the appointment. A group of young men who met at the Triplicane Literary Society decided that Indians needed their own English paper to answer back.

There were six of them. G. Subramania Iyer, a schoolteacher from Tanjore district, and M. Veeraraghavachariar, a lecturer at Pachaiyappa’s College, were the teachers. T.T. Rangachariar, P.V. Rangachariar, D. Kesava Rao Pantulu and N. Subba Rao Pantulu were law students. The group has been remembered ever since as the Triplicane Six.

The first issue came out on 20 September 1878: a weekly of eight pages in demi-quarto size. The Hindu Group’s own history says the founders put in “a rupee and three-quarters” as capital, which is one rupee and twelve annas in the money of the time. The four law students left once they were called to the Bar, and the paper was carried by Subramania Iyer as editor and Veeraraghavachariar as manager.

The paper grew quickly. It became a tri-weekly in 1883, and on 3 December 1883 it moved to 100 Mount Road and set up its own printing works, the National Press. Owning the press meant the paper no longer depended on a job printer for deadlines, page count or print runs.

Politics gave it more to report. The Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885, and The Hindu welcomed it and covered it closely. On 1 April 1889, eleven years after launch, it became a daily, published in the evening. In October 1893 the page count rose to 12. On 15 September 1897 it printed a photograph of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had just been arrested for his writings. The group describes it as a stride at a time when photographs were rare in Indian newspapers.

The founders did not last together. The partnership between Subramania Iyer and Veeraraghavachariar was dissolved in October 1898. Iyer left to concentrate on his Tamil paper Swadesamitran, which he made a daily in 1899. Veeraraghavachariar became sole owner, and the paper’s energy, and its sales, began to fall.

By the early 1900s circulation was down to about 800 copies. On 1 April 1905, S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, a Kumbakonam-born lawyer who had been the paper’s legal adviser since 1895, bought The Hindu and its press from Veeraraghavachariar for ₹75,000. He became editor and proprietor. Two partners, C. Sankaran Nair and T. Rangachari, joined him and later withdrew.

He spent money on the paper. The page count rose to 18. In 1921 a rotary press able to print 30,000 copies of 24 pages was installed, and in 1923 a battery of composing machines followed. By then circulation had reached 17,000, about twenty times what he had bought. On 23 March 1923, Mahatma Gandhi visited the office to unveil Kasturi Ranga Iyengar’s portrait. Iyengar died later that year, and his son Kasturi Srinivasan and the family carried the paper on.

That purchase explains most of what followed. The Hindu has been owned and largely edited by one family ever since, through Kasturi & Sons, incorporated on 21 February 1940 and made a public limited company in 1959. The long continuity gave it the money to invest in presses and aircraft. It also produced public family disputes over who should edit it, in 2010–11 and again in 2013.

In its golden jubilee year, 1928, The Hindu brought in linotype machines and launched a Sunday tabloid, The Hindu Illustrated Weekly, at four annas. From 6 January 1929 it came out seven days a week. In 1933 it opened offices in London, Bombay and Calcutta, the first sign that it was thinking beyond the Madras Presidency.

On 24 November 1939 the paper moved into Kasturi Buildings on Mount Road, where it still is. It became, by its own account, the first Indian newspaper with a P&T teleprinter line in its own office, so reports no longer had to be carried by bicycle messenger from the Telegraph Office. (The group’s chronology says the move came “a week before the outbreak of World War II”, but the war had begun in September 1939. The date of 24 November is the one to trust.)

The war changed the paper’s clock. On 7 November 1940 The Hindu became a morning daily, so that late-evening despatches from the fronts could reach readers at breakfast. The same year it first used spot colour, for advertisements. Colour for editorial pages and pictures would not come until 6 November 1999, 59 years later. In April 1949 it became the first Indian paper with teleprinter links between its own offices, Madras–Bombay and Delhi–Bombay.

A newspaper printed in Madras was stale by the time a train got it to Coimbatore or Bangalore. The Hindu’s answer, over forty years, was to move the paper faster and then to stop moving paper at all.

It began sending copies by air on 11 April 1947. In 1962 it used a special Indian Airlines service to fly copies to three centres, and in 1963 it acquired an aircraft of its own for early-morning deliveries across a wider area. Few newspapers anywhere have run their own planes.

The bigger shift came on 27 July 1969. The Hindu started a Coimbatore edition printed from page images sent by facsimile from Madras over co-axial cable, which the group describes as a first in India. A Bangalore facsimile edition, its first outside Madras State, followed on 27 March 1970. Content was made in one place and printed close to the reader, the same idea behind every multi-city paper today. In 1986 The Hindu took it national with a Delhi edition whose pages were sent from Madras by satellite.

Recognition followed the reach. In 1965, The Times of London rated The Hindu one of the world’s ten best newspapers and called it “a national voice with a southern accent”. In 1968 it received the World Press Achievement Award.

During the Emergency (June 1975 to March 1977), pre-censorship applied to every Indian newspaper, The Hindu included. It is not remembered for open defiance in the way The Indian Express is. The episode still shaped the paper’s later claims about independence from government.

The Hindu’s best-known investigation came a decade later. The Bofors scandal broke in April 1987, when Swedish Radio alleged that bribes had been paid to win a big Indian contract for 155 mm howitzers. Over the next months The Hindu published scores of original documents on the secret payments into Swiss bank accounts. The reporting was led by Chitra Subramaniam, a part-time correspondent in Geneva, with N. Ram in Madras. It was a serious embarrassment for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose Congress lost the 1989 election, and Columbia Journalism School later featured the reporting in its centennial series of landmark stories.

Governments pushed back more than once. In 2003 the Tamil Nadu Assembly, under Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, moved against The Hindu’s editors for breach of privilege, and the Supreme Court stayed the action. In February 2019, The Hindu published reports by N. Ram, then chairman of its publishing group, defence ministry file notes on the Rafale fighter deal. The government told the Supreme Court the papers had been stolen and raised the Official Secrets Act. On 10 April 2019 the Court rejected the objection and allowed the documents to be considered, citing the freedom of the press.

The newspaper became a group gradually. Sport & Pastime launched on 10 September 1947. The Sportstar weekly followed on 15 July 1978, the paper’s centenary year, marked on 4 September 1978 with President N. Sanjiva Reddy. Frontline, a fortnightly, launched in November 1984, and The Hindu BusinessLine on 28 January 1994. On 7 December 1980 The Hindu moved from hot metal to computer-aided photocomposing, which the group calls a first for a mainline Indian paper.

The Hindu was one of the first Indian papers on the internet. Wikipedia and The Hindu’s own later reporting date thehindu.com to 1995. The group’s chronology instead says it started an online version in June 1996, as a weekly package of selected print stories. Either way, it was online in the mid-1990s. E-paper replicas followed on 10 September 2006, the same year it appointed K. Narayanan as Readers’ Editor.

The 2010s mixed expansion with a family fight. In July 2011, Siddharth Varadarajan became the first editor from outside the family. He resigned on 21 October 2013, when the owners decided to return editorial control to family members. The group launched its Tamil daily on 16 September 2013, now titled Hindu Tamil Thisai, and its first apps that year. The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, a group think tank, was inaugurated by President Pranab Mukherjee on 31 January 2013. A paywall came to all group titles in 2019, and Suresh Nambath became editor that year. On 15 August 2022, The Hindu began publishing Hindi translations of its editorials online, a first in its history.