Abstract
The journalistic sphere provides fertile ground to explore one of the key facets of the colonial encounter: how the ideas, ideology and idealism of the British model of journalism (such as it was then) travelled abroad as the empire spread across the globe. It presents a unique case study of how the model was discursively introduced, received, adopted and constructively adapted by local elites in various colonies. In almost every colony, journalism went on to emerge as a powerful weapon against the colonizers; frontline leaders in freedom struggles were often prolific writers and editors, who used the technology of print to counter colonial narratives effectively. The growing trend of de-westernizing journalism studies, particularly journalism history, calls for a wider, pan-empire research on the trajectories of introduction, adoption and adaptation of the British model, tracing their similarities and differences, and profiling leading actors in the march of journalism in the colonies.
The foremost among such colonies was India, the ‘jewel in the crown’, where print journalism began in 1780 with James Augustus Hicky’s Hicky’s Bengal Gazette or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser. By early 19th century, India had the first fully formed print culture outside Europe and North America, when editors and writers were already lecturing the British on how to run their empire. Editors who played a leading role in public life in colonial Calcutta such as Rammohan Roy and Bhabhani Charan Bandopadhyay were among the first to challenge and present indigenous counter-narratives to the British, reflecting early impulses of Indian nationalism. They were followed by many others, who played a leading role in the freedom struggle, until independence in 1947. One of them is the subject of this book: Ramananda Chatterjee (1865–1943), who launched three journals from Calcutta – The Modern Review, Prabasi and Vishal Bharat.
This work began 22 years ago when the author received a fellowship to research Chatterjee. Its main contribution is placing Chatterjee and his work in the early 20th-century context of growing Indian nationalism, of violence and powerful use of non-violence, of press censorship and defiant journalism. According to the author, Chatterjee’s work showed that he ‘went beyond the traditional definition of the nation as an entity with fixed boundaries to anticipate Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner’ (p. 16). Putting forth Indian perspectives on key issues through his journals in the colonial cauldron of early 20th century was no easy task. As the author states, What makes Ramananda and his journals different from other newspapers and journals of the time is that they not only were strictly independent but addressed the issue of nationalism from all possible angles. He addressed three concentric publics through the use of three journals in three languages. And finally, the nationalism advocated by him was not narrow but rather tended towards internationalism. (p. 11)
Chatterjee is best known as the founder of the influential journal of opinion, The Modern Review, launched in 1907. Britons living in India, UK-based writers interested in colonial India and Indians all wrote for it, arguing about issues in areas such as art, political theory, economics, archaeology and history. It had a similar impact in India as its better known counterparts elsewhere had (and have), such as Les Temps Modernes in France, The Nation in the United States, and the New Statesman and The Spectator in the United Kingdom. The book examines the 37 years Chatterjee edited the journal, when besides the Indian elite, the colonizers also read it closely to understand Indian nationalist opinion. His editorials were scholarly, while contributors from a wide intellectual spectrum provided a range of opinions; they included Rabindranath Tagore, Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, J C Bose, Verrier Elwin, Gandhi, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Zhu Deh, the co-founder of the Chinese Red Army. Before The Modern Review (in English), he founded Prabasi (in Bengali) in 1901 and later Vishal Bharat (in Hindi) in 1927.
Billed as a profile of 20th-century India through the life of Chatterjee – described by the author as a ‘journalist, influencer, nationalist’ – the book seeks to highlight the role of the media in the making of the idea of India. It is divided into eight chapters. Besides a helpful overview in the introduction, chapters include the following: ‘Ramananda Chatterjee and the nation’; ‘Ramananda: his journals’; ‘Ramananda and the left’; ‘The scientific spirit’; ‘The nation and its constitution’; ‘Ramananda’s contemporary relevance’. The chapter ‘Some helpers from abroad’ looks at three individuals who supported the idea of self-rule and freedom: the Anglican priest Charles Feer Andrews, the US Unitarian Jabez T Sunderland and the American journalist Agnes Smedley. The author states that Chatterjee was sceptical of the ‘tall emotional claims’ of the success of communism and socialism in the Soviet Union made by its leaders, but took an objective view of the left and sought to adopt its positive features. Adding to Chatterjee’s enigma is his association with the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha party, one of the early fundamentalist organizations, and recent attempts have been to claim him as one of the figures of Indian conservatism at a time when the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party is in power. The author points out that Chatterjee insisted that the Hindu Mahasabha was a fundamentalist party, and that India cannot be a nation only of and for the Hindus.
Biographies of journalists at the forefront of public events such as Chatterjee who played seminal roles in the pre-independence period in former colonies of the British empire can enrich journalism studies – more importantly, contribute much to the growing discourse of ‘connected histories’ in mainstream studies of history.