Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021. xvi, 261 pp. (Figures.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 9781438484136.
There’s a lot to admire in this book by Priti Joshi. It delves deep into an underexplored area: the spread of newspapers in India in the mid-nineteenth century. Its diligent probing demonstrates the possibilities for difficult research that the digital era has opened up. And it illustrates how conscientious scholars, inspired and helped by interaction with colleagues, follow their noses to unexpected and fascinating places.
Joshi is a professor of English at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Her early research was in nineteenth-century English literature; the subtitle of her doctoral dissertation at Rutgers University was “discourses of the poor and middle-class identity, 1840–1860.” If this seems a long way from “an account of Anglo-Indian newspapers” (2), Charles Dickens is partly responsible.
The Dickens Universe (https://dickens.ucsc.edu/universe/) based at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has for 40 years run an annual week-long festival focused on the Victorian novel. Joshi has been a long-time attendee. Colleagues at the event inspired her to write a paper on the connections between Dickens’s heart-pounding novel, A Tale of Two Cities, and the great revolt of 1857 in India. The Tale was published in 1859, a year after the bloody suppression of the revolt.
While reading Dickens’s weekly magazine, Household Words, Joshi came across John Lang (1816–1864), an Australian lawyer, gadfly, and journalist, who flitted between India and Britain. Lang often posed as an Englishman, helped an Indian financier win a celebrated acquittal on charges of corruption, and attempted to help the dethroned Rani of Jhansi regain her principality. (The Rani died a patriot fighting the British in 1858.)
Lang started The Mofussilite, a provincial newspaper originally based in Meerut, 1,500 kilometres from Kolkata and Mumbai. Mofussil refers to the countryside—the rural areas, the boondocks.
Joshi’s encounter with Lang in Household Words led her from Victorian fiction to newspaper production in Victorian India. Having been attracted by The Mofussilite, Joshi discovered that not much was known about it or newspapers like it, in spite of fairly complete files still existing. She delved into the production of such newspapers and the ways in which they generated their content and paid their bills.
Each of Empire News’s four chapters could stand alone. Chapter 1 examines The Mofussilite to understand the market for such a newspaper on the distant borders of the East India Company’s rule, how the paper was produced and financed, and what motivated Lang and people like him to embark on such a venture. It’s a lively story with much to say about printing technology, communications, and the producers and consumers of newspapers.
Chapter 2 contrasts coverage in The Mofussilite of two events: the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and in India, the trial of Jyoti Prasad, the financier and contractor. The trial “became the sensation of the day where Anglo-Indian newspapers were concerned” (88). In Britain, coverage of the exhibition brought notoriety to the Koh-i-Noor diamond, recently seized by British armies in Punjab and put on display in London. For The Mofussilite and other newspapers in India, however, the trial of the wealthy contractor, accused of fraud, was of far greater interest.
Joshi’s book asks why the trial was treated more prominently in Indian newspapers than the Great Exhibition. The answer seems straightforward: the trial was local; it unfolded slowly and dramatically, and people were familiar with the protagonists. Courts and crime, especially close to home, have always been a newspaper staple. The exhibition, on the other hand, was static, and England was remote, a two-month journey away in the days before telegraph connections and the Suez Canal.
In chapter 3, Joshi focuses on the treatment of the 1857 revolt in five mofussil newspapers. Her admirable research identifies the owners and editors and explains the constraints under which they worked and the diversity of opinion they displayed (sometimes within the same paper). The government introduced a press law in June 1857 requiring all newspapers to be licenced. The rural newspapers in Joshi’s sample, two of which were Indian-owned, complained and criticized, but complied; none lost its license.
Joshi’s discussion of how writing and attitudes from “the colonies” appeared in the metropole forms the theme for chapter 4. Because of the prolonged revolt, Dickens’s Household Words was “scrambling for copy” about India (182), and John Lang, always in need of money, happened to be stranded in England. From 1857 to 1858, he wrote a series of travel essays which were later published in book form as Wanderings in India in 1859. Joshi points out that the essays steer clear of the revolt and that Lang’s travel details often don’t square with what is known from other sources. Lang, it seems, was ever ready to improve stories by adding masala.
Joshi at various points in the book seeks to relate the research to academic literature on print, print production, and studies of imperialism. Some readers may see these discussions as a distraction from the important story she has to tell: how and why printed information edged its way out of Calcutta and began to permeate the rest of India. Discussion of wider theoretical questions might perhaps have been more effectively brought together in a single essay. Such an essay, focusing explicitly on the mofussil newspapers and the light they shed on larger questions, might be a future possibility.
For students of print culture and India, Joshi’s enterprising research has produced a book that is rewarding, stimulating, and entertaining.
Robin Jeffrey
National University of Singapore, Singapore