Saturday, 29 January 1780.
It had been 90 years since the city of Calcutta was established and his was the first. Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, India’s first newspaper, was a sensation.
People were happy to finally have a newspaper. Printed on Saturdays, each issue was four pages and cost Re 1, similar in price to newspapers in England at the time. Hicky dedicated the first two or three pages to news and opinion letters, with the remainder being for advertisements. He tried to cover everything that might be important to Calcutta, devoting many sections to politics, world news, and events in India. He encouraged people to write him letters and poems.
How did James Augustus Hicky establish the first newspaper in India? The answer to this question can be found in Andrew Otis’s book titled The Untold Story of India’s First Newspaper.
The book is as much a story of Hicky as that of India’s first newspaper. Hicky worked on a number of jobs. While young, he moved to London to apprentice with William Faden, a Scottish printer. However, Hicky never took his freedom from the printers’ guild, and instead secured a clerkship with an English lawyer. At some point he quit his career in law, and, after a brief attempt practicing as a surgeon in London, he boarded an East Indiaman as a surgeon’s mate bound for Calcutta in 1772.
Life in Calcutta did not lack any adventures either. Hicky jumped ship on 1 February 1773, abandoning his position as surgeon’s mate, and stepped onto the streets of Calcutta. Soon, he discovered that the many mansions belied Calcutta’s seedier side. Opium dens, whore houses, and taverns in dingy lanes hosted a shadowy multi-ethnic underground. Eventually he settled in a place where no respectable European lived. And this is where he captured the essence of the city, which ultimately led to the founding of India’s first newspaper.
Kalampedia 