The Untold Story of Hicky's Bengal Gazette: Scandal, Blackmail and Corruption in Old Calcutta

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The Untold Story of India's First Newspaper

Andrew Otis

Madras: Westland Publications Private Ltd, 2018.

The History of the print media is an exiting field of research thanks to the pioneering works of Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton. Like Elizabeth Eisenstein who emphasized the revolutionary character of print as a medium that brought about a fundamental transformation  in society, both the historians mentioned studied the impact of print by analyzing the social groups which patronized the mass produced chap books, almanacs, and other uses of print. Darnton set his eyes on the great project of the eighteenth century, the publication of Diderot's Encyclopedia. Andrew Otis has a more humble quarry. He has studied the Bengal Gazette, a Newspaper which was started by James Augustus Hicky in Calcutta in 1780. The book is an exploration of the trials and tribulations faced by Hicky as he took on the powerful Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, 

Printing began in India in the tiny coastal village of Tranquebar in 1714  when Prussian missionaries from Halle established a printing press as support to carry out their evangelical activities. The troubles that Hicky faced in Calcutta stemmed from one Protestant missionary from Tranquebar who set up shop in Cuddalore and then moved to Calcutta, Johann Zacharias Kiernander who was seconded to India by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge according to Hicky was more interested in making money and he accused him of systematically defrauding the Society. Not content with his broadsides against the missionary, Hicky carried out a campaign against Warren Hastings accusing him of corruption and using the Chief Justice of the Sadr Adalat Eliah Impey as his accomplice, in extortion, corruption in Military Contracts and plain thuggery that will perhaps shame even an Indian politician today. Hicky was particularly savage in his attacks on Hasting regarding his war against the Rohillas which was waged for the sole purpose of seizing the wealth of the "Begums of Oudh", the grand dames of Awadh. Hicky compared Warren Hastings with Clive, his predecessor and obviously even Warren Hastings was not amused.

Both Kiermnader and Hastings brought charges of libel against Hicky and in spite of the Jury finding Hicky not guilty of most of the serious charges, he was sent to prison, making him the first martyr for the Independence of the Press. The four years that he spent in Jail weakened his health, drained his resources and impoverished his family. in 1799 Hicky died on his way to China and was buried at sea, off the coast of Malacca.

The book is written in a highly readable style and there is no attempt at painting heroes and villains and this is welcome. Warren Hastings was recalled as the news of his egregious corruption reached the House of Commons and the main articles of impeachment wer drawn up by Edmund Burke on the basis of Hicky's scathing attacks: the illegal execution of Nanda Coomar, the Poolbandy Army Contracts, the Affair of the Begums of Awadh being the most noteworthy. After a trial that lasted nearly 8 long years, and 5 changes in the British Government, Wrren Hastings was acquitted.

As a contribution to the history of the East India Company, the book is not of any importance. However, the life of Hicky as he took on the powerful officers of the East India Company is of great importance. In a foreign land, Hicky tried in vain as it turned out in his lifetime, to establish the Freedom of the Press. He refused to divulge the names of his sources, a strategy he could have used to deflect the charges of libel on to his informants. And for this adherence to principle we need to remember Hicky. The records of his trial by sheer happenstance have survived and I am sure that it will attract greater attention. 

William Roxburgh and Indian Botany Plants Empire and Trade

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William Roxburgh

The Scottsh Enlightenment had a profound impact on India and historians have failed to study the impact of the intellectual movement that emerged as a consequence of the Act of Union, 1707. I have been studying a number of Scots who worked in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; Mark Wilks, Colin Mackenzie, and am now beginning a more detailed study of William Roxburgh. My work on Col Mark Wilks has been cited in the latest English Historical Review and have worked earlier on Colin Mackenzie, the first Surveyor General of India. I now hope to write a longer work on the Scottish Nation in India and its contribution to the understanding of India, it History, Literature and the Natural World. Obviously an Intllectual History of the sort we propose sits uncomfortably with the modern notions of post colonial study which negates the very idea that the past is accessible to human knowledge and is open to truthful and rational investigation. With these words let me move on to the study of William Roxburgh.

Government House Madras, Chennai

Perhaps the most honoured botanist of his day and was second only to Sir Joseph Banks. William Roxburgh was educated at the University of Edinburgh which was the instirutional centre of the Scottish Enlightenment' Born in 1751 Roxburgh died in 1815 and came from a family that had close ties with Henry Dundas who was the Chairman of the Board of Control of the East India Company and an influential politician in Georgian England. roxburgh stdied under John Hope who initiated the young William into the world of botanical study. Botany was still in its infancy, though the Royal Gardens of Kensington and Kew had been established it was under Sir Joseph Banks that these botanical gardens became centers of an ever widening web of botanical exchange, ropagation of plants and collection of seeds for further reseach and study. Indeed the very establishment of the Botanical Garden at Kew was itself a Scottish foundation as it owed its origin to John Stuart, the Earl of Bute in the 1760s. With the intervention of hs patrons in the Company establihsment, William Roxburgh got a position as Assistant Surgeon in the Madras Headquarters of the East India Company. Arriving in Madras after rounding the Cape of Good Hope in May 1776. The job of the Assistant Surgeo seems to have been extremely light as roxburgh found the time to indulge his passion for collecting botanical specimens.

Botanical nvestigation was rather chaotic in the early eighteenth century, a situation that was destined to change due to the theoretical and empirical work of the great Swedish naturalist Charles Linnaeus. The plants were studied on the bais of their external charecteristics rather than the inherent sexual and reproductive functions which were performed in numerous ways by plants. Linneaus introduced the taxonomic method by which the charecteristic features of plants were studied according to its Taxonomic feature, generic features and thereby the species was identified. The morphology of plants and their parts were studied in a scientific manner and Herberia were manitained for ready reference.

In Madras now renamed Chennai, Roxburgh mt Dr Koenig a pupil of Dr Charles Linneaus. Koenig was associated with the Danish settlemnt of Tranquebar, a notorious slaving station on the coromandel coast run by the Dutch East India Company and of course Protestant missionaries like Ziegenbang did not find anything offensive ethically or morally in the odious trae of indegenous people as slaves. Both Roxburgh and Koenig went of Plant collection expeditions all over the Coromandel region collecting specimens. The East India Company was particularly interested i economically beneficial plants like Teak, Indigo and of course Spices. We do not know what happened to this early collection. When Koenig died he left his papes to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society. In 1781 Roxburgh was transferred to Samalkota, near the estuary of the River Godavari and the wild life reserve Forest of Coringa and it was here that a mounumental tragedy struck.

( to be continued in Part II)

TRANQUEBAR: NEW STUDIES AND PERSPECTIVES

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Trnaquebar--Whose History? Transnational Cultural Heritage in a Former Danish Trading
Colony in South India

Helle Jorgensen
New Delhi, Orient Black Swan, 2014

Cultural Encounters in India: The Local Co-workers of the Tranquebar Mission 18th and 19th Centuries 

Heike Liebau
New Delhi, Social Science Press 2014

The recent changes in historiographical fashion has left its mark on these two books. The post colonial obsession with identity, ideology and self-refashioning has contributed to the gradual erasure of colonialism as a violent and at times racist attack on the cultures of non- White peoples. Post colonial nostalgia and the distance from the colonial past has made some of the more comfortable Europeans look back at the past of their societies with a certain degree of pride and conscious self awareness. Tranquebar, a small trading post of the Danish East India Company on the East Coast of India, better known as the Coromandel coast, has had a checkered  past; after the Napoleonic wars, the Danes essentially lost control over the trading post leaving a murky legacy of Christian evangelism, Slaving, Textile Trade and the most celebrated of all, the Printing Press. Print culture started in Traquebar and though there is some evidence to suggest that Serampore near Calcutta may have had an earlier start, the legacy of Tranquebar lives on both in popular memory and in scholarly texts.

In the first book, Helle Jorgensen looks at the interaction between the local population of Tranquebar and foreign tourists from Northern Europe who flood the place. Tranquebar has been the subject of a major experiment in restoration and conservation of the colonial buildings and tourists from Europe perceive a connect between their own subjective selves and the remote outpost of European settlement in Asia. Remarkably, the author seems to suggest that the presence of the old style European colonial buildings in the settlement are a boon to the local people whose economy revolves around catering to those tourists.  Partly an ethnographic study and partly an extended reflection on the meaning and significance of heritage and its conservation, this book completely ignores the Indian perspective. While India no longer frets and fumes at European colonialism as a new generation which has come of age in the post Independence period does not regard the eighteenth and nineteenth century past with great trepidation. However, it is utterly condescending to write as if the local context does not matter at all. Worse, in the name of heritage and tourism, the past cannot be whitewashed and made palatable.

The second book is a more substantial contribution and it explores the relationship between the Lutheran Mission and its leadership in Tranquebar and the Tamil population it apparently ministered. Bartholmaus Ziegenbalg, the Protestant missionary is the subject of an excellent biography by B Singh. He is rightly remembered in India as the man who introduced Print and thereby brought about a revolution in the social and cultural history of India. He studies Tamil and within a couple of years of his stay was able to write psalms  and catechisms or prayer books in simple Tamil for the people living in the hinterland of Tranquebar. His papers preserved at Halle  give us a picture of a man driven by a deep and abiding faith in religion who did not forget his European identity throughout his stay in India. While the contemporary Jesuits went native and adopted Indian dress and customs, Ziegenbalg was always attired in the frock coat and top hat.  He established a school where children were taught and even a factory for making paper. The site of this factory is unfortunately lost. He eventually dies in Tranquebar and is buried in the cemetry of the Zion Church which he built and consecrated.  The book gives details of the relationship with other Christian missions in the region such as SPCK. The issue of caste and identity cannot be wished away as many of the early converts came from the Vellala peasant background and eventually the other castes joined the Church raising issues which the Christian Church both Catholic and Protestant have not resolved until this day.

Both these books are significant contributions to the study of the early colonial past of Southern India.

Tranquebar

The Fort facing the Coromandel Coast

Chinese Porcelain from Tranquebar

Danish Historical Documents

 The Zion Church built by Ziegenbalg

The Restored mansion of the Governor