Hot Off the Press

Abstract

Priti Joshi’s Empire News is at once an archival exposition and a careful analysis of the ephemera of empire: nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian newspapers. In the literature on the press in British India, Joshi identifies a critical gap between Charles Metcalfe’s repeal of censorship laws in 1835 and the Government of India’s 1878 Vernacular Press Act which imposed restrictions on the non-English-language press. Empire News steps into this crucial moment of flux, ‘between the conclusion of empire’s territorial expansion and the cementing of its imperial identity and politics’ (p. 22), to understand the ad hoc nature of the British empire as it played out in Anglo-Indian newspapers. Methodologically grounded in book history of the late twentieth century that brought textuality and materiality into the same intellectual circuit, this book traces the ways in which newspapers traversed and were obstructed in the colonial space. Empire News examines several Anglo-Indian newspapers, leaning heavily on the Mofussilite, with four additional newspapers – the Bengal Hurkaru, the Friend of India, the Englishman, and the Hindoo Patriot. It also draws on newspapers such as the Agra Messenger, Allen’s Indian Mail, and Atlas for India. Relying primarily on the Mofussilite, a newspaper whose very name – news from the ‘mofussil’ or the provinces as opposed to the major presidencies – implies a sense of marginality, Joshi makes a nuanced argument for the persistent but uneven borrowings and uneasy exchanges at work in the Anglo-Indian press.