Imprimatur as Adversary: Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780–1823

Abstract

AbstractExamining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public legitimacy, they feared that public critique would destabilize the very sovereign authority that they sought to establish. Concerned with appearing arbitrary, officials developed strategies through which they could demand obedience without necessarily predicating it on censorship. Journalists derived much of their negotiating power from the early colonial state's vulnerability to public scrutiny, but they also knew that the state possessed extensive control over their livelihood. Cognizant of the power and constraints of colonial governmentality at this juncture, they produced their own mechanisms of permissible intransigence. This uneasy equilibrium generated the questions explored in this article: What rights of comment and critique practically accrued to newspapers? What was the legal authority of executive regulations censoring newspapers and how far were these enforceable? Why, in practice, did punishments remain strikingly similar across periods with and without formal censorship? The cases between 1780 and 1823 not only reveal the historical negotiations that structured this foundational—though somewhat marginalized—period of India's press history, but also explain the strategic shifts that followed as, in 1823, the fulcrum of crime and punishment turned away from press censorship and towards press licensing.