The 9th September
2015, in Barath’s Sir class of ‘ History and Growth of Journalism ‘, we touched
on the advent of print in India. With the coming of print India became much
more modern or to put in other words, colonial modernity. Modernity came into
these main presidencies, namely Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. In Calcutta, it
lead to the modern English education whereas Bombay and Madras had a dissent
with the INC ( Indian National Congress ) which mainly comprise of North
Indians. In religion terms, Christianity was considered a much more modern
religion compared to the religion followed by the majority of Indians, i.e
Hinduism. In Calcutta presidency people were not much in favour of the
missionaries and also conversion, hence resulting in the coming up of a number
of reformers, one such reformer was Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Whereas in the other
two Presidencies, Bombay and Madras, the conversion of people from Hinduism to
Christianity was much more simpler due
to various reasons, the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese had already established
themselves in Bombay presidency resulting in the rise of numbers of Indian
converting to Christians. In the southern peninsula ( Madras presidency }, the
Hindu believers of Shiva and the Hindu believers of Vishnu had always fought
among themselves which led to many problems and taking the lives of each other,
this is also one of the main reason which lead to a majority of the people to
convert into Christianity. Certain kind of challenges by the whites also led to
the conversion of Christianity in Inida.
Many prominent personalities in
India during the time when print first came to India had different views on
Nationalism, for example, Tagore’s take on Nationalism was western modernity
whereas Gandhi’s opinions were against modernity. Gandhi mix religion with
politics, whereas the likes of Tagore, Nehru and Jinnah were Secular, but
talking about secularism, we have to keep in mind that secularism in India is
totally different from secularism in the rest of the world.
With the advancement of print in
India, the British had to bring some kind of control to administer the smooth
operation of print. The 1st print ordinance which comprises of
various Do’s and Dont’s and various rules and regulations was implemented, what
was implemented in London was also implemented in India. We can safely assume
the dissent between the 3 presidencies since all of them were vying for power,
led to the protest for the implementation of the 1st press
ordinance. The 2nd ordinance was implemented at the beginning of the
20th century which involves more clauses, this again led to various
problems for patriotic writers, these so called ‘ patriotic writers ‘ would
take refuge in Pondicherry which was not a colony of the British.
- Fabian Thangkhiew
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