India's First Newspaper

Five years before The Times and over seventy years before The New York Times, a four-page broadsheet appeared in Calcutta to become the first newspaper in India and all of Asia. This newspaper, started by an Irish expatriate on Indian soil under British patronage, soon became a lighthouse of resistance and free speech when the Sepoy Mutiny was still almost a century away. The story of India's first newspaper is the story of oppression, audacity, conspiracy, and determination. This story has happy moments, but it does not have a happy ending. Most importantly, it has lessons—both political and editorial.