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Your paper is now 100
Hindustan Times, born as the voice of India during the freedom struggle, remains true to that legacy as it celebrates its centenary
On December 4, 1924, a majestic stone arch overlooking the Arabian sea was thrown open, forever stamping its place on Bombay’s skyline.
That autumn, another institution was born.
On September 15, Mahatma Gandhi stood with a small clump of people outside a nondescript building in the now-erased Burn Bastion Road in central Delhi. On the 24 ft x 24 ft ground floor of its first office stood a Dawson and Payne hand-fed stop cylinder press and a Miehle press.
Seven days later, the first edition of a newspaper that was to become the nation’s chronicler and conscience keeper rolled out.
“Every word and sentence published in the paper should be weighed,” Gandhi said.
These words from the father of the nation became the guiding light for a newspaper, forged in the crucible of the freedom movement, whose founding editor even went to jail to defend his right to publish the truth. Once published from cramped quarters in the imperial capital with money pooled in by freedom fighters, that paper would go on to become among the most-read publications in the largest democracy on earth.
That paper, your paper, Hindustan Times, turns 100 on Sunday.
This journey spans a century and straddles an extraordinary range – from a small band of men and women braving brutal colonial censorship laws to stoke the embers of freedom in the hearts of Indians, to a globally respected voice chronicling the churn in the world’s most populous nation, and from a thin broadsheet of grainy images and long scrawls of black-and-white typesets to a slick modern enterprise offering a bouquet of news products across mediums, reaching 73 million people every month.
Over the years, this paper has acted as a mirror to India and offered its platform to great thinkers and leaders – Martin Luther King Jr, C Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad, Eleanor Roosevelt, MS Swaminathan and Sachin Tendulkar among them. It has blossomed from a circulation of merely 20 copies to becoming one of the most widely read papers in the country.
Yet, the lighthouse steering this voyage is the mission spelt out by Gandhi – of eliminating fear from the Indian mind, of committing to truth shorn of compromise, and of keeping the downtrodden at the core of every story. It is this mission that helped etch HT’s distinctive identity and become the paper that it is today.
Crusader for freedom
The first few steps in this journey were laboured. A maze of onerous censorship laws made publication of facts difficult in British India, and Gandhi’s non-cooperation push put the colonial masters on guard. Suppression of democratic protests, arbitrary brutality, closure of publications and harsh punishments were commonplace. Revenues were a trickle and the paper ran on money arranged by Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lala Lajpat Rai. Only when GD Birla stepped in as proprietor in 1927 – his principal objective being to build a vessel for the freedom movement – did things ease.
Yet, the paper’s commitment to shine a light on the dark underbelly of imperialism remained steadfast, as did its zeal to nurture the spirit of freedom in a nation that was only still waking up to its democratic potential.
Whether it was its 1942 special issue where freedom fighters argued forcefully for independence, its faithful reporting of the debates that rent the halls of the Constituent Assembly and eventually gave India its founding document, or its pledge to distil the erudite debates that shaped the Bombay Plan (co-authored by GD Birla) and eventually India’s economic policy, HT acted as a cauldron of ideas from where the contours of a robust democracy emerged.
“It is a year of unprecedented national upsurge,” HT wrote in 1946.
It was a treacherous time.
Between August 19 and December 31, 1942, HT stopped printing in protest against vicious restrictions on news of civil disobedience. During those months, M Subrahmanyan, the joint editor of HT, brought out a book titled, Why Cripps Failed. HT editor Devadas Gandhi, son of Mahatma Gandhi, wrote the foreword from prison where he was serving a two-month sentence after being found guilty of contempt on a report of judicial impropriety.
Eventually, HT triumphed in the case – its position as the foremost vehicle of the freedom movement forever cemented.
Shouldering a nation’s hopes
At the midnight hour of August 15, 1947, as India rang in its independence, HT too began its tryst with a new role – as a patriotic vessel documenting, but also guiding, the hesitant steps of a young nation.
Gandhi’s assassination on January 30, 1948 was an example. With his son at the helm, the staff compiled a rare photo book where one photograph showed Devadas holding up the bloodstained dhoti that Gandhi wore the day he died.
A decade later, it outdid that effort. “If we fail, on an international scale, to follow the Gandhian principle of non-violence, we may end up destroying ourselves through the misuse of our own instruments,” Martin Luther King Jr wrote in a commemorative edition in January 1958.
HT’s reporters fanned across the country for independent India’s inaugural polls in 1951-52, captured the tumult of the language protests through that decade, and the shifting sands of international politics that India tried to navigate with its non-alignment policy. It lauded the setting up of industry and institutions and held the political leadership to account. HT’s coverage of a famine in Bihar in 1966 led to an immediate government relief fund. It was in HT’s columns that MS Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution outlined his vision of a hunger-free India. “India must plan to develop itself into a nation providing those parts of the world which are not favourably endowed for crop growth with agricultural produce of the highest quality. Otherwise, the socio-economic problems may render the euphoria created by the Green Revolution short-lived,” he wrote in 1969.
As India was convulsed with violence in the 1970s and 80s, HT faced a fresh challenge and rose to it. An example of this came in the spring of 1984 when anti-Sikh riots rocked Delhi. In his autobiography, KK Birla recounted how Rajiv Gandhi requested HT to bring out a new, midday edition to help restore peace by scotching rumours. HT, which already had morning and evening editions, added a third despite large-scale absenteeism because of the violence.
Towards a modern India
Beginning in the 1980s, modernity washed over India in great waves, and HT was at the forefront of this revolution. A cocktail of covering cosmopolitan India, the glitz of cinema and fashion, and boots-on-the-ground reporting invigorated the newspaper. This was a society in churn, questioning the stranglehold of orthodoxy. HT became the vehicle of innovation for a country that had learnt to dream. It lauded our cricket heroes in 1983, backed the women’s movement that swept India, and was the foremost proponent of economic liberalisation. “India has reached a stage of development after decades of planning and industrialisation where it should welcome rather than fear foreign investment. Direct foreign investment will provide access to capital, technology, and markets,” it wrote the day India’s economy was unshackled in 1992.
As India moved online, so did the venerable institution. As small towns exploded with ideas and aspirations, so did HT – mushrooming in editions. As glamour and lifestyle caught the imagination of a young India, so did it inside the newsroom. In 2000, Michael Keegan, design director of The Washington Post, helped redesign HT to meet the shifting requirements of an evolving, liberalised market. From The Hindustan Times, the paper became Hindustan Times and the friendly HT.
At the same time, its original compact with the reader was only strengthened. Citizen complaints about civic issues published in the paper brought immediate succour, and unrelenting coverage of crimes of the powerful brought accountability. As terrorism reared its head, HT was swift in joining combat. “It is time to stop our endless debates, our waffling, our love of governing by committee and proposal, and create an ultra-modern, professional force to tackle ultra-modern, professional terrorism,” it wrote the day after Mumbai was rattled by terror in 2008.
HT’s vision of cheaper and freer telecom services became the reality within a decade. It gave voice to the millions who spilled on to the streets in 2012 demanding a better country for its women. It endorsed crucial reforms such as the Goods and Services Tax and infrastructural overhaul. It explained the myriad intricacies of a deeply complex nation to the world. It offered caution and advice on divisive questions. It fought against caste bias and communal violence. It promoted scientific and rational thinking when a global pandemic shut the world. And like it had done for a century, it continued to give wings to the aspirations of India, now a billion-plus strong, soberly chronicling the remarkable journey of a country that has flourished against all odds, fed and protected its citizens when none thought it possible, and built a legacy of freedom and democracy that the world now emulates.
HT and India – this century-old relationship now steps into a new era.
