Politics, Public Issues and the Promotion of Urdu Literature: Avadh ...

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ULRIKE STARK • 67forty years, during which it made a distinct impact on the emerging Urdupublic sphere. Outlining the growth, contents and policy of AA, it willlook at both economic and human factors in the making of an outstandingpopular success in nineteenth-century Urdu journalism. 2Munshi Naval Kishore (1836–95) is one of several eminent Hindupublicists who figure prominently in the history of nineteenth-centuryUrdu journalism. Following his higher education at Agra College, hewent to Lahore to receive his training as a printer and journalist at thefamous Kåh-e N∑r Press (est. 1849) of Munshi Harsukh R≥’® (1816–90),the doyen of Urdu journalism in the Punjab. 3 At the beginning of 1856Naval Kishore returned to Agra to establish his own Urdu weekly, Safµr-e¥gra. 4 His plans, however, were thwarted by political events. In September1857 we find him back in Lahore where he assumed the editorship ofKåh-e N∑r and successfully saw the paper through the uprising of 1857.His loyalty towards the British at the time would be amply rewardedwhen he moved on to Lucknow in 1858—he was the first Indian to begranted a license to operate a printing press in the city after the “Mutiny.”Established under the name of Maπba‘-e Avad^ Akhb≥r in 1858, the NavalKishore Press (hereafter NKP) rose to great fame in the history of commercialand scholarly publishing in India with an unparalleled range ofpublications in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu.Compared to other North Indian urban centers, Urdu journalismstarted late in Lucknow. This was due to the particular circumstance that,following a temporary closure of all printing presses in the city by V≥jid‘Alµ Sh≥h in 1849, conditions of strict censorship prevailed in Avadh. Nosooner had the nav≥bµ come to an end through the British annexation ofAvadh in 1856 than at least seven Urdu weeklies were launched in2I am grateful to Christina Oesterheld for patiently assisting me in readingthrough the files of AA.3Munshi Harsukh R≥’®, a Kayastha from Sikandarabad, had earlier served aseditor to the J≥m-e Jamsh®d , an Urdu journal of Meerut. At the instigation of theBritish he moved to Lahore in 1849 where, with the support of the PunjabAdministration Board, he established his own press and launched the first Urdunewspaper in the Punjab. With a circulation of nearly 350 copies (1854) the Kåh-eN∑r remained for a long time the most influential Urdu paper in the province.Harsukh R≥’® subsequently rose to a position of prominence in Lahore society.4Safµr-e ¥gra, a weekly comprising twelve pages, was launched on 19 January1856. N≥dir ‘Alµ Kh≥n, Hindust≥nµ Pr®s, 1556–1900 (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh UrduAkademi, 1990), p. 286.
68 • THE ANNUAL OF URDU STUDIESLucknow within a year’s time. 5 The 1857 uprising, however, brought thecity’s thriving print and publishing industry to a complete standstill. Thevacuum Naval Kishore encountered on his arrival in Lucknow in early1858 and the initial absence of local competition in the newspaper tradecertainly did much to enhance the early growth of AA. The paper’slasting and extraordinary success, however, must be attributed to anumber of other factors.The first factor was British patronage in the form of subscriptionsand the overall support extended to the NKP. From the outset NavalKishore entered into an intense business collaboration with the colonialadministration, printing all kinds of government forms and registers. Henot only held a monopoly in textbook printing in Avadh, but subsequentlymanaged to get the lion’s share of official patronage in the amalgamatedNorth-Western Provinces and Avadh: by 1882 over 75 percent ofBritish printing commissions went to his press, the remainder beingshared by fifteen presses. 6 A large proportion of the profits made fromgovernment-job work was reinvested in Oriental book publishing andsome went into sustaining AA. The government, in its turn, patronizedthe paper by subscribing to a number of copies which were distributed tothe schools and colleges in the provinces. If official statistics are a measureto go by, colonial patronage of the paper was not quite as substantial assome later voices made it out to be: With 50 out of 820 copies in 1877, 94out of 732 copies in 1886, and 94 out of 521 copies in 1895, governmentsubscriptions hardly ever exceeded twenty percent of the paper’s totalcirculation. 75 The most important was the ∫ilism-e Lak^na’∑, edited by MaulvµMu√ammad Ya‘q∑b of the Firangi Mahal family. Details in Nadir Ali Khan, AHistory of Urdu Journalism (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1991), pp. 294–355.6 Proceedings of the Government NWP & Oudh, General Dept., May 1886, p.16.7 The circulation of AA during the nineteenth century never exceeded 850copies. It has to be borne in mind, however, that circulation figures at no timereflect actual readership. Newspapers like AA were widely recirculated and frequentlyread out to groups of non-literate people in both private homes andpublic arenas. See my paper “Lucknows Jalsa-i Tahzib: Urbane Elite, organisierteHandlungskompetenz und frühe ‘associational culture’ in Britisch-Indien,” inHandeln und Verhandeln. Kolonialismus, Transkulturelle Prozesse und Handlungskompetenz,ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné (Muenster: LIT, 2002), pp. 69–70; and also
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