About The Englishman

The Englishman

The Englishman was an English-language daily newspaper published in Calcutta, now Kolkata, in West Bengal, with origins dating to 1821. For more than a century it was regarded as the voice of the city's European business community and, in the words of a later history of the British press in India, it became the exponent of European feeling in India. It was also the principal commercial rival of The Statesman, the other great English daily of Calcutta, until it was absorbed into that paper in the interwar period. The date of the absorption is itself disputed: The Statesman's own published history gives 1934, while the account of The Statesman carried in standard references dates the absorption to 1927. Both dates are set out in this profile, because the record does not allow the disagreement to be settled from the sources available.

Origins and the John Bull connection

Reference accounts of The Statesman trace The Englishman back to a founding in 1821, the same year that saw a flowering of new Calcutta titles in Bengali, Persian and English. The clearest documented episode in its early reinvention came in 1833, when the journalist Joachim Hayward Stocqueler, newly returned to India and backed by the Bengali entrepreneur Dwarkanath Tagore, purchased the Calcutta newspaper John Bull and changed its name to The Englishman. As editor, Stocqueler gave the paper a liberal focus, though his editorship at times annoyed local residents. The episode is revealing about the early Calcutta press: titles were bought, sold and renamed as commercial properties, and an Indian entrepreneur of Tagore's standing could be the financial backer behind an Englishman's newspaper. Stocqueler's purchase connected the paper to one of the most colourful press careers of the period.

Stocqueler's editorship and departure

Stocqueler, who had first sailed for Calcutta around 1821, combined editorship of The Englishman, which some sources style the Calcutta Englishman, with a string of other ventures, including the Bengal Sporting Magazine, which ran from 1833 to 1845, and the East India United Services Journal. He was credited with suggesting the establishment of the Calcutta Public Library in 1836, moved in the theatrical world of Chowringhee, and observed the First Anglo-Afghan War as a journalist. His finances, however, collapsed: on his return to Calcutta he fell into debt and spent time in the Debtors' Prison from October 1840 until February 1841. He sold The Englishman, which continued successfully under others, and left India in 1843 aboard the new P and O paddle steamer Hindostan. The paper's survival of its editor's ruin was an early sign of the institutional strength it would show for the rest of the century.

Voice of the European business community

Across the nineteenth century The Englishman consolidated its identity as the paper of Calcutta's European commercial world. The batch of characterisations preserved in press histories is consistent: it spoke for merchants, planters, officials and the European business community of the city, and it carried corresponding influence with government. That position placed it naturally in competition with other English titles, and above all with The Statesman after that paper's founding in 1875. Where The Statesman, under Robert Knight and his successors, cultivated a reputation for independent and often India-sympathetic commentary, The Englishman was understood to represent European interests more directly. The rivalry between the two papers structured English-language journalism in Calcutta for two generations, and it is the essential context for the paper's eventual absorption by its competitor.

The Saunders era and editorial influence

The paper's most influential period is associated with Saunders, the proprietor-editorial force behind The Englishman in the later nineteenth century. A history of the British press in India credits him with making war correspondence a special feature of the paper and with discovering talent that shaped imperial journalism, including the war correspondent Lionel James and E. J. Buck, who controlled the press arrangements at Simla. From 1883 to 1897 Andrew Macdonald acted as editor of The Englishman, but Saunders continued to direct his writing. The same history stresses the paper's enormous influence upon the Government, an influence exercised through leaders written or inspired by Saunders. Few anecdotes illustrate that influence better than the episode of the Victoria Memorial, recounted in the section that follows.

The Englishman and the Victoria Memorial

A few days after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, The Englishman carried a leading article, inspired by Saunders, arguing that the emotion aroused in India by her death ought to be used to erect a memorial that was not a merely utilitarian public work but a work of art, a permanent memorial to the glories of Victoria. The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, had been brooding over the same idea. The morning after the article appeared, Curzon sent for Saunders, and a communication from the Viceroy drew the public response out of which the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta grew. The memorial was duly built in the following years, its foundation stone laid in 1906 and the building opened to the public in 1921. That a newspaper leader could be remembered as one of the starting points of the most famous monument of British Calcutta is a measure of the standing The Englishman then enjoyed.

Character, campaigns and the plague years

Press histories illustrate Saunders's journalistic character through episodes such as the plague scare of the winter of 1896-97, when disease threatened Calcutta and the paper's coverage tested both official nerves and public calm. Such episodes underline the dual nature of the paper's power. It was a commercial daily dependent on its European readership, but it was also an agenda-setting institution whose leaders could move a Viceroy. Its war reporting, its cultivation of correspondents, and its closeness to government distinguished it from the more oppositional tradition represented earlier in the century by papers such as the Calcutta Journal, and from the independent line later associated with The Statesman. Readers who wanted the European commercial view of Indian affairs, argued forcefully and with insider confidence, turned to The Englishman.

Rivalry with The Statesman

The Statesman had been founded on 15 January 1875, when Robert Knight merged his Indian Statesman with The Friend of India, a paper descended from the Serampore missionary title founded in 1818, to form the Indian Statesman and New Friend of India, later simply The Statesman. Knight had previously been a principal founder and editor of The Times of India, and he brought metropolitan ambition to Calcutta. For over half a century the two dailies competed for the same English-reading public of the city. The Englishman held the older lineage and the European business constituency; The Statesman built the broader reputation, being praised as early as 1885 by The Hindu as singularly free from prejudice and known for sincere advocacy of the Indian cause. In commercial terms, the contest could have only one long-term winner in a market of Calcutta's size, and the end of the rivalry came through absorption rather than closure.

Absorption into The Statesman: 1927 or 1934?

The Englishman was absorbed into The Statesman in the interwar period, but the year is disputed and this profile deliberately presents both versions rather than choosing between them. The account of The Statesman in standard reference summaries, citing the paper's history, states that it absorbed its erstwhile rival The Englishman in 1927. The Statesman's own published history, as reproduced in descriptions of its official app and in anniversary accounts, states instead that The Englishman, founded in 1821, was merged with The Statesman in 1934. Trade teaching materials repeat the 1934 merger date, while other summaries describe The Statesman as formed from the two older publications without precision. What is not in dispute is the substance: the older paper's independent life ended, its identity was folded into its rival, and The Statesman continued, later starting its Delhi edition in 1931 according to its own history, transferring to Indian ownership in the mid-1960s, and surviving into the present day as one of India's oldest English newspapers.

Survival of the record and historical assessment

The physical record of The Englishman is fragile. The British Library's Endangered Archives Programme describes a collection held by the British Indian Association consisting mainly of The Hindoo Patriot and The Englishman, covering newspapers of 1869 to 1929, which are in many cases neither digitised nor microfilmed and survive on poor-quality, yellowing, brittle paper, much of it stored for years in gunny bags and damaged by weight, moisture and sunlight. Those files, the programme notes, provide insight into the socio-political, economic and cultural milieu of colonial Bengal. The assessment of the paper itself is more secure than its archive. For over a century, from its 1821 origins through the Stocqueler renaming and the Saunders ascendancy to its absorption in 1927 or 1934, The Englishman was one of the defining institutions of English-language journalism in India: the commercial voice of European Calcutta, a maker of war correspondents, an influence on viceroys, and the great rival whose disappearance left The Statesman alone in the field the two had contested.