Abhyudaya

Overview

Abhyudaya was a Hindi-language newspaper published from Allahabad, the city now known as Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh. It was launched by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1907 as a weekly and was converted into a daily in 1915. Malaviya edited the paper himself for its first two years, and under him and the succession of editors who followed, it became one of the leading nationalist voices in the Hindi press of the United Provinces. Its name, meaning rise and glory, was suggested by Balkrishna Bhatt, the veteran Allahabad editor of Hindi Pradeep, and it announced the paper's purpose from the start: it was a journal of public awakening, founded by a politician who believed that political work in India needed a press of its own in the language of its readers.

The paper belonged to the formative generation of Indian-owned newspapers that carried the freedom movement into the vernacular public sphere. Where the English-language press spoke to officials and to an all-India elite, a Hindi weekly from Allahabad spoke directly to the teachers, lawyers, students, traders and Congress workers of the Hindi-speaking provinces. Abhyudaya's history was therefore inseparable from the career of its founder, from the politics of the Indian National Congress in the decade before the First World War, and from Allahabad's position as one of the great publishing cities of northern India.

Allahabad and the Hindi Press

Allahabad had a dense print culture long before Abhyudaya appeared. Scholarship on the city's publishing world records Hindi periodicals such as Vrittant Darpan and Prayag Dut in 1868 and 1871, and identifies Balkrishna Bhatt's Hindi Pradeep, published from 1877 to 1910, as the first Hindi journal in the city to attract a significant readership, followed by Pratapnarayan Mishra's Brahman. These journals were vocal advocates of the Hindi-Nagari cause, yet the city's presses remained strikingly multilingual: English, Urdu, Hindi, Persian and Sanskrit publications coexisted, competed and shared readers well into the early twentieth century.

It was into this crowded and argumentative world that Malaviya launched his weekly. The choice of Hindi was deliberate. Malaviya had worked for the introduction of Devanagari in the courts of the province, and he understood that the political education of the Hindi-speaking public could not be conducted through English alone. Abhyudaya was his instrument for carrying Congress politics, and his own moderate nationalist convictions, to readers whom the English press did not reach.

Founding in 1907

The Abhyudaya started as a Hindi weekly on Vasant Panchami day in 1907, and it was entirely Malaviya's own creation. He had become a member of the Provincial Legislative Council in November 1902 and had shortly afterwards begun his movement for a Hindu university, the project that became Banaras Hindu University. Wanting to devote the bulk of his time to that project, he felt the need of a journal through which his political work could continue uninterrupted. The Abhyudaya of 1907 and the English daily Leader of 1909 were the outcome of that urge.

The paper's object at the start was mainly to popularise the politics of the Moderate group in the Congress, whose leadership had been challenged at the previous year's session in Calcutta. Malaviya was anxious in particular to restrain students from active participation in politics, though he was fully in favour of their making a deep study of political theory and current affairs. He also hoped that an ably conducted Hindi journal would earn him an income sufficient to support his public life. As events showed, that hope was vain: like most nationalist journals of the period, Abhyudaya was a public cause sustained by commitment rather than a commercial proposition.

The Founder's Earlier Journalism

Malaviya came to his own paper with two decades of editorial experience. Born in Allahabad on 25 December 1861, he had made his mark as a speaker at the second session of the Indian National Congress in 1886, and in 1887 he began his career in journalism as editor of the Hindi daily Hindostan, owned by Raja Rampal Singh of Kalakankar, who had been impressed by the young man's speech and demeanour at the Calcutta Congress. Biographical accounts record that Malaviya resigned that editorship after about two and a half years when the Raja broke a promise about the terms on which he would deal with his editor, an early sign of the insistence on personal and editorial dignity that marked his later career.

He went on to edit the Indian Opinion in 1889, before that paper was merged with the Lucknow newspaper Advocate, and he wrote poetry under the pen name Makrand and essays on religious and modern subjects for journals associated with the Bharatendu circle. He took his law degree in 1891 and built a successful practice at the Allahabad High Court, but journalism remained one of his principal public instruments. When he founded Abhyudaya in 1907, he was not experimenting with the press; he was acquiring, at last, a paper that answered to no proprietor but himself.

Editors After Malaviya

Malaviya edited Abhyudaya himself for two years, until his election as a member of the reformed Indian Legislative Council in 1909 took him more fully into legislative work. The editorship thereafter passed to a succession of able men: Purushottam Das Tandon, Satynand Joshi, Krishna Kant Malaviya, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, Venkatesh Narayan Tivary and, finally, in 1936, Padma Kant Malaviya. Several of these names were significant in their own right. Tandon became one of the leading Congress figures of the United Provinces, while Vidyarthi went on to found the Kanpur newspaper Pratap and to become one of the most celebrated editors of the Hindi press.

Malaviya nevertheless kept a tight rein over the paper. Accounts of his stewardship record that he supervised the journal's political line closely and did not hesitate to pull up an editor who departed from the standards he expected. The best-documented instance came in June 1914, when Krishna Kant Malaviya published a leading article in Abhyudaya on the subject of widow remarriage and Malaviya wrote to him expressing grave displeasure at the piece. The episode showed both sides of the paper's character: its pages were open to debate on the leading social questions of the day, and its proprietor regarded the conduct of that debate as a matter of personal responsibility.

From Weekly to Daily

In 1915 Abhyudaya was converted from a weekly into a daily newspaper. The change placed it in a different class of publication. A weekly could comment, argue and educate; a daily had to report, and to do so at the speed of the telegraph and the railway, through the years of the First World War, the repressive press legislation of the colonial government and the first great mass campaigns of the national movement. The conversion also testified to the readership the paper had built during its eight weekly years: a Hindi daily in Allahabad was viable because a Hindi-reading public for daily news now existed in the city and the province beyond it.

The daily Abhyudaya appeared in the same decade in which Malaviya founded the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915 and saw the Banaras Hindu University established in 1916. The paper was thus one element in a connected set of institutions through which its founder worked: a university for education, a political organisation for Hindu public life, and newspapers in Hindi and English for the daily conduct of argument.

Sister Publications

Abhyudaya did not stand alone. In 1909, with the aid of Motilal Nehru, Malaviya founded the English daily Leader, which he edited from 1909 to 1911 and whose board he presided over from 1911 to 1919; under its later editor C. Y. Chintamani it became one of the most influential English newspapers in northern India. In 1910 he founded the Hindi monthly Maryada. He understood, earlier than many of his contemporaries, that a campaign needed both languages: he had campaigned against the Indian Press Act of 1910 and the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act of 1908 and had demanded an all-India press conference at Allahabad, and he concluded that for such a campaign to succeed across the nation, an English newspaper was necessary alongside the Hindi one.

His press career extended well beyond Allahabad. In 1924 he helped purchase the Hindustan Times and prevent its premature demise, raising funds with Lala Lajpat Rai, M. R. Jayakar and Ghanshyam Das Birla, and he served as chairman of the Hindustan Times from 1924 until his death in 1946. Abhyudaya, his first wholly owned journal, was the foundation on which this later career as a press proprietor and rescuer of nationalist newspapers was built.

Role in Nationalist Politics

The paper's politics were those of its founder: Congress nationalism of the moderate school, committed to constitutional agitation, political education and social reform conducted with restraint. Malaviya was elected president of the Indian National Congress four times, in 1909, 1918, 1932 and 1933, served for years in the Imperial Legislative Council, and played a leading part in campaigns such as the ending of the Indian indenture system. A journal edited under his direction carried that programme to Hindi readers week after week and, after 1915, day after day.

That connection also defined the paper's limits and its discipline. Abhyudaya was not a free-floating commercial daily but the organ of a political tendency, and its editors worked under a proprietor who treated the paper's line as an extension of his public life. In an era when the colonial state watched the vernacular press closely and prosecuted editors readily, that discipline was also a form of protection: the paper could be forceful within a politics its founder was prepared to defend in the legislature and in public.

Legacy

Malaviya died on 12 November 1946, on the eve of the independence he had worked towards for sixty years, and he was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2014. Abhyudaya's place in his legacy was foundational. It was the first newspaper that was entirely his own, the training ground or early platform of editors such as Purushottam Das Tandon and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, and a demonstration that a Hindi journal from Allahabad could sustain first a weekly and then a daily readership for nationalist politics.

In the history of the Indian press, the paper stood for a particular idea of what a newspaper was for. It was founded not to chase circulation for its own sake but to keep a political movement literate, argued and organised between elections, sessions and campaigns. That it was remembered, decades later, alongside the Leader, Maryada and the Hindustan Times in accounts of Malaviya's journalism showed how completely Abhyudaya had become identified with the man who launched it on Vasant Panchami in 1907 and with the Hindi public sphere it helped to create.