Sambad Prabhakar
Overview
Sambad Prabhakar was a Bengali newspaper published from Kolkata, then Calcutta, that achieved a distinction no earlier Bengali title had reached, because it became the first Bengali-language daily newspaper. It was founded by the poet Ishwar Chandra Gupta and began as a weekly on 28 January 1831. Eight years later, on 14 June 1839, it appeared as a daily, and it continued publication into the early twentieth century. Across that long career it covered news from India and abroad and put forward its views on religion, politics, society and literature.
The paper was influential in the development of the Bengali language and in the wider cultural awakening known as the Bengali Renaissance. Historians also credited it with building public sentiment in the years that led towards the indigo revolt, when Bengali cultivators resisted the coercive system under which European planters forced them to grow indigo. A newspaper that could move between poetry, politics and agrarian grievance occupied a central place in the public life of nineteenth-century Bengal.
Ishwar Chandra Gupta, Poet and Founder
The paper was the brainchild of Ishwar Chandra Gupta, who was born in March 1812 in the village of Kanchrapara, in the 24 Parganas district, and who spent most of his childhood in Kolkata after the death of his mother, in the house of his uncle. He became an Indian Bengali poet and writer of the first rank, and later generations described him as a poet of transition, a figure whose work helped Bengali poetry move beyond the boundaries of the medieval tradition towards modernity.
Gupta created a different style of poetry from that of the kobiwalas, the professional verse performers of his youth, whose performances had often relied on sexual wordplay and verbal clashes. His own verse dealt with the daily life of human beings rather than only with the lives of gods and goddesses, and satire and irony became its distinctive weapons against the social contradictions of his time. He also reintroduced into Bengali poetry a medieval style of double meaning, and he collected and preserved the biographies of earlier Bengali poets, work that rescued a whole literary inheritance from oblivion.
Patronage, Launch and the First Closure
Gupta's patron was Jogendra Mohan Thakur of Pathuriaghata, one of Calcutta's wealthy and cultured families. The newspaper began as a weekly launched on 28 January 1831, a date that corresponded to 16 Magh 1237 in the Bengali calendar. Thakur was the backbone of the paper, and the venture depended on his support to a dangerous degree, because when he died the paper lost its financial foundation.
Publication closed in 1832, barely a year after the launch. The failure was typical of early Bengali journalism, in which a single patron's death or displeasure could end a title overnight. What distinguished Sambad Prabhakar was that its editor refused to accept that ending as final. Gupta moved to other editorial work, including the Sangbad Ratnabali, but he kept the ambition of restoring the paper alive through the years in which it did not appear.
Revival and the First Bengali Daily
In 1836 the newspaper was revived by Gupta and appeared as a tri-weekly on 10 August 1836. The Thakurs of Pathuriaghata lent a helping hand to the paper again, and the restored title rebuilt its readership on the stronger footing of three issues a week. Then, on 14 June 1839, Sambad Prabhakar became a daily, the first Bengali-language daily newspaper in history.
The step from weekly to daily was more than a change of schedule. A daily Bengali paper assumed that Bengali readers wanted, and would pay for, news with the same regularity that English readers in Calcutta already enjoyed, and it required a press, a staff and a distribution system capable of producing a fresh paper every morning. By sustaining that effort, Gupta demonstrated that Bengali journalism had come of age, and the paper's editors after him, who included Ramchandra Gupta, Gopalchandra Mukhopadhyaya and Manindrakrishna Gupta, inherited an institution rather than an experiment.
News, Opinion and the Bengali Renaissance
Sambad Prabhakar covered news on India and abroad and put forward its views on religion, politics, society and literature. That breadth made it a general newspaper in the fullest sense at a time when many Bengali publications still existed mainly to advocate a single religious or reforming cause. Its columns treated public questions as matters on which Bengali readers were entitled to form their own opinions, and in doing so the paper helped to create the reading public on which the Bengali Renaissance depended.
The paper was influential in the Bengali language itself. Daily journalism demanded a prose that was clear, current and capable of handling subjects from foreign wars to municipal affairs, and editors such as Gupta forged that prose in the pressure of daily deadlines. Readers who encountered modern Bengali in the Prabhakar encountered a language being stretched, week by week and then day by day, to carry the whole range of contemporary experience.
A Training Ground for Writers
The paper's literary importance rested heavily on the writers it nurtured. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, who became the leading Bengali novelist of the nineteenth century, began his literary career with compositions published in Sambad Prabhakar, and his earliest publications appeared in Gupta's paper. Bankim worked for the journal in the early 1850s under Gupta's editorship, following his editor's model as he began as a writer of verse before turning to the fiction that made him famous.
Bankim was not alone. The credit for creating a proper climate for writers such as Dinabandhu Mitra and Rangalal Banerjee was also given to Gupta, and the Prabhakar was remembered as the training ground of many distinguished writers of the period. Other named contributors included Kangal Harinath and Radhakanta Deb. A newspaper whose pages gave first publication to the young Bankim, and encouragement to a generation around him, had earned a place in literary history quite apart from its news columns.
Gupta's Views and Their Evolution
Gupta's own opinions gave the paper much of its character. In his early days he was a conservative who opposed the Young Bengal movement and frowned on widow remarriage, a position that put him at odds with Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the great campaigner for the remarriage of widows. He was also one of the earliest advocates of a Hindu view of Indian society, and his satire frequently mocked the so-called modern class that blindly followed the colonial British power.
Later in his life his views began to change, and he championed the cause of the remarriage of virgin widows and of women's education. He was a nationalist with strong feelings for his land and his language, and he started a movement for the improvement of Bengali, making it a point to use Bengali words unaffected by English. The paper under such an editor could be conservative and reforming, traditional and patriotic, in successive phases, and its long life allowed readers to watch a leading Bengali mind argue with itself across three decades.
The Paper and Public Sentiment Before the Indigo Revolt
Historians of Bengal credited Sambad Prabhakar with influence in building the public sentiment that preceded the indigo revolt of 1859 and 1860. The indigo system rested on coercion, and Bengali opinion turned against the planters through years of reporting, discussion and literary treatment of rural grievances. A daily and tri-weekly press that carried such questions into Calcutta's reading rooms helped to ensure that, when the cultivators resisted, educated Bengal was prepared to sympathise with them.
The paper's role illustrated a wider truth about the nineteenth-century Bengali press. Newspapers did not merely report movements after they had begun. By selecting subjects, framing grievances and sustaining attention over years, they prepared the moral ground on which movements later stood. Sambad Prabhakar, with its unmatched continuity from 1831 onwards, was better placed than any rival to perform that slow work of preparation.
Gupta's Wider Editorial Career and Death
Apart from Sambad Prabhakar, Gupta edited a number of other journals, among them the Sangbad Ratnabali, the Pasandapidan and the Sangbad Sadhuranjan, and he edited works of earlier poets, including the Kalikirtan in 1833 and the Prabodh Prabhakar of Ramprasad Sen in 1858. That range of activity made him one of the central editorial figures of his generation, a man for whom journalism, poetry and literary preservation were parts of a single vocation.
Gupta died on 23 January 1859, and the paper outlived its founder by decades, continuing into the early twentieth century under successor editors. Bankim himself later returned the debt he owed his first editor by editing a collection of Gupta's poems, the Ishwar Chandra Guptar Kavita Sangraha, published in 1885. The pupil who had become Bengal's greatest novelist thus preserved the verse of the editor who had first printed him, and the connection symbolised the paper's place at the root of modern Bengali literature.
Legacy and Historical Assessment
Sambad Prabhakar was remembered, above all, for two achievements. It became, on 14 June 1839, the first daily newspaper in the Bengali language, a milestone in the history of Indian journalism that no later title could take from it. And it served, under Ishwar Chandra Gupta, as the school in which a generation of Bengali writers learned their craft, at the moment when Bengali prose and poetry were being remade for the modern age.
Its history also traced the hazards of that age with unusual completeness. It was launched by a patron in 1831, it died with him in 1832, it was revived by its editor's persistence in 1836, and it rose within three years to a daily frequency that it then sustained, in one form or another, into a new century. Few newspapers in any Indian language left a record that joined a clear institutional first to so rich a literary legacy, and on that double ground Sambad Prabhakar held its honoured place in the history of the press in Bengal.
