Hicky's Bengal Gazette

The notebooks record the workings of a court that shaped early colonial Calcutta. One of the people who passed through it was James Augustus Hicky, printer of the Hicky's Bengal Gazette, the first newspaper published in India. Hicky used his paper to attack the powerful, including the Governor-General Warren Hastings and Chief Justice Sir Elijah Impey. He was tried for libel before this Supreme Court and imprisoned. The judges whose notebooks fill this archive are the same men who heard his case.

Because Hicky was tried here, these notebooks and his newspaper are two halves of a story: the court's own record on one side, the press it silenced on the other.

The reconstruction

Hicky's Bengal Gazette survives only in scattered, incomplete runs across a handful of institutions. As part of this project, the surviving issues were gathered and assembled into a single, most-complete edition for scholarly use, drawing on Andrew Otis's research for his book Hicky's Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India's First Newspaper (2018).

Visit Hicky's Bengal Gazette ↗

Opens the Steps Ventures digital edition, Calcutta, 1780 — The Court and the Press.