Retrieving Lost Texts: Early Persian Newspapers of Bombay

Abstract

While the study of the history of print culture in India is still at an early stage, languages moribund in India, like Persian, have been all but ignored in this narrative. Persian newspapers of the nineteenth century, especially from its first half, played an important role in the development of the Indian public sphere. To a certain extent, they continued in the vein of the pre-British akhbārs, while on the other hand, they took on gradually the character of a modern newspaper. Bombay (Mumbai), for historical and geographical reasons, emerged as a center of Persian language activity during this period and its rapidly burgeoning printing infrastructure facilitated the development of Persian, as a language for books and newspapers. Using a range of contemporary government records and newspapers, an attempt is made here to reconstruct the history of these early Persian newspapers. Over a dozen Persian newspapers are identified, most of them for the first time; a preliminary attempt is made to understand the impact of these newspapers and the motivations of their Parsi, Hindu, and Muslim editors.