Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India (review)

The history of the imperial press is enjoying a healthy popularity, and thus a biography of Robert Knight, the English-born newspaper editor in Victorian India, is timely and welcome. Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India is not, however, a rushed attempt to respond to that trend. Edwin Hirschmann explains in the preface that his biography is one forty years in the making, and this is evident in the strong empirical research: the bibliography boasts a generous list of primary sources consulted, both published and archival, on three continents. Rather unfortunately, it also reveals the relatively slim range of recent secondary sources with which Hirschmann has engaged. This is a shame, as this author has undoubtedly witnessed such broad developments in historiography over the past four decades that it would have been interesting to have his reflections on how his subject should be located in the recent historical scholarship on India, the British Empire, press history, and biography more generally.

The book is chronologically structured into five chapters which reflect Hirschmann's view of Knight as progressing from reformer to editor, dissident, imperial critic, and finally to "statesman elder" (193). Hirschmann introduces political events and debates, then gives detailed reports of Knight's writings and pronouncements on the Raj. Often quoting Knight's newspaper editorials at length, Hirschmann offers a service to scholars to whom Knight's newspapers are not available. Hirschmann provides historical background that students will welcome for its clarity and accessibility; its particularly strong description of economic, demographic, and technological changes reflects Knight's interest in these topics.

Knight is entirely deserving of a biography as the English editor in India who established several major Indian newspapers, including the Times of India and the Statesman, and emerged as a persistent and vocal critic of British policy in India. Of humble London origins, he arrived in Bombay in 1847, married into an Anglo-Indian family, but struggled financially in several commercial positions in trade and brokerage. In 1857, he was offered, on the strength of several articles he had written on Indian economics, the acting editorship of the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce. The beginning of his tenure was marked by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and Knight adopted an unusual editiorial position, arguing that the Mutiny revealed the poverty of the Indian people and their exploitation by the Raj.

It is regrettable that more source material is not available for Knight's early life; Hirschmann is forced to extrapolate based on what is known about the mores of the London community into which Knight was born to build a picture of him as imbued with the reformist spirit of Chartism. But in terms of his first decade in India, tantalising questions are left unanswered about how Knight went from being a bankrupted Englishman of modest origins and connections to being invited by Indian businessmen to replace the permanent editor of the Bombay Times, with all the cross-cultural negotiations and politics that must have involved.

As editor of the Bombay Times (which became the Times of India in 1861), Knight called for Indian land reform, the fair and equal distribution of justice, and fiscal caution. He believed that Christian conversion would be necessary for social reform in India, but he argued for separation of church and state. His tenure as editor ended in 1869 following a dispute with his business partner, Mathias Mull, after which he founded the Indian Economist. A brief spell in official employment analysing economic data for the Bengal government conflicted with Knight's critical editorial output and ended badly. A London edition of the Statesman was short-lived, as Knight was sued for libel and suffered poor health. Back in Calcutta, the Statesman moved forward and gave its support to the young Indian National Congress but faced another expensive libel trial. Knight died in 1890, having consistently scrutinised imperial rule over thirty years, whilst maintaining a belief that imperial government...