The Indian Periodical Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric by Sukeshi Kamra (review)

While studies of Indian nationalism are legion, not much attention has been paid to the rhetorical bearing of its constitutive public sphere. Sukeshi Kamra’s new book therefore takes up a fruitful line of inquiry, for key to her investigation is the consolidation of an Indian public sphere as it was mediated by the native press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking her cue from earlier studies of the formation of a public sphere in colonial India, Kamra does not expend critical energy in debating the purported imitativeness, failed or otherwise, of an Indian public sphere in relation to Western (Habermasean) models. Refreshingly, she is not interested, either, in pointing to what might be construed as its idiosyncrasies in order to prop up claims of an alternative modernity. Rather, the study traces the development of what it terms the “periodical public sphere” inasmuch as the native press manifested nationalist impulses and desires that were otherwise excluded from the more legislative scope of early nationalist politics (27).

Not surprisingly, the main texts of study are native periodicals. Kamra focuses more on vernacular newspapers, especially ones written in Bengali, presenting a usefully exhaustive account of newspaper reports gleaned from archives in India and the United Kingdom. Of particular interest are the citations from the Native Newspaper Reports (NNR), which comprised a weekly compendium of (translated) abstracts from vernacular newspapers that the colonial government meticulously maintained in order to keep tabs on the native media. As is often the case, the hyper-surveillance of the British colonial state provides a treasure trove of materials for the contemporary researcher, and most of Kamra’s examples are drawn from the NNR. However, even though she draws extensively from newspaper reports archived in the NNR, Kamra is reflexive about the NNR’s status as a repository of the native press. Astutely pointing out the configurative effect of the NNR, she notes how “the Indian press gains a very particular function and meaning when articles, in bits and pieces, are lifted out of their context, thematized, rearranged, and thus reconstituted in the pages of the NNRs” (14–15). It is not only the vernacular press but also the Indian public itself that is constellated by the editorial and translatory function of the NNR, which led its audience to conclude “that the Indian press and reading communities were hotbeds of simmering resentment at one end and volatility at the other” (9). Consequently, the study is also invested in tracing the formation of an Indian counterpublic sphere that not only sought to destabilize the authenticity of the NNR but also made itself particularly visible at legal flashpoints in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the law emerges as a crucial actor in this context, and the book also relies on trial records to register how an Indian public not only came into being but also negotiated the legal framework that in many ways hailed the public into existence.

The immediate aftermath of the Revolt of 1857 provides the historical starting point for the study. Chapter 1, which focuses on the events surrounding 1857, marks a welcome departure from much of the voluminous scholarship on the Revolt by focusing on the Indian response and perspective. Even as this chapter does not dwell much on the periodical press, it successfully essays how an idiom of loyalty becomes instrumental in the self-representation of the Indian public in the wake of the Revolt, which ruptured established relays of affiliation and address. The memory of 1857 compounded the Indian feelings of loss, mourning, and melancholia that accrued over the century, and, as chapter 2 traces, added an affective dimension to public opinion by the 1870s. In fact, the emotional register becomes both crucial and contested, for with the introduction of the law for seditious libel in 1870, the colonial state identified “the realm of feelings as a site subject...