Audience Participation: Advertisements, Readers, and Anglo-Indian Newspapers

This essay examines advertisements that appeared in English-language Indian newspapers between 1845 and 1860. Concentrating particularly on adverts by individuals and local businesses, I explore that most recalcitrant node in Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit”—readers. I place a range of advertisements in relation to one another and to the news and letters sections of the newspaper in order to develop a portrait of the newspaper’s readers and the social and political dynamic of Anglo-Indian life in the years preceding and immediately following the 1857 Sepoy Uprising.