User:Kvwiki1234/B. G. Horniman

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Career as a journalist[edit]

Caricature

Horniman began his journalistic career at the Portsmouth Evening Mail in 1894. Before coming to India in 1906 to join the Statesman in Calcutta as its news editor, he had worked with several dailies in England including the Daily Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian.[1] In 1913, he became editor of The Bombay Chronicle, a daily founded by Pherozeshah Mehta.[2] The paper adopted a trenchant anti-colonial voice and became a mouthpiece of the freedom movement under Horniman. Two years after taking charge of The Bombay Chronicle, Horniman founded the Press Association of India, a union of working journalists that aimed at “protecting the press of the country by all lawful means from arbitrary laws and their administration, as well as from all attempts of the legislature to encroach on its liberty or of the executive authorities to interfere with the free exercise of their calling as journalists”. As president of the first trade union of working journalists in India, Horniman fought fiercely for the freedom of the press, sending petitions to the viceroy and the governor “protesting against the misuse of the Press Act by Government and against the constant abuse to which the Defence of India Act was put”.[3] Following the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Horniman managed to smuggle photographs of the incident and broke the story about the massacre and its aftermath in the Labour Party's mouthpiece the Daily Herald. The exposé broke through the censorship on the matter and unleashed a wave of revulsion in the British public over the incidents and the Hunter Commission.[4] One of his correspondents, Goverdhan Das, was imprisoned for three years. Horniman himself was arrested for his coverage of the massacre and criticism of the colonial government and deported to London, and the Chronicle closed down (temporarily).[5]

In England he continued his journalistic crusade against the colonial government and authored British Administration and the Amritsar Massacre in 1920. He returned to India in January 1926[6] and resumed the editorship of the Chronicle. In 1929 he launched his own newspaper, the Indian National Herald and its Weekly Herald.[7] He later resigned from The Bombay Chronicle to start the Bombay Sentinel, an evening newspaper which he edited from 1933 for 12 years.[8]

In 1941, Horniman, along with Russi Karanjia and Dinkar Nadkarni, founded the tabloid Blitz.[9]

  1. ^ Kaul, Chandrika (2003). Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880-1922. Manchester University Press. p. 274.
  2. ^ "Essay on the History of Early Newspapers of Indian". 24 November 2011. Retrieved 30 November 2012.
  3. ^ Ramachandra Guha, The Telegraph (Kolkata) 06 November 2021
  4. ^ Kirpalani, S K (1993). Fifty Years With The British. Bombay: Orient Longman. p. 63. ISBN 9780863113369.
  5. ^ In The Districts Of The Raj
  6. ^ Ramachandra Guha, 'The Legacy of B.G. Horniman', The Telegraph (Kolkata) 06 November 2021
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference indiavideo was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Panigrahi, D N (2004). India's Partition: The Story Of Imperialism In Retreat. Routledge. pp. 346. ISBN 9780203324882.
  9. ^ "Russi Karanjia dead". The Hoot. 1 February 2008. Retrieved 22 April 2013.
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