Living in
the Now 2.6.23 | Mrinal Chatterjee
The Sun rose and how!
Four out of
the top five largest circulated newspapers in India presently is in Hindi, with
a combined circulation of over 14 crores. It all started on 30 May 1826 with
the publication of Oodhund Martand, (or Udant Martand
in some documents, which means rising sun), a weekly Hindi newspaper from
Calcutta (now Kolkata). Incidentally it was the day of Narada Jayanti. Narada,
a mythical wandering sage is widely considered to be the guru of the
journalists.
Pandit
Jugal Kishore Shukla (Jooghol Kishore Sookool- in some documents) edited and
published it from AmarTalla Lane, Kolutola in the
Bada Bazar area of Calcutta (now Kolkata) ‘in the interest of Hindustanis’. The print order
for the first issue was 500. Udant Martand used a mix of Hindi
dialects- Khari Boli and Braj Bhasa in Devnagari script. This weekly newspaper reached readers every week on Tuesday.
 |
| Pandit Jugal Kishore Shukla |
By the early 1820s, newspapers in
few Indian languages had been published including Bengali, Urdu and Persian.
Samachar Darpan, 1818 was the first Bengali newspaper followed by Jam-e-Jahan
Numa in Urdu (27 March 1822) and Mirat-ul-Akhbar (12 April 1822) in Persian.
Jugal Kishore Shukla hailed from
Kanpur, but made Calcutta his workplace. He was a lawyer. He wanted to
talk about the rights of indigenous Indians in British ruled India. For this,
he started publishing 'Udanta Martand'. In his papers, he raised the issue of
equality of status of the Indians vis a vie the Europeans. He also raised
issues of social inequality, besides publishing local news and news from Hindi
speaking areas.
However, the paper could not get
many readers, as there were not many Hindi speaking and Devanagari script
reading people in Kolkata and Eastern India. He tried to send the paper
to Hindi speaking states in North India. In that time he could only send
the newspapers by post. It became very costly and economically unviable because
of the high postal rates. Shukla requested the government to give some
concession in postal rates so that newspapers could be sent to readers in Hindi
speaking regions, but the British government did not agree to it. He
requested postal fee exemption for eight
newspapers to be posted to North India. That was also denied. Besides, no government department agreed to buy even a single
copy of 'Udanta Martand'.
Thus, mainly due to financial
constraints, 'Udanta Martand' could not be published for a long time, and
finally, on 4 December 1826, it stopped publication.
Years later, in 1850- Jugal Kishore Shukla made an attempt to start another paper called Samyadani
Martand. But that also failed.
Udanta
Martand as an individual newspaper failed to live long. However, it marked the
beginning of journalism in Hindi.
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https://www.odisha.plus/2023/06/the-sun-rose-and-how/
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