India's First Newspaper

About This Audiobook

Before colonialism’s hold tightened, a scrappy Irish publisher dared to print the truth in Calcutta. *India’s First Newspaper* isn’t just a history lesson—it’s a gripping origin story about influence, censorship, and the fragile birth of public discourse. Amit Schandillia’s razor-sharp research strips away the dust of archives to reveal how James Augustus Hicky’s *Hicky’s Bengal Gazette* became Asia’s first modern newspaper, a four-page broadsheet that terrified the East India Company. The audiobook’s greatest strength lies in its refusal to glorify or oversimplify: it’s a tale of ambition clashing with authority, where every issue of the Gazette could spark a riot or land its printer in debtors’ prison. Raghavendra Ashok’s narration crackles with urgency, his voice oscillating between the measured diction of a scholar and the coiled tension of a man dodging arrest. The pacing never drags, even as Schandillia unpacks the paper’s financial precarity and the political minefield of the 18th-century British Raj. This isn’t dry colonial history—it’s a thriller disguised as a footnote, proving that the first draft of a nation’s story was often printed in defiance.