Hicky's Bengal Gazette
India's first newspaper, printed in Calcutta by James Augustus Hicky from January 1780. Every surviving page, transcribed and searchable, beside the scan it was read from.
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The paper
Hicky's Bengal Gazette; or, the Original Calcutta General Advertiser first appeared on Saturday 29 January 1780. It came out every Saturday, with occasional Supplements and Extraordinary editions, and it was the first newspaper printed in India. Hicky filled it with shipping news, advertisements, letters, verse and gossip, and increasingly with attacks on the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, and his circle. Hastings and others sued Hicky for libel, and he kept printing from jail. The last issue appeared on 30 March 1782, when the Supreme Court ordered his types seized.
Where the pages come from
No library holds a complete run. The surviving copies are scattered across seven collections on four continents, and this edition puts them back in date order. Each page notes which copy its scan comes from and who transcribed it. See About for the collections and how the transcriptions were made.
Reading the transcriptions
Spelling, capitals and punctuation follow the original. The long s (ſ) is printed as a plain s. Words that could not be read are marked in [square brackets]. Of the 466 pages, 48 come from Andrew Otis's own transcriptions and 418 were read from the scans with AI. AI transcriptions will contain mistakes, so check the scan beside each page before quoting it.
The book
The story of Hicky and his paper is told in Andrew Otis, Hicky's Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India's First Newspaper (Tranquebar, 2018). See andrewotis.com.