Hicky's Bengal Gazette
India's first newspaper, printed in Calcutta by James Augustus Hicky from January 1780. Every surviving page, transcribed and searchable.
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 issues are scattered across seven collections on four continents. This site puts them in order. In total, Hicky printed 121 issues and a Prospectus, comprising 464 pages. See Collections for more infromation on the collections and About for 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].
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.