Hyde's Notebooks
The Gazette was not printed in a vacuum. James Augustus Hicky, its printer, used the first newspaper published in India to attack the powerful, including the Governor-General Warren Hastings and Chief Justice Sir Elijah Impey. He was tried for libel before the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William and imprisoned. The judges who heard cases in that court kept notebooks, and Justice John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers filled theirs with what they saw and heard from 1774 to 1798. They are the same men who sat in Hicky's Calcutta.
Because Hicky was tried in that court, his newspaper and the judges' notebooks are two halves of a story: the press on one side, the court that silenced it on the other.
The notebooks
The notebooks record the daily work of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William, Calcutta, in the years the Gazette was printed and long after. Roughly 22,500 pages have been transcribed, and they can be browsed, searched and downloaded at Hydebooks. The project began with Carol Siri Johnson and Andrew Otis and students at NJIT, and was preserved and modernized by Steps Ventures in 2026.
Opens the digital edition of the judicial notebooks of Justice John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers.