Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

The history of the telegraph and of telegraphy seems till present as a Western project, more precisely: a transatlantic history of success. It serves as one of many proofs for the technological and therefore civilisational supremacy of the "West" in opposition to the so-constructed static "East". Once again - in addition to the rail way and the steam ship -, the Western "modernity" manifests itself in science and technology.

The term and concept "public sphere" are situated similarly. It seems - according to Jürgen Habermas - to have originated in Western Europe from the 18th century onwards. Opposed to the developing (nation) state it was the nucleus of what is now called the  civil society. By now, the Europe´s sonderweg/separate path with respect to the public sphere has been brought to question because (forms of) the public have existed in other regions of the world.

Strikingly, the cohesion of the public and telegraphy has so far not been dealt by researchers. This is also true for the transformation process in the sector of the press. This project intends to close the gap that yawns for the history of British-India. It will be shown that over the course of the 19th century different forms of the public developed till in the 1880s an "all-India public sphere" emerged. The telegraphy contributed immensely because it formatively influenced journalism, media coverage and the opening of daily and weekly periodicals and allowed "national" topics to take an ever growing wider and more prominent spot.

The telegraphy network was sistematically expanded in the 1850s. It was in many ways complementarily to the synchronically built railway system. Both were expanded under premises of security politics and economics. A media-orientated usage was not intended. But within a short span of time the Indian print media employed the new technological medium and started a revolution of the media scene. Lacking copyright-standards allowed periodicals and their Indian owners to utilise the telegraphically transmitted news from all around the world by simply copying and adopting them into their own papers.

The Marathi, Bengali, Oriyan, Sindhi and Tamil nationalism experienced an unprecedented uplift by the telegraph and the transformed press coverage. They are all part of the diverse "Indian" public spheres that dominated the political scene in British India. They also prove that separate national movements existed till the second half of the 19th century, in some "regions" of British-India up into the 20th century, and that the imagined concept of an all-Indian state was an idea of British colonialism.

Only when rail way and telegraphy became logistic centres of the from 1885 yearly changing cities hosting the yearly congress of the Indian National Congress the press and media landscape addressed all-Indian "national" topics. Among others, it was also the coverage on the yearly conventions in Indian daily and weekly press that relied upon telegraphic and therefore immediate transmission of debates and resolutions that procured the "national" themes an exalted status.
 

This multi-layered and media-historical complex process contributed immensely to the formation of an eventually critical, all-Indian as well as diverse Indian public sphere/s in British-Indian. They show that how in utilisation of new technologies socio-political dynamics emerge even in a colonial context through a creative handling by the local population. The telegraph, intended as a colonial instrument of rule transformed within half a century into an instrument for the organised resistance in the form of an "all-India public sphere