Who among the following is considered to be the first Indian to go to jail in performance of his duty as a journalist?

Correct — D, (d) Surendranath Banerjee. In 1883 Banerjee, who was editing the Calcutta paper The Bengalee, published a sharp comment on a judge of the High Court over his handling of a case in which a family idol had been brought into court. He was prosecuted for contempt, convicted and imprisoned, and he is generally recorded as the first Indian journalist to go to prison for what he had published. The country’s reaction is as significant as the sentence: protest meetings and hartals broke out in Calcutta and spread through Bengal and beyond, and a punishment intended to discipline one editor turned into an early demonstration of organised public opinion. That was the making of Banerjee. Dismissed from the Indian Civil Service in 1874 in circumstances he always regarded as unjust, he had founded the Indian Association in 1876 and taken over The Bengalee to give the new politics a voice; after the imprisonment he convened the Indian National Conference, which met in 1883 and 1885 and was one of the streams that fed into the Indian National Congress. He presided over the Congress twice, led the agitation against the partition of Bengal, and was known as Rashtraguru and, for his refusal to give way, as Surrender Not Banerjee. The other three names on the list are all associated with the press in one way or another, so the discriminator is the date: 1883 is earlier than any of them.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Mahatma Gandhi — Gandhi was imprisoned repeatedly, and once for precisely this offence — in 1922 he was tried and sentenced for sedition over three articles he had written in Young India, in the proceeding remembered as the Great Trial. But that was thirty-nine years after Banerjee’s conviction, and Gandhi’s earlier imprisonments were in South Africa and arose from the satyagraha campaigns there rather than from journalism. The question asks who was first, and on that test Gandhi cannot be the answer however many times he went to jail afterwards.
• (b)Rabindranath Tagore — Rabindranath Tagore was never imprisoned. His engagement with public affairs was of a different kind — the Swadeshi songs and writings of 1905, the schools at Santiniketan, and the renunciation of his knighthood in 1919 in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which is the act of political defiance he is remembered for. He edited and wrote for journals throughout his life, but no prosecution of his writing ended in a prison sentence, and he is on this list as the famous name that does not fit the category at all.
• (c)Lokmanya Tilak — Tilak is the strongest wrong answer, because his imprisonments arose directly out of his journalism. Articles in his Marathi weekly Kesari brought him a sedition conviction in 1897, and a second prosecution in 1908 sent him to Mandalay for six years, a sentence that made him the foremost leader of the extremist wing on his return. Both, however, come after 1883. A candidate who knows only that Tilak went to prison for what he wrote will pick this option; a candidate who also knows the decade will not.

The press and the criminal law grew up together in British India, and each provoked the other. The government’s instruments were the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, which subjected Indian-language papers to prior restraint while leaving the English press free; the law of sedition in section 124A of the Penal Code, under which Tilak and later Gandhi were tried; the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act of 1908; and the Press Act of 1910, which required security deposits liable to forfeiture. The response was that editors became politicians and prosecutions became publicity. Banerjee’s case in 1883 is the earliest of the well-known instances and shows the pattern already complete: a critical article, a prosecution, a prison term, and a wave of public protest that left the editor stronger than before. Understanding that cycle explains why so many leaders of the national movement were newspapermen first — Banerjee, Tilak, Gandhi, Azad, Ghaffar Khan — and why the freedom of the press became one of the fixed demands of the Congress long before independence.

Key facts

• Surendranath Banerjee was imprisoned in 1883 for contempt of court over remarks published in his paper The Bengalee, and is recorded as the first Indian journalist to be jailed.
• The conviction set off protests and hartals across Bengal, an early instance of organised political agitation in India.
• Banerjee had qualified for the Indian Civil Service and was dismissed from it in 1874; he founded the Indian Association in 1876.
• He convened the Indian National Conference, which met in 1883 and 1885 and was among the precursors of the Indian National Congress.
• He presided over the Congress twice and was a leader of the agitation against the partition of Bengal; he was known as Rashtraguru.
• Tilak was convicted of sedition over articles in Kesari in 1897 and again in 1908, when he was sent to Mandalay for six years.
• Gandhi was tried for sedition in 1922 over three articles in Young India, in the proceeding known as the Great Trial.

Common traps

• Answering a ’first’ question by association instead of by date. Three of these four men were prosecuted over their writing at some point.
• Assuming the most famous prisoner of the national movement must also be the earliest.
• Forgetting that Banerjee’s offence was contempt of court, not sedition, which is why it does not appear in lists of sedition trials.
• Treating Tagore’s renunciation of his knighthood as equivalent to a prosecution. It was a protest, not a conviction.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Surendranath Banerjee’s imprisonment in 1883 arose out of a prosecution for which offence?

  • (a)Sedition under section 124A
  • (b)Contempt of court
  • (c)Breach of the Vernacular Press Act
  • (d)Waging war against the Queen

  Answer(b) Contempt of court

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which organisation founded by Surendranath Banerjee in 1876 was a forerunner of the Indian National Congress?

  • (a)The British Indian Association
  • (b)The Indian Association
  • (c)The Madras Mahajana Sabha
  • (d)The Bombay Presidency Association

  Answer(b) The Indian Association