Journalism in India

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The present volume is the newest edition of Pat Lovett's book, Journalism in India, published in 1929. This book is a collection of two pieces of writing. The first one, 'Journalism in India', is an endowment lecture delivered in 1926 and the second one, 'An Outsider's Odyssey', is a kind of autobiographical composition published for private circulation in the early 1920s.

'Journalism in India' is Lovett's Adhar Chandra Mookerjee Lecture at the invitation of the University of Calcutta. The Lecture was published in the University organ, The Calcutta Review.

For the present publication, we have checked and compared the text of the article 'Journalism in India' with the text of his lecture published in The Calcutta Review. For the autobiographical article, we depended solely on the original publication as no other printed version is available to liken with.

This new edition contains four appendices. First, CS Rangaswami's 'A Tribute', which was the Preface to the original edition of Lovett's book. Rangaswami was a renowned financial journalist and the Managing Editor of Indian Finance, founded in 1928. Second, an article by Pat Lovett himself, 'Polo in Calcutta'. Third, a note titled ""The Capital Limited' which contains a comprehensive overview of the paper. Fourth, 'The Late Mr Pat Lovett', which is a report published in The Calcutta Review (January 1928) after his death.

The Introductory article is an attempt to interpret and contextualise Lovett's unique narrative of a significant episode of Indian journalism.

Mr Pat Lovett, an Irish by birth, came to India in 1883 at the young age of around twenty and devoted the remaining four and a half decades of his life to professional journalism, first in Mumbai (Bombay), then in Kolkata (Calcutta).

Mr Lovett spent the best part of his professional life as the editor of the Capital in Kolkata. This financial weekly rose to a new height under his able leadership.

After his death on 2 January 1928, The Calcutta Review in its January 1928 issue rightly commented: ""He was a typical Irishman, generous, large-hearted, impulsive and lovable-a friend of the poor and destitute a true sportsman in every field of life...""

The present volume is a New Edition of Pat Lovett's book, Journalism in India originally published in 1929, a year after he breathed his last. - This latest edition comes with an Editorial Introduction along with newly added notes and annotations.

The pursuit of journalism, before being institutionalized as an academic discipline at the university level, perhaps existed in different ways in the areas of cultivation of human knowledge in modern times. The new edition of Pat Lovett's book entitled Journalism in India (1929), edited by one of the committed scholars on the subject in our time, Professor Anjan Bera, has done us a remarkable service by bringing to our perceptible arena a kind of 'sociology of knowledge', downloading the subject in a historical as well as politico-economic context.

The editor through his longish and erudite Introduction has delineated at length the entire spectrum of the task in his hand on the overall coverage of this prestigious publication. By and large, this innovative attempt has amply reflected on the developments in this special field of public communication through an unique intellectual journey along with its managerial import and trade engagements of the profession involved. In brief, this revealing documentation has captured a reasonable portraiture of the then existing social, economic, political, cultural and commercial realities of the time covered.

The prioritization of selecting the editors of the news houses, focussing the news items etc, in a sense the total control over the dissemination and disposition of information, skillful moulding of the public opinion, motivation towards building up of a sustained readership together constitute the pre-meditated mental world of the so-called 'owners' or 'operators' world over culminating to the successful manipulation of the resource base (capital) at their command.

In spite of all the visible and invisible constraints and limitations embedded in such a collective and cumulative social production, some enterprising and smart individuals always emerge as uniquely singled out entity, who can afford to curve out a special niche for their meaningful existence in the given set up. They are able to do it in terms of their own excellence by way of idealistic, scholastic and stylistic projection of the 'self' in the continuing system.

Pat Lovett's book, Journalism in India, was published in 1929 by The Banna Publishing Company, Calcutta (now Kolkata). Lovett could not see the publication as he had passed away on 2 January 1928, a year before the book was launched. The book is a compilation of two essays, the first one is an endowment lecture, titled 'Journalism in India' delivered at the University of Calcutta in 1926 and the second one is his autobiographical reminiscences, 'An Outsider's Odyssey"", written in the early 1920s.

'Journalism in India' was Lovett's Adhar Chandra Mookerjee Lecture at the invitation of the University. This annual endowment lecture was instituted by the University in 1918 with a provision to invite a distinguished scholar to deliver alternately, either in science or in humanities, at least two lectures. Adhar Chandra Mookerjee was a professor of History at Scottish Church College in Kolkata and a member of the Calcutta University Senate as well.

The University invited Lovett to deliver the Adhar Chandra Mookerjee Lecture for the year 1924. The lecture sessions, however, were arranged in 1926. Lovett spoke on 'Journalism in India' in two parts on two different days, first on 18 April and then, after five months, on 16 September 1926.

Lovett was then widely recognised as one of the nationally acclaimed journalists working in Kolkata. He was the editor of The Capital, a Kolkata-based English-language commercial and financial periodical with a nation-wide reputation.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages