AUTHOR – UDAY BASU
Publishers – Atlantic Publishers
Available for purchase on Amazon, Flipkart and atlanticbooks.com
BY AMRAPALI CHAKRABORTY
KOLKATA, 23 JANUARY 2024
Rarely does a newspaper turn into an institution. It happens so only when a newspaper not merely dishes out information, but becomes intertwined with the socio-cultural-economic-political fabric of a whole people. The Statesman acquired such a distinction thanks to the untiring efforts of British and Indian journalists who worked in the paper since 1875.
The book chronicles the brand of investigative journalism pioneered by The Statesman. It unfolds how the paper’s founding Editor, Robert Knight, exposed, among many wrongdoings, the oppression of Bengal farmers by barbaric British indigo planters and a railway scam of monumental proportions during the British Raj.
The book shows how Rabindranath Tagore used the paper’s columns to renounce his knighthood after the Jalianwala Bagh massacre and ventilate his differences with Mahatma Gandhi on the latter’s political creed of nonviolence.
There is a scintillating account of how the poet WB Yeats enjoyed and translated Tagore’s poem that won him the Nobel Prize for literature.
The Statesman’s courageous British Editor first broke the news of Bengal famine in 1943 taking advantage of a loophole in British laws that prohibited the use of the word “famine.” The photographs of starvation deaths on Kolkata streets due to the famine published in The Statesman revealed before the world the catastrophic famine.
Sister Nivedita, Lord Curzon, Satyajit Ray, Utpal Dutt, Francois Mitterrand, Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr BC Roy and many other prominent personalities figure in the book.
The author has drawn upon his personal experiences as the paper’s journalist of 40 years’ standing to show how exclusive reports can be produced. One of his early journalistic feats was a report he filed on the first public speech in India by the daughter of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was challenged by the German embassy.
He was then on probation. His boss, Chief Reporter Sujoy Sengupta gave him that important assignment as he had such confidence in his skill. He came out with flying colours thanks to the unstinted support he got from his immediate boss and the illustrious Editor S Nihal Singh.
Many untold stories of the paper with authentic documents about which avid readers all over the country are keen to know are presented in a highly readable style.
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