Lahore at one time had more newspapers published every day than any other city in Pakistan. After the events of 1857, the city saw new newspapers appearing almost every month. One description tells us of Lahore as a city of ‘gardens, colleges, poets and newspapers’.

But the first official newspaper … newsletters by current standards … came to the city in the form of hand-written copies of “Akhbar Deorhi Sardar Ranjit Singh Bahadar”, which was a description of the court proceedings of the Lahore Darbar. They were written in Persian and dated according to the Hijri calendar. The earliest known copy of this rare newspaper is an 1810 version that the spies of the Peshwa of the Marathas managed to acquire and lies in the Archaeological Survey of India office in Poona (Pune). Copies of these are available with the Lahore Museum with a lot of the originals stored in the Indian Punjab’s State Archives at Patiala.

Once the Sikh rule ended in 1849, among the first printed newspapers to appear in Lahore was the Urdu newspaper Koh-e-Noor, owned by Harsukh Rai of Bulandshahr, and The Tribune owned by Dayal Singh Majithia, the son of Sardar Lehna Singh, the richest Sikh Sardar of Lahore who had served in the army of Ranjit Singh. Along with these a leading Muslim of Delhi, Syed Muhammad Azeem, moved to Lahore along with a second-hand press purchased in Agra in 1848 and he set up his press called The Lahore Chronicle Press at the Naulakha ‘haveli’ opposite the yet to be built railway station. This was before the British had officially taken over Punjab in 1849. He was to go on to set up a famous newspaper The Lahore Chronicle, which was to morph into the famous The Civil and Military Gazette. This newspaper in which also worked Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill as a correspondent covering the Malakand Campaign, sadly closed down after 125 years in 1963.

But Syed Muhammad Azeem had sold his shares in the company and moved in 1856 to Chowk Wazir Khan with a new press and produced an Urdu newspaper called The Punjabi. The ‘breaking news’ section of this newspaper during the events of 1857 saw its copies being sold in the black market. This newspaper closed in 1890, five years after the death of Syed Azeem.

During the same period a vicious campaign erupted in Lahore among two Hindu organisations, they being the Agnihotri and the Dayanand sects. Both had set up their own printing presses, which had led to intense pamphleteering against each other. These negative activities led to several Hindi newspapers appearing in Lahore, almost all sectarian in nature. Prominent among such newspapers were Arya and Arya Musafir and a moderate Hindi newspaper called Akashwani. The Sikhs had their own newspaper called Khalsa Samachar in Gurmukhi, which was originally published from Amritsar, but then set up a Lahore edition in 1887.

Another prominent newspaper was The Punjab Observer, set up in 1893 by Khawaja Ahmad Shah of Ludhiana, with Sir Abdul Qadir as its first editor. It closed down in 1918. It seems that newspapers lasted as long as their owners were alive. But the very first Urdu newspaper based on the lithographic method in the subcontinent was ‘Delhi Oordoo Ukhbar’ which started in 1844 and closing in 1849. Its peak circulation was 79 copies.

In Lahore, between 1858 and 1902 two major Urdu newspapers came out, they being Paisa Akhbar in 1887 and Sul-e-Kul in 1902. In 1915, the magazine Al-Hilal was started by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. His powerful words saw him expelled to Ranchi, so under the guise of Madina with Hamidul Ansari as editor, a new magazine was launched.

But the major newspaper in Hindi in Lahore was launched in 1920, titled Bande Matram, with Sardar Mohan Singh Sawhney as the editor. In Urdu, the biggest and most popular newspaper to appear from Lahore was Maulana Zafar Ali Khan’s Zamindar. This newspaper is considered the pioneer of modern Urdu newspapers in Lahore and Punjab. To match this effort in 1923, Mahashe Khushal Chand launched his Milap, which was an Arya Samaj newspaper. Between 1919 and 1939, the major Hindi newspapers being published in Lahore were Shakti, Hindi Milap and Arjan.

By 1947, the number of newspapers coming out of Lahore multiplied. In 1940, the Nawa-e-Waqt was launched and it played a major role in the Pakistan Movement. It remains the oldest continuously published Urdu newspaper of Lahore and Pakistan. To match this, the daily ‘Jang’ was launched in 1946 which is the largest circulating newspaper of Lahore and the country now. In 1946, a major English-language newspaper was launched with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the founder. It was the daily Dawn of Karachi which now also publishes from Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar.

The new country also saw the city have two major English language newspapers, they being The Pakistan Times and the Urdu daily Imroze of Mian Iftikharuddin and the old Lahore Chronicle Press-owned The Civil and Military Gazette (C&MG) battle it out as Pakistan’s premier dailies. Both met terrible ends as the military dictatorship of Gen Ayub Khan clamped down on them. As The Pakistan Times espoused progressive views the military stepped in and ‘nationalised’ it, only to follow up with jailing many prominent journalists in fake conspiracy plots. Ultimately, in the days of Gen Ziaul Haq, the famous PT of Lahore closed down and the declaration was taken over by the Jang Media Group which also took away the famous PT Archives.

The C&MG met an even more terrible end because the new owners were more interested in the land and building belonging to the newspaper. It also possessed the rare C&MG Archives, which every library in the world was interested in. Those days a figure of US$3m for it was being bandied about. The building today houses a huge commercial plaza on The Mall.

In the pre-Partition period just as Hindi sub-sects battled it out in print, the Muslims were no less. They carried out this communal fight into Pakistan, which we all know has today reached dizzying levels. One colourful example of this communal yet ‘commercially viable’ pastime was in the politics of the Majlis-e-Ahrar activist Agha Shorish Kashmiri in his magazine, Chattan, and that of his rival, the Jamaat-i-Islami’s moderate Maulana Kausar Niazi, in his magazine Shahab, focusing on the Ahmadiya issue. These two journalists, in what is legend among journalists, once physically attacked each another in Lahore’s Old Tollinton Market.

So we see that newspapers in a free Pakistan in Lahore became the centre of religious activism, which reflected the internal politics of the city, more so the country. This was very much in line with the pre-Partition trend among Hindi newspapers. As the great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz said in a newspaper interview: “After the Great War, thanks to colonial policy, all newspapers represented one shade of communal prejudice or another. Some excelled in even hating their own co-religionists. Even pacifist Buddhists excelled in it. Colonialism effectively fanned communalism and hence Pakistan emerged. Now Muslims fan prejudices against other Muslim sects. The outcome will be dreadful.”

The emergence of military dictatorship saw a very different trend as a clampdown on newspapers started. Journalists were whipped. Many fled the country. But starting from October 1958, we see new newspapers emerge in Lahore. By 2015, the rise and fall of both Urdu and English-language newspapers continued. We have before us the Nawa-e-Waqt coming up with its English daily The Nation, and even with a split in the Nizami family, a second English daily called ‘Pakistan Today’ emerged. New business houses realising the media as “an asset that guarantees profit in a democratic Pakistan” set up newspapers like the daily Express, Daily Times, The News and the Frontier Post.

In the Urdu language, as media persons gained patronage, some questionable at the best of times, they started producing their own newspapers. Among the first such newspaper was the daily Mashriq. The emergence of computer technology meant that the cost of production drastically reduced and expensive calligraphers were no longer required. To name a few, we see in Lahore the emergence of Urdu-language dailies like Khabrain, Pakistan, Dunya, Nai Baat and Ausaf.

But the newspapers of Lahore continue to lead the rest of Pakistan in its variety and quality. A quantum change in their content can be seen, given a new form of media in television and their ‘almost vicious’ talk shows. The great Richard Dimbleby, in a 1953 radio interview, predicted that “the likely possibility of the anchor being more important than the guest is a grave danger that could be its undoing”. That age is among us today. But then the print media competes by engaging the best and ‘famous’ columnists.

In a way this is a universal phenomenon where ‘breaking news’ on television leads to newspaper columnists dwelling on the wider picture. This has seen newspaper owners branching out into television stations of their own, one complimenting the other and competing with others.

From the 1819, the print media beginning of the Lahore Darbar of Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s Persian language hand-written ‘akhbars’ to the modern tabloid-sized and print news dailies owning television stations, the age and power of the media is upon us. Their strength and power in modern Pakistan lies in their diversity. In a way, for better or for worse, without them modern democracy would collapse.

(The writer is a journalist and author and an expert on Lahore.)