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This article examines one small corner of Indian Ocean print culture by mapping the biographies of two Indian newspapers, Tanganyika Opinion (1923-55) and Tanganyika Herald (1929-62). The figures who emerged from this Anglo-Gujarati print public centred in Dar es Salaam resemble those studied by T. N. Harper in Singapore, who 'seem to present impossibly contradictory layers of belonging' (Harper 2002: 152). The contradictory communities envisioned in Tanganyika's Indian newspapers were in part ideological, bundling together claims of imperial citizenship with diasporic universalisms of religion and nation. Loyalty to the British Empire was a frequent refrain of editors and letter writers, in part to maintain favour with colonial censors but also as a genuine expression of generic aspirations for self-improvement through a universal 'civilization' that accompanied colonial rule. Such sentiments stood oddly alongside nationalist challenges to imperial authority produced by the same writers, which invoked civilization for anti-colonial ends, most obviously in the ideology of Indian National Congress (INC) protests. But more central to this article's concerns are the contradictions that emerged out of the very business of newspaper production. The sharpest of these was the tension between the Gandhian vision of a print culture that was 'a strategy to produce a moral community' independent of both market and state (Hofmeyr 2008: 15), on the one hand, and the messy business of securing resources and readership from an insecure mercantile minority in East Africa on the other. The print culture created by this Indian diasporic intelligentsia, resting upon a socio-economic base of Furnivallian pluralism, with its tight communal atoms linked together by the weak bonds of marketplace interaction, found itself tightly tethered by the limits of willing advertisers, censors, and reading public appetites of colonial Tanganyika.Figure 1
Front page of Tanganyika Herald, 3 March 1931
Historians often use newspapers as depositories of facts and vessels of ideologies in order to reconstruct political narratives and historical imaginations. The present author has used the same two Indian newspapers for such ends in an earlier project (Brennan 1999). But newspapers themselves were produced as informational fragments in composite, a naked business model of advertisements, sports results, commodity prices, official departures and arrivals, and other local notices that competed for space with historians'...