Jehangir Patel, editor of the Parsi community magazine Parsiana , acquired the weekly Anglo-Gujarati newspaper Kaiser-i-Hind in the early ...
Jehangir Patel, editor of the Parsi community magazine Parsiana, acquired the weekly Anglo-Gujarati newspaper Kaiser-i-Hind in the early 1980s. Along with it, he also got control of its hoary printing press. Located on Bazaar Gate Street in the Fort of Bombay, most of the printing equipment in the press was hopelessly outdated. At a time when offset presses were being commonly used for printing newspapers, the English text of the Kaiser-i-Hind was set using Linotype and Monotype machines, a technology which had been outmoded for a few decades. The Gujarati text was still being composed by hand as it had been done for the previous two hundred years in Bombay.
When Patel ventured up into the loft of the press, he discovered that the entire area was piled high with mouldering newspapers. A quick look at the newspapers revealed that they were the volumes of the Kaiser-i-Hind going back a hundred years to 1882, the year in which it was founded. Recognising the newspaper archive as a unique treasure, Patel preserved them, unlike many of his contemporaries who, at about the same time, were discarding their print heritage without much thought.
Early days
The Kaiser-i-Hind, which translates into Emperor of India, was started on 1 January, 1882 by Framji Cowasji Mehta as a Gujarati weekly published...
