The Bombay Samachar – Asia’s Oldest Newspaper
For anyone with an interest in Parsi history and the story of the press in India, a documentary on Mumbai Samachar made by Zahan Sawhney is well worth a watch.
Mumbai Samachar holds a distinction few publications anywhere in the world can claim: it is Asia’s oldest continuously published newspaper. Founded by the Parsi scholar and priest Fardunjee Marzban, it first appeared on July 1, 1822, as a modest weekly of three small quarto sheets and a half-sheet supplement, fourteen pages in all. That first issue was a snapshot of a very different Bombay — advertisements for lost property and items for sale (mostly placed by Parsis), a short editorial titled simply “Ourselves,” notices of government and court appointments, shipping arrivals and departures, a list of European deaths, and columns of news reprinted from Calcutta, Madras and London, right down to opium prices out of Canton.
Marzban was already a pioneer before the paper existed. He had established the first native-run press in Western India in 1812 and, in 1814, produced a Gujarati calendar a full six years before Calcutta printed its first Bengali equivalent. Mumbai Samachar, launched in 1822, was the capstone of that career — a weekly until 1832, a bi-weekly until 1855, and a daily ever since, published in Gujarati and later also in English.
Over two centuries, the paper built a reputation for sober, fair and independent reporting rather than sensationalism, and for a deliberate editorial policy of giving front-page space to many small advertisers rather than selling that space to a single sponsor — a quiet but distinctive act of journalistic principle. That reputation for objectivity earned it the respect of both the British administration and the Indian nationalist movement, and its pages were frequently cited by freedom fighters including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel during the struggle for independence.
The paper passed through several hands before coming into the ownership of the Cama family in 1933, under Hormusji N. Cama, and it remains under the family’s stewardship today, now printed on modern full-colour, high-speed offset presses. In June 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the paper’s Dwishatabdi Mahotsav, marking 200 years of continuous publication, and released a commemorative postage stamp for the occasion — a fitting national tribute to an institution founded by, and still deeply connected to, the Parsi community.
For a community whose footprint in India has always been outsized relative to its numbers, Mumbai Samachar stands as one of its quieter but most enduring contributions: two centuries of a free press, still running, still Parsi at its roots.