Communications, media and the imperial experience: Britain and India in the twentieth century

Chandrika Kaul’s 2003 volume Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922 was the first detailed analysis of British press reporting of India. It demonstrated the British Government’s attempts to manipulate media coverage in the interests of maintaining imperial control. It also showed how this was countered by increasingly sophisticated use of the press by Indian nationalists to further their cause. By demonstrating how the British press was a central institution of the Raj, the volume made a major contribution to British and imperial media history. Since then, Kaul has systematically pursued further detailed archival research which examines the history of the British Empire in India from a media perspective. Many examples of her work can be found in major journals and edited collections