The Hindu

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hindu was founded on the 20th of September 1878 in Madras, by a group of six men who called themselves the Triplicane Six. Four of them were law students, and two were teachers. Among them was G. Subramania Iyer, a schoolteacher from Tanjore district, and M. Veeraraghavacharyar, a lecturer at Pachaiyappa's College. Few readers picking up that first weekly edition could have known they were holding the seed of a paper that would one day be named one of the ten best newspapers in the world by The Times of London.

  What began as a modest weekly would become a daily within eleven years, and eventually a publication that reached readers from 21 locations across 11 states of India. Yet the story of The Hindu is not simply one of growth. It is a story of contested ownership, dynasty, journalistic courage in the face of government pressure, and a family whose name became synonymous with a newspaper spanning nearly a century and a half.

  How did a paper started by six men in late-nineteenth-century Madras survive internal feuds, government hostility, and the shift to digital publishing? And what does it mean for a newspaper to claim the nickname 'the Maha Vishnu of Mount Road'?

• 2. The Triplicane Six

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  T.T. Rangacharya, P.V. Rangacharya, D. Kesava Rao Pantulu and N. Subba Rao Pantulu were the four law students in the founding group, and they were led by Subramania Iyer and Veeraraghavacharyar. That combination of legal training and academic rigor shaped the paper's early character: from its new address at 100 Mount Road, it issued a quarto-size paper whose front pages were filled with advertisements, a practice that would not end until 1958.

  Between those advertisement pages, the paper was described as carrying 'more views than news'. The Hindu modeled itself partly on the pre-Thomson Times of London, and that journalistic ambition gave it a seriousness that set it apart from other publications of the era.

  The partnership between the two leading founders, Veeraraghavachariar and Subramania Iyer, did not last. In October 1898, it dissolved. Iyer quit the paper, leaving Veeraraghavachariar as the sole owner. He appointed C. Karunakara Menon as editor. But without the energy of the founding partnership, circulation fell sharply, dropping to 800 copies before Veeraraghavachariar decided to sell. The man who stepped in to buy was someone who already knew the paper intimately: S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, who had served as The Hindu's legal adviser since 1895.

• 3. A Family's Paper

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  S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar purchased The Hindu in 1905 and in doing so transformed it from a partnership enterprise into a family institution. The paper has remained family-owned ever since, with Iyengar's descendants jointly owning it through the holding company Kasturi and Sons Ltd.

  For most of its history, senior editorial positions were held either by family members or by those appointed under family direction. The one notable exception was Siddharth Varadarajan, whose tenure would later become the center of a bitter succession dispute. The paper was headed by G. Kasturi from 1965 to 1991, then by N. Ravi from 1991 to 2003, and then by Ravi's brother N. Ram from the 27th of June 2003 to the 18th of January 2011.

  By 2010, the board of Kasturi and Sons had twelve directors. The family's reach extended into both editorial and business operations, a dual presence that gave the Iyengar descendants unusual control over not just what was published but how the company was run. When that control was challenged, the consequences would play out publicly and divisively.

• 4. The Bofors Investigation

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  In April 1987, Swedish Radio alleged that bribes had been paid to senior Indian politicians, officials, and Indian Army officers in exchange for awarding a large arms contract to a Swedish manufacturer. The contract involved the purchase of 155 mm howitzers for the Government of India.

  The Hindu's coverage of what became known as the Bofors scandal stands as one of the paper's most significant journalistic achievements. Over a six-month period, it published scores of original documents that traced secret payments of $50 million into Swiss bank accounts, along with the agreements behind those payments, communications relating to the crisis response, and other material.

  The investigation was led by Chitra Subramaniam, a part-time correspondent reporting from Geneva, supported by Ram in Chennai. The paper's editorial directly accused Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of being party to massive fraud and a cover-up. The scandal became a major embarrassment for Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The episode set the terms of national political discourse on the subject and established The Hindu's reputation for document-backed investigative reporting at the highest level of national politics.

• 5. Succession and Internal Conflict

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  N. Ram resigned in 2011, and his departure set off a succession battle within the Kasturi family that exposed deep divisions over what The Hindu was supposed to be. Ram had appointed Siddharth Varadarajan as his successor, justifying the choice on the principle of separating ownership from editorial management. N. Ravi, Ram's brother, opposed the appointment because it broke the publication's tradition of keeping editorial control within the family.

  Dissident family members accused Varadarajan of being left-leaning. The board of directors of Kasturi and Sons voted 6-6 on reviewing the appointment, and the tie was broken by Ram himself, in his capacity as chairman of the company, voting in favor of his own decision. Narasimhan Murali, in the course of the dispute, alleged that Ram had run The Hindu 'like a banana republic, with cronyism and vested interests ruling the roost'.

  The conflict also drew in Malini Parthasarathy, who had previously served as Executive Editor and who publicly called Ram and certain Hindu employees 'Stalinists', alleging they were working to push her out of the newspaper. In 2015 she became editor herself, and in July 2020 she became chairperson of the group. On the 5th of June 2023, she stepped down on completing her non-extendable three-year term, and Nirmala Lakshman, Kasturi Srinivasan's granddaughter, was unanimously appointed as chairperson, becoming the first woman to hold the role at the company.

• 6. Press Freedom and Government Pressure

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  In 2003, the Jayalalithaa government of Tamil Nadu filed cases against The Hindu for breach of privilege of the state legislative body. The move was widely read as a government assault on press freedom, and The Hindu attracted support from the wider journalistic community.

  That same year, joint managing director N. Murali acknowledged publicly that readers had complained about partial and non-objective reporting. N. Ram was appointed editor-in-chief on the 27th of June 2003 with an explicit mandate to improve structures for upholding quality and objectivity. An editorial in August 2003 diagnosed the newspaper as being affected by the 'editorialising as news reporting' virus and declared a commitment to restoring clear lines between news and opinion.

  A 2014 article in the Indian Journal of Pharmacology praised The Hindu's ongoing journalism and its critique of clinical trials in India, an acknowledgment that the paper's investigative instincts had extended well beyond political coverage. The paper had faced external pressure from governments, defamation suits, and internal feuding, yet its reputation for seriousness remained a consistent asset. In 1968, the American Newspaper Publishers Association gave The Hindu its World Press Achievement Award, and The Times had already placed it among the world's ten best newspapers in 1965.

• 7. Into the Digital Age

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  The Hindu was the first newspaper in India to launch a website, going live at thehindu.com in 1995. It would be fourteen years before the first redesign of that site, which launched in beta on the 15th of August 2009 and went fully live on the 24th of June 2010.

  On the 15th of August 2022, for the first time in its 144-year history, The Hindu began publishing Hindi-translated editorials on its website. The same year it launched The Hindu in School on the 2nd of April 2013, with S. Shivakumar as editor, distributing a special edition for young readers through schools under its Newspaper in Education programme. On the 16th of September 2013, The Hindu Group added a Tamil-language edition with K. Ashokan as editor.

  The paper's commitment to print was tested on the 2nd of December 2015, when The Hindu did not publish a print edition in the Chennai market for the first time since its founding in 1878. Workers could not reach the press building because of the 2015 South Indian floods. That single missed edition, forced by floodwater rather than any editorial decision, underscored just how consistently the paper had maintained its print run across nearly 137 years.