Written by Devasis Chattopadhyay

There was a time when India made things and spoke about making them with seriousness and pride. I am not referring to the recent ‘Make in India’ slogan, but to an older era when the language of industry, enterprise, and capital had intellectual weight. That language had a home in Calcutta, a city where commerce and ideas were intertwined. Its clearest expression was a weekly newspaper called Capital, a pioneering venture that did not merely report business, but created the very category of business and financial journalism in India.

On November 18, 1888, in Calcutta, Capital: A Weekly Journal of Commerce appeared in print for the first time. Decades before publications such as The Economic Times or Business Standard were conceived, Capital defined what economic reporting could be in India. It would endure for 91 uninterrupted years, until 1979. During the course of its publication, it shaped commercial discourse long before “business journalism” became an established media category.

A newspaper that invented business journalism

Founded by two Calcutta businessmen, Shirley Tremearne and William Harold Targett, it was printed by A Acton at the Caledonian Steam Printing Company at 3 Wellesley Place in what is now B B D Bagh. Its office, W H Targett & Company, stood at 4 Waterloo Street, now Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah Sarani. Tremearne served as the founding editor and managing director.

The declaration on its positioning was precise: “A Weekly Commercial Paper Devoted to the Interests of Capitalists and Employers of Labour.”

In an India still imagining its economic future, Capital supplied commercial language, data, and discipline. It began as a 32-page publication and expanded to nearly 80 pages by the interwar years. It reported on trade, production, taxation, infrastructure, labour relations, and politics with balanced authority and clarity. During the Second World War, when speculation ran feverish and fortunes were pursued recklessly, investors turned to Capital not for drama but for sober interpretation of markets.

Capital did not merely report commerce. It taught society how to think economically.

Why Calcutta made this possible

The paper could only have been born in the Calcutta of that era. The decades after 1885 were formative. The Bengal Renaissance reshaped civic life. The Indian National Congress had been founded. Nationalism, imperial authority, reform, and resistance coexisted in debate.

The city herself embodied modernity. As imperial capital, she possessed one of Asia’s most advanced infrastructures. Underground water pipes and drainage systems were laid in the 1870s. Horse-drawn trams and gas lighting followed in the 1880s. Telephones arrived by 1882, motor cars by the 1890s, and electric trams and fans by the turn of the century. Managing agency houses directed hundreds of enterprises across tea, jute, coal, steel, engineering, and shipping. Head offices of major banks and insurance companies were in this city.

Capital chronicled this industrial organism week after week. Though primarily financial, it addressed civic and political questions, linking commerce with public ethics. By its 50^th  anniversary, just before the Second World War, it had become the standard national reference for company news, market trends, and industrial reporting.

Shirley Tremearne and the circles of power

Shirley Tremearne was not merely an editor. He occupied the nerve centre of imperial Calcutta’s commercial life. Until 1887, he served as an Assistant Registrar of the Original Side of the Calcutta High Court. He headed merchants’ and mercantile groups, represented the ‘Calcutta Traders’ Association’ in the corporation, and was an influential member of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce.

His networks extended further. He was closely associated with Armenian business magnate Apcar Alexander Apcar, president of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce. Tremearne became a director of Apcar’s Shibpore (Howrah) Jute Manufacturing Company Limited in 1895. He served on the Board of the Alipore Zoological Garden alongside the Nawab of Murshidabad, the Maharaja of Burdwan, and senior civil servants. He was a director of the managing agency house, Bird & Company Limited, too. And, he was also the managing director of the Great Eastern Hotel around that time.

In 1905, during the agitation against the first Partition of Bengal, Tremearne attempted to form a union of journalists of European and Indian origin to protest against Lord Curzon’s (1899–1905) anti-India policies. Alongside Moti Lal Ghosh of Amrita Bazar Patrika, he supported Home Rule and the Swadeshi movement, as recorded by Paramananda Dutt in his 1935 biography of his uncle Moti Lal Ghosh.

Innovation in ink

Capital achieved several journalistic firsts. Its column ‘Ditcher’s Diary’ pioneered personalised financial commentary long before such writing became common. In 1937, it published the first systematic share indices of the Calcutta Stock Exchange, allowing investors to read economic trends empirically.

Long before business television or glossy magazines, it offered rigorous analysis of tea, cotton, jute, sugar, tobacco, coal, and steel companies. Its archives, preserved at the National Library of India in Alipore, Kolkata and at New York University’s South Asia Materials Project, remain invaluable.

Scholars Aruna Magier and Judy Alspach have noted that for historians of Indian industry, its importance is unmatched. It contains extensive quantitative and qualitative material on Indian enterprise, including early data on Tata companies, the Indian stock market, and banking.

Issues from April and May 1947 are especially revealing. In an editorial titled ‘New Taxation and Existing Enterprise’, the paper warned that future fiscal policy risked becoming “a brake on progress”. Its column ‘Current Coin’ documented strikes, inflation, and uncertainty, observing that trade must continue “in the midst of anxiety”.

These pages capture a nation approaching independence with hope and apprehension, aware that freedom required economic steadiness.

From authority to obscurity

After Independence, Capital continued publication, though its founding generation had largely passed away or migrated to either England or Australia. The era of state planning and the licence-permit regime narrowed the space for independent economic debate. Yet the paper persisted, operating under financial strain but retaining its measured tone.

By the 1970s, however, the media scenario in India had changed. Daily financial newspapers such as The Economic Times and Business Standard, along with magazines like Business India, emphasised speed, circulation, and marketing. In February 1979, India Today noted that the country’s oldest financial journal, Capital, was nearing closure. Later that year, after 91 years of uninterrupted publication and a circulation of around 4,500 copies, Capital folded quietly.

Its end was more than institutional. It marked the fading of a belief that journalism, industry, and public reasoning could coexist without spectacle or political bias.

The present question

Today, economic debate centres on quarterly sentiment, start-up valuations, and statistical adjustments. Services, information technology, finance, and the gig economy dominate our growth narratives. These sectors are important, but they cannot replace a durable manufacturing base.

Devasis Chattopadhyay is a narrative history writer and a columnist