The Medium and Its Message: Reporting the Austro-Prussian War in the Times of India

This paper explores the multifarious relations between technologies of communication and the messages they convey. The focus of the paper is on the electric telegraph, but the steamship, the other technology used to transmit messages between Britain and India during the mid-nineteenth century, is also considered. The messages examined are news about the Austro-Prussian War published in the Times of India, one of the leading Indian newspapers of the period. Through a comparative analysis which takes into account both the content and the form of war news, as well as the routes of communication along which news traveled, the paper explores the ways in which these technologies of communication and the environment in which they were used conditioned the message and constructed fields of vision for readers of the newspaper.