Six young men in Madras started The Hindu with a weekly in 1878
In 1878 four law students and two teachers in Madras launched a weekly paper. Their circulation later sank to just 800 copies, and the paper was sold to its own legal adviser. His family has run The Hindu ever since, turning it into one of India's newspapers of record.
The founders, known as the Triplicane Six, followed two leaders: M. Veeraraghavacharyar, who lectured at a Madras college, and G. Subramania Iyer, a teacher from the Tanjore area. The Hindu first appeared on 20 September 1878 and became a daily in 1889. After the two leaders split in 1898, Veeraraghavacharyar ran it alone, but its early spirit faded along with its readership. In 1905 he sold it to S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, who had served as its legal adviser since 1895.
Iyengar's descendants have owned it since, filling editorial, business and board roles; apart from about two years under S. Varadarajan, top editorial posts stayed with the family or its appointees. G. Kasturi led it from 1965 to 1991, followed by brothers N. Ravi and N. Ram. Nirmala Lakshman became the first woman in the company to take an editorial or managerial role. For decades it had a distinctive look: from its old home at 100 Mount Road it printed front pages full of advertisements, a habit dropped only in 1958. Its weighty editorials earned it the nickname Maha Vishnu of Mount Road.
Its best-known investigation came in 1987 and 1988. After Swedish Radio alleged in April 1987 that bribes had been paid to win an Indian army contract for 155 mm howitzers from the Swedish firm Bofors, The Hindu spent six months publishing scores of original documents tracing $50 million in secret payments to Swiss accounts. The reporting, led from Geneva by part-time correspondent Chitra Subramaniam with N. Ram's support, shaped the national debate and embarrassed the government of Rajiv Gandhi.
It has also been an early adopter. In 1995 it became the first Indian newspaper with a website. It launched an edition for schoolchildren and a Tamil edition in 2013. Floods in 2015 stopped its Chennai print edition for the first time since its founding. As long ago as 1965, The Times of London named it one of the world's ten best newspapers, noting it was read attentively in Delhi despite being published in a provincial capital.
Source: The Hindu
