In the 1870s, Indian news editors warned their readers of a series of crises threatening India. They saw the famines, wars, and poverty that they were describing as symptoms of the same illness: Colonial governors had failed to implement an ethical system of governance, and had therefore failed to create a healthy body politic, choosing to expend energy in punishing or censoring dissent when they should have been constructing more durable civic institutions. In North India, earlier Mughal traditions of political philosophy and governance offered a template to critique the current state. In drawing on these traditions, editors linked multiple registers of dissent, from simple ‘fables’ about emperors to more sophisticated arguments drawn from newly reinterpreted akhlaq texts, creating a print record of the multilingual, multivalent literary and oral worlds of Indian political thought. The figures of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb, representing the zenith and nadir of Mughal sovereignty, in turn linked popular and learned discussions on statecraft, good governance, and personal responsibility in an age of crisis. The press itself became a meeting point for multivalent discourses connecting South Asian publics, oral and literate, in their exploration of the nature of just rule in the context of empire, calling, in the process, new ‘publics’ into being.

1870年代，印度新闻编辑警告读者，威胁印度的一系列危机。他们看到饥荒，战争和贫困被描述为同一疾病的征兆：殖民地州长没有执行道德的治理体系，因此未能建立健康的政治机构，选择花费精力来惩罚或当他们本应建立更持久的公民机构时，对异议进行审查。在印度北部，莫卧儿（Mughal）较早的政治哲学和治理传统为批评当前国家提供了模板。在借鉴这些传统的过程中，编辑人员将持不同意见的人联系在一起，从关于皇帝的简单“寓言”到从新近重新诠释的阿赫拉格提出的更复杂的论点。文字，创造了印度政治思想多语言，多价文学和口述世界的印刷记录。莫卧儿皇帝阿克巴（Akbar）和奥兰则布（Aurangzeb）的人物代表了莫卧儿主权的最高峰和最低点，这反过来又在危机时代将关于政权，善政和个人责任的广受欢迎的讨论联系在一起。在探讨帝国背景下正义统治的本质并在此过程中召集新的“公众”时，新闻界本身成为了连接南亚公众（无论是口头还是识字）的多价话语的汇合点。