Four hostile newspapers: The role of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Arthur Griffith in constructing a national identity in India and Ireland

Although historians have begun to explore the impact of Irish nationalism on India's nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, few studies have examined the link between Irish and Indian journalism in that same era. While the Indian National Congress and the Irish Parliamentary Party pursued constitutional means to achieve Home Rule, their elitist composition ensured that neither enjoyed broad appeal. Thus, the emergence of a viable native press played a critical role in the forging of a national identity. In the vanguard of the movement were editors Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Arthur Griffith, whose newspapers provided a valuable forum for the masses, framing the national debate with urgency and lucidity. Individually, these journalists and statesmen articulated, in print and in public, the essential tenets of Irish and Indian nationalist policy. Together, their combined assault on their English rulers may have hastened the decline of the British Empire.