Laying the foundation stone of a new building for The Pioneer newspaper in Lucknow in 1936, the British Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, reminded his audience, likely comprising many journalists, of the power the press wielded over public institutions and public opinion. The proprietors and editors of newspapers have a ‘grave responsibility’, he said, ‘towards the State and towards the public’. In a sense, censorship of publications was acknowledgment— howsoever perverse—of the power wielded by the printed word. An Indian journalist has described the 1930s as the decade of the ‘adulthood of the Indian Press, not to say middle age!’ At the beginning of that decade, The Hindu had already been around for 50 years; the Times of India for almost a century. At the same time, according to the 1931 census, fewer than 10 out of every 100 Indians could read. In fact, colonial authorities termed this low level of literacy a ‘very serious obstacle’ to attaining ‘full self-sufficing nationhood on modern democratic lines’. However, they also recognized that it was precisely this low level of literacy that accorded educated Indians disproportionate influence and gave rumour peculiar force. In 1930 the Simon Commission report commented: