HT@100: One Hundred Years of Hindustan Times and the Nation It Helped Shape

There is something quietly extraordinary about a newspaper outlasting empires, surviving partitions, witnessing the birth of a republic, and still landing on doorsteps a century later. Hindustan Times has done exactly that.

The first edition rolled off the press on September 23, 1924. The paper was launched a day earlier, on September 22, carrying with it the hopes of a country that had not yet won its freedom but was already arguing loudly for it. Delhi was its home. The freedom movement was its context. And truth, at least in aspiration, was its mandate from day one.

Hindustan Times was not born as a commercial enterprise dressed up with editorial ambitions. It was founded by the Akalis with a specific political and cultural purpose during one of the most charged periods in Indian history. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya stepped in to support the paper when it needed steadier ground, and Mahatma Gandhi lent his weight to its early years.

The first editor was KM Panikkar, a scholar and statesman whose appointment set a tone of intellectual seriousness that the paper tried to carry forward. Then in 1937 came perhaps the most symbolically significant chapter in its early history. Devdas Gandhi, the youngest son of Mahatma Gandhi, joined Hindustan Times as managing editor. He held that position until his death in 1957. For two decades, the father's movement and the son's newspaper occupied overlapping moral ground in Indian public life.

A newspaper that began in colonial India has had no shortage of history to report. Partition. Independence. The republic's first elections. Wars. Economic crises. Liberalisation. The technology revolution. Each of these moments tested how journalism responds under pressure.

HT's value over a century has never rested on being first with a headline. It has rested on the credibility accumulated across thousands of editions where the facts held up and the editorial spine did not bend too easily. That kind of institutional reputation is not built in a news cycle. It is built across decades of consistent choices.

In 1936, the Hindi sister publication Hindustan was launched, extending the group's reach into a language spoken by hundreds of millions. That move reflected an understanding, rare for the time, that serious journalism in India could not exist only in English.

September 2024 marked the completion of HT's first century. The celebrations were not merely nostalgic. HT House on KG Marg in New Delhi, the publication's iconic home, was transformed into a visual canvas of national memory. For a week starting September 22, the building came alive each evening with light projections tracing India's journey across a hundred years. The walls that housed a century of journalism became the screen for telling that story back to the city.

A special centenary edition was released, carrying facsimiles of old front pages and long-form reflections on moments that defined both the newspaper and the country. The edition was not a corporate brochure. It was a document of shared history.

Praveen Someshwar, Managing Director and CEO of HT Media, described the centennial as a moment of deep gratitude toward the readers and partners whose trust has sustained the publication across generations. That framing matters. A hundred-year-old newspaper does not survive on institutional momentum alone. It survives because readers keep choosing it over alternatives, day after day, in a media landscape that now offers infinite options.

The challenge going into the second century is the one every legacy publication faces. Print readership has shifted. Digital consumption has fragmented attention across platforms. The audience that once had three newspapers and a radio now has thousands of sources competing for the same morning minute. Navigating that shift while holding onto the credibility that took a century to build is genuinely difficult.

But Hindustan Times enters this next chapter with something very few Indian media brands can claim: an unbroken record of publication through every disruption India has lived through since 1924.

Hindustan Times' centenary, marked as HT@100, celebrates 100 years of journalism that began on September 23, 1924, under the shadow of India's freedom struggle. Founded with the backing of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, shaped by editors like Devdas Gandhi, and grown into a multimedia institution under HT Media, the publication has been both witness and participant in the country's defining moments. As it steps into its second century, Hindustan Times carries a legacy of truth-telling that very few institutions of any kind in India can genuinely claim.