The Civil and Military Gazette was a daily English-language newspaper founded in 1872 in British India. It was published from Lahore, Simla and Karachi, some times simultaneously, until its closure in 1963.[1] The archives are owned by Lahore-based businessman Humayun Naseer Shaikh and have been digitized by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's Citizens Archive of Pakistan.
The Lahore and Simla editions of the paper continued to be published concurrently until 1949, when the Simla branch was closed.
The Civil and Military Gazette began publishing in Karachi a week before its branch in Simla closed. However, the CMG in Karachi was very short-lived, the publication lasting a mere 4 years.
During the CMG's publication in Lahore, Simla, and Karachi, the frequency of publication changed thrice as follows:
Date changed
Until
Frequency of Publication
Branches affected
January 2, 1929
November 14, 1932
Daily (except Tuesday)
Lahore, Simla
November 15, 1932
December 27, 1932
Daily
Lahore, Simla
June 1, 1945
October 24, 1949
Daily (except Monday)
Lahore, Karachi
Notable staff members
Rudyard Kipling
The Civil and Military Gazette was the workplace of renowned British author and poet, Rudyard Kipling. It was referred to by Kipling as his "mistress and most true love."[3]
When Kipling joined the staff at the Lahore CMG in 1882, the editor-in-chief was Stephen Wheeler. 1886 brought a change of editors at the newspaper. Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom, and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.[6] His first collection of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, contained 28 stories that had initially found publication in the CMG.[7]
Rudyard Kipling eventually left the Civil and Military Gazette in 1887, to move to its sister-newspaper in Allahabad, The Pioneer.[4]
Mahbub Jamal Zahedi
The last editor of CMG was Abdul Hamid Sheikh, who wrote Lahore Notes under 'HS' in the Pakistan Times after the CMG shut down.
Mahbub Jamal Zahedi joined the Civil and Military Gazette in 1963, at a time when its last branch, situated in Lahore, was about to cease publication. He served there for only a few months, before he moved to Dawn in Karachi.[8]
^Kipling, Rudyard (1935). "Something of mysel". public domain. Archived from the original on February 23, 2014. Retrieved September 6, 2008.also: 1935/1990. Something of myself and other autobiographical writings. Cambridge University Press. ISBN0-521-40584-X.
^Rutherford, Andrew (1987). Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of "Plain Tales from the Hills", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-281652-7
^Carpenter, H. and M. Prichard. 1984. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, and New York. ISBN0-19-860228-6
^"MJ Zahedi no more". The Daily Star. December 26, 2008. Archived from the original on December 4, 2014. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
