About this stamp
A Century of an Odia Newspaper
India Post issued this ₹5 stamp on 6 October 2019 for the centenary of The Samaja, the Odia newspaper founded in 1919 by Gopabandhu Das (1877–1928), the freedom fighter and educationist known as Utkalmani. He started it as a weekly to spread his ideas and wake the people of Odisha to their freedom and their duty to the nation.
Gopabandhu Das
Influenced by Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s Deccan Education Society, he set up the school at Satyabadi in Puri district and became its secretary. Through The Samaja he pressed for four things: uniting all the Odia-speaking tracts, permanent protection against floods and famine, the right of Odias to make salt free of excise duty, and education on the Satyabadi model. He brought Gandhi to Odisha in 1921 for the Non-cooperation Movement, was arrested that year and released from Hazaribagh jail on 26 June 1924. Subhas Chandra Bose called him the father of the national movement in Odisha.
The Newspaper Today
The Samaja is owned by the Servants of the People Society (Lok Sevak Mandal), founded by Lala Lajpat Rai, and the people associated with it over the years include Purushottam Das Tandon, Balwant Rai Mehta and Lal Bahadur Shastri. Published first from Cuttack, it now has editions in Bhubaneswar, Sambalpur, Rourkela, Balasore, Berhampur, Visakhapatnam and Kolkata, and, according to India Post, a circulation of nearly 350,000 and about 1.6 million readers. Its relief committee helps in natural calamities, and it runs a 100-bed hospital, the Gopabandhu Institute of Medical Science and Research, near Athgarh.
On the Stamp
The stamp shows a portrait of Gopabandhu Das below the newspaper’s Odia masthead, against old pages of the paper, with “The Samaja 1919–2019”. It was designed by Brahm Prakash, with the cancellation by Nenu Gupta; 406,450 were printed by wet offset at the Security Printing Press, Hyderabad.
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