Andhra Patrika was the weekly newspaper of the nationalist movement in the Telugu speaking region founded by Kasinadhuni Nageswara Rao in 1908. It later transformed into a daily newspaper before it closed down in 1991. It helped to shape both modern Telugu language and an identity that resulted in the creation of the state of Andhra Pradesh.
Nageswara Rao founded the weekly as he recognized the need for a Telugu language journal to campaign effectively for the Indian freedom struggle and founded the weekly, and the newspaper wandered all over the territories in which the Telugu language was spoken. Rao moved the newspaper to Madras in 1914 to get closer to Telugus, and after a few years turned it into the first enduring daily in Telugu.
After Nageswara Rao’s death in 1938 his son-in-law, Sivalenka Sambhu Prasad took over the operations. After Sambhu Prasad’s death, his successors closed the Madras edition and began publishing from Vijayawada and later Hyderabad, the capital of Undivided Andhra Pradesh. Circulation declined, and when the new Telugu daily Eenadu made its first appearance in the Audit Bureau lists in 1976, Andhra Patrika was down to 41,000. Eenadu was audited at 60,000. Ten years later, Andhra Patrika had fallen to 24,000; Eenadu had risen to 2,82,000 and was publishing from four centers. Subsequently, Andhra Patrika closed in April 1991.
With circulation at less than 20,000, the descendants of Nageswara Rao and Sambhu Prasad stopped paying their dues to the ABC in 1988 and sold the indebted newspaper in 1989. A dispute then arose over whether the purchaser had acquired full legal control of the company. Lawsuits and questions in the legislature followed, and employees were no longer paid. Towards the end of its life, the newspaper could not be brought out on certain days for “want of money to buy newsprint.”
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