Bengal Gazette, the first newspaper in India, was started in 1780 by:

Concept: The history of the Indian press begins with private printing ventures run by Europeans inside the East India Company's settlements, and not with official gazettes or the later nationalist papers. A paper's claim to be the country's 'first' is settled by the date on which its opening printed issue actually appeared, so naming its founder means naming the person who owned and worked the press that produced that earliest issue.

Application: In Calcutta an Irish-born printer, James Augustus Hicky, set up a press of his own towards the end of the 1770s. On 29 January 1780 he brought out Hicky's Bengal Gazette, also titled the Calcutta General Advertiser, a two-sheet weekly and the earliest printed newspaper published in India. Its columns lampooned Warren Hastings and senior officials of the Company, and Hicky was tried for libel, fined and imprisoned in 1782, after which his types were seized.

Cross-check: Placing the other names on the same timeline shows why none of them belongs to an event of 1780.

• Annie Besant's Indian journalism belongs to the twentieth century: she ran the weekly Commonweal and took charge of the daily New India in 1914, and founded the Home Rule League in 1916.

• A.O. Hume, a retired officer of the Bengal Civil Service, addressed his open letter to the graduates of Calcutta University in 1883 and was central to convening the Indian National Congress at Bombay in 1885.

• 'Lord Cripson' matches no figure in the record of colonial India; the similar-sounding Sir Stafford Cripps reached India in 1942 with constitutional proposals.

The Bengal Gazette of 1780 was therefore started by James Augustus Hicky.