In 1932, the
Indian Express was started by an
Ayurvedic doctor,
P. Varadarajulu Naidu, at
Chennai, being published by his Tamil Nadu press. Soon under financial difficulties, he sold the newspaper to
Swaminathan Sadanand, the founder of
The Free Press Journal, a national
news agency. In 1933, the
Indian Express opened its second office in
Madurai, launching the
Tamil edition,
Dinamani. Sadanand introduced several innovations and reduced the price of the newspaper. Faced with financial difficulties, he sold a part of his stake to Goenka as
convertible debentures. In 1935, when
The Free Press Journal finally collapsed, and after a protracted court battle with Goenka, Sadanand lost ownership of
Indian Express. In 1939, Goenka bought
Andhra Prabha, another prominent
Telugu daily newspaper. The name
Three Musketeers was often used for the three dailies, namely
Indian Express,
Dinamani and
Andhra Prabha. In 1940, the whole premises was gutted by fire.
The Hindu, a rival newspaper, helped considerably in re-launching the paper, by lenting their old building and allowing getting it printed temporarily at one of its Swadesimithran's press and later offered its recently vacated premises at 2 Mount Road, on rent to Goenka, which later became the landmark Express Estates. This relocation also helped the
Express obtain better high speed printing machines. The district judge who led the inquiry into the fire concluded that a
short circuit or
cigarette butt could have ignited the fire and said that the growing city had inadequate fire control support. After Goenka's death in 1991, two of his grandsons, Manoj Kumar Sonthalia and
Viveck Goenka split the group into two.
Indian Express Mumbai with all the North Indian editions went to Viveck Goenka, and all the Southern editions, which were grouped as Express Publications Madurai Limited and headquartered in Chennai, went to Sonthalia.
Indian Express began publishing daily on the
internet on 8 July 1996. Five months later, the website
expressindia.com attracted "700,000 hits every day, excepting weekends when it fell to 60% of its normal levels". ==Circulation==