Early Indian Print Culture: Key Aspects

India and the World of Print

• Before the print age, India had a rich tradition of handwritten manuscripts in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and vernacular languages.
• Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or handmade paper, beautifully illustrated and preserved between wooden covers.
• The manuscripts were expensive, fragile, and difficult to read due to varying scripts, limiting their widespread use.
• Pre-colonial Bengal had village primary schools, but students mainly learned to write through dictation from memory, rather than reading texts.
• Many became literate without reading texts.

Print Arrives in India

• The printing press came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-16th century.
• Jesuit priests learned Konkani and printed tracts and by 1674, about 50 books were printed in Konkani and Kanara.
• In 1579, Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in Cochin, and in 1713, the first Malayalam book.
• By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries printed 32 Tamil texts, including translations.
• English language presses grew later, despite the English East India Company importing presses from the late 17th century.
• In 1780, James Augustus Hickey began editing the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine that was a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none.
• The "Bengal Gazette" was a private English enterprise and India's first English newspaper.
• Hickey published gossip about Company officials
• Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted Hickey and supported officially sanctioned newspapers.
• Indians began publishing newspapers, with the weekly Bengal Gazette started by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, close to Rammohun Roy, being the first.

Religious Reform and Public Debates

• Intense debates around religious issues in India began in the early 19th century.
• Reformers criticized existing practices, while others countered their arguments, with printed materials spreading and shaping these debates.
• Controversies arose between social and religious reformers and Hindu orthodoxy over issues, including widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood, and idolatry.
• Rammohun Roy published Sambad Kaumudi from 1821 in Bengal, while Hindu orthodoxy started Samachar Chandrika.
• From 1822, two Persian newspapers, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, were published.
• A Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay Samachar, appeared.
• In North India, ulama feared colonial rulers would change Muslim personal laws.
• Urdu and Hindi prints encouraged religious text reading in vernacular languages.
• The Deoband Seminary, established in 1867, published thousands of fatwas to guide Muslims' daily lives and explain Islamic doctrines.
• Numerous Muslim sects and seminaries emerged in the 19th century.
• Urdu print enabled these groups to conduct their debates publicly.
• Print encouraged the reading of religious texts among Hindus, especially in vernacular languages.
• The first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas was published in Calcutta in 1810.
• By the mid-19th century, cheap lithographic editions flooded North Indian markets.
• From the 1880s, Naval Kishore Press and Shri Venkateshwar Press published religious texts in vernaculars.
• Printed texts were portable, easily read or read aloud to large groups, and promoted conflicting opinions and connected communities.
• Newspapers spread news, creating pan-Indian identities.

New Forms of Publication

• Printing created new writing forms like the novel, which developed distinct Indian styles.
• Lyrics, short stories, and essays about social and political matters emerged.
• Visual culture expanded with increased printing, allowing mass reproduction of images.
• Painters like Raja Ravi Varma created images/paintings for mass circulation.
• Cheap prints and calendars became available to decorate homes and workplaces with prints shaping ideas.
• By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons in journals and newspapers commented on social and political issues, ridiculing educated Indians' tastes while expressing fears of social change.
• Women's reading increased, with husbands and fathers educating womenfolk.
• Many journals explained why women should be educated.
• Some Hindus believed a literate girl would be widowed; Muslims feared Urdu romances, but women defied these prohibitions.
• In East Bengal, Rashsundari Debi secretly learned to read and wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban.
• From the 1860s, Kailashbashini Debi and other Bengali women wrote about women's confinement and unjust treatment.
• In the 1880s, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passion about upper-caste Hindu women's lives.
• A Tamil novel expressed that books gave happiness to women confined by social rules:
• Hindi printing developed seriously from the 1870s and focused on women's education.
• Early 20th-century journals, written for and by women, discussed women's education, widowhood, remarriage, and nationalism.
• Folk literature in Punjab, like Ram Chaddha's Istri Dharm Vichar, taught women to be obedient wives.
• Battala in Calcutta was dedicated to printing popular books, including cheap religious texts and scandalous literature adorned with woodcuts.

Print and the Poor People

• Jyotiba Phule wrote about caste injustices in Gulamgiri (1871).
• In the 20th century, B.R. Ambedkar and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) wrote powerfully on caste.
• Local movements created journals and tracts criticizing scriptures and envisioning a new future.
• Workers in factories had little education to express their experiences.
• Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 to link caste and class.
• The 1935-1955 poems of Sudarshan Chakr were published as Sacchi Kavitayan.
• By the 1930s, Bangalore millworkers set up libraries following Bombay's example.
• Social reformers sponsored these libraries to promote literacy, sometimes linking it to nationalism.

Print and Censorship

• The East India Company initially controlled Englishmen critical of Company misrule in India.
• In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed and modeled on Irish Press Laws.
• It allowed the government to censor vernacular press reports and editorials.
• Authorities tracked vernacular newspapers, and newspapers faced warnings.
• Papers were seized if warnings were ignored or the printing machinery confiscated.
• Nationalist newspapers grew despite these measures.

Explore manuscripts, visual culture, and the arrival of the printing press in India. Understand the Bengal Gazette's origins and the evolution of female literacy. Uncover the social impact and debates surrounding early print media.