Class X History Chapter 5: Print Culture and the Modern World PDF

# CLASS –X- HISTORY ## CH-5-PRINT CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD ### UNIT-6-INDIA AND THE WORLD OF PRINT * Before the Age of print, India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages * Manuscripts were copi...

# CLASS –X- HISTORY ## CH-5-PRINT CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD ### UNIT-6-INDIA AND THE WORLD OF PRINT * Before the Age of print, India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages * Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or on handmade paper, which were beautifully illustrated. * They were pressed between wooden covers or sewn together to ensure preservation. * Manuscripts, however, were highly expensive and fragile. They had to be handled carefully, and the script was not easy to read as the script was written in different styles. * So manuscripts were not widely used in everyday life. * Even though pre-colonial Bengal had developed an extensive network of village primary schools, students very often did not read texts. * They only learnt to write. Teachers dictated portions of texts from memory and students wrote them down. * Many thus became literate without ever actually reading any kinds of texts. ### Print Comes to India- * The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century. * Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts. * By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in the Konkani and in Kanara languages. * Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin,and in 1713 the first Malayalam book was printed by them. * By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts, many of them translations of older works. * The English language press did not grow in India till quite late even though the English East India Company began to import presses from the late seventeenth century. * From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine that described itself as ‘a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none'. * “The Bengal Gazette” was a private English enterprise that began English printing in India. Hickey also published a lot of gossip about the Company's senior officials in India. * Enraged by this, Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted Hickey, and encouraged the publication of officially sanctioned newspapers that could counter the flow of information that damaged the image of the colonial government. * There were Indians, too, who began to publish Indian newspapers. The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy. ### UNIT-7-RELIGIOUS REFORM AND PUBLIC DEBATES From the early nineteenth century, there were intense debates around religious issues in India. * Some criticised existing practices and campaigned for reform, while others countered the arguments of reformers. Printed tracts and newspapers not only spread the new ideas, but they shaped the nature of the debate. * There was intense controversies between social and religious reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry. * In Bengal, Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821 and the Hindu orthodoxy commissioned the Samachar Chandrika to oppose his opinions. * From 1822, two Persian newspapers were published, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar. * In the same year, a Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay Samachar, made its appearance. * In north India, the ulama feared that colonial rulers would encourage conversion, change the Muslim personal laws. * Urdu and Hindi prints encouraged the reading of religious texts, especially in the vernacular languages. * The Deoband Seminary, founded in 1867, published thousands upon thousands of fatwas telling Muslim readers how to conduct themselves in their everyday lives, and explaining the meanings of Islamic doctrines. * All through the nineteenth century, a number of Muslim sects and seminaries appeared, each with a different interpretation of faith, each keen on enlarging its following and countering the influence of its opponents. * Urdu print helped them conduct these battles in public. * Among Hindus, too, print encouraged the reading of religious texts, especially in the vernacular languages * The first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century text, came out from Calcutta in 1810. * By the mid-nineteenth century, cheap lithographic editions flooded north Indian markets. * From the 1880s, the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published numerous religious texts in vernaculars. * In their printed and portable form, these could be read easily by the faithful at any place and time. * They could also be read out to large groups of illiterate men and women. * Print not only stimulated the publication of conflicting opinions amongst communities, but it also connected communities and people in different parts of India. * Newspapers conveyed news from one place to another, creating pan-Indian identities. ### UNIT-8-NEW FORMS OF PUBLICATION Printing created a new kinds of writing. I. The novel, a literary form developed in Europe. It soon acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles II. Lyrics, short stories, essays about social and political matters were other new literary III. Visual culture - With an increasing number of printing presses, visual images could be easily reproduced in multiple copies. * Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images/paintings for mass circulation. * Cheap prints and calendars could be bought even by the poor to decorate the walls of their homes or places of work. These prints began shaping popular ideas about modernity and tradition, religion and politics, and society and culture. * By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers, commenting on social and political issues. Some caricatures ridiculed the educated Indians' fascination with Western tastes and clothes, while others expressed the fear of social change. * Women's reading increased enormously in middle-class homes. Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and sent them to schools. * Many journals began to explain why women should be educated. * Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed and Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances. Sometimes, rebel women defied such prohibition. * A) In East Bengal, Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household, learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen. Later, she wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban which was published in 1876. It was the first full-length autobiography published in the Bengali language. * B) From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women – about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served. * C) In the 1880s, in present-day Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows. * D) A woman in a Tamil novel expressed what reading meant to women who were so greatly confined by social regulations: ‘For various reasons, my world is small More than half my life's happiness has come from books ...' While Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi print culture had developed early, Hindi printing began seriously only from the 1870s. Soon, a large segment of it was devoted to the education of women * E) In the early twentieth century, journals, written for and sometimes edited by women, became extremely popular. They discussed issues like women's education, widowhood, widow remarriage and the national movement. Some of them offered household and fashion lessons to women and brought entertainment through short stories and serialised novels. * F) In Punjab, too, a similar folk literature was widely printed from the early twentieth century. Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling Istri Dharm to teach women how to be obedient wives. The Khalsa Tract Society published cheap booklets with a similar message. Many of these were in the form of dialogues about the qualities of a good woman. * G) In Bengal, an entire area in central Calcutta – the Battala was devoted to the printing of popular books. Here you could buy cheap editions of religious tracts and scriptures, as well as literature that was considered obscene and scandalous. By the late nineteenth century, a lot of * these books were being profusely illustrated with woodcuts and coloured lithographs. Pedlars took the Battala publications to homes, enabling women to read them in their leisure time. ### Print and the Poor People * Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of 'low caste' protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri (1871). * In the twentieth century, B.R.Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker in Madras, better known as Periyar, wrote powerfully on caste and their writings were read by people all over India. * Local protest movements and sects also created a lot of popular journals and tracts criticising ancient scriptures and envisioning a new and just future. * Workers in factories were too overworked and lacked the education to write much about their experiences. * But Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote and published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 to show the links between caste and class exploitation. * The poems of another Kanpur millworker, who wrote under the name of Sudarshan Chakr between 1935 and 1955, were brought together and published in a collection called Sacchi Kavitayan. * By the 1930s, Bangalore cotton millworkers set up libraries to educate themselves, following the example of Bombay workers. * These were sponsored by social reformers who tried to restrict excessive drinking among them, to bring literacy and, sometimes, to propagate the message of nationalism. ### UNIT-9-PRINT AND CENSORSHIP Under the East India Company, the early control were directed against Englishmen in India who were critical of Company misrule and hated the actions of particular Company officers. The Company was worried that such criticisms might be used by its critics in England to attack its trade monopoly in India In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on the Irish Press Laws. It provided the government with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press. From now on the government kept regular track of the vernacular newspapers published in different provinces. When a report was judged as seditious, the newspaper was warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press was liable to be seized and the printing machinery confiscated. Despite repressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India.