Print Culture and the Modern World
Print in the nineteenth century and in India
Explain how print spread in the nineteenth century and how it came to India.
New readers in the 19th century. Mass literacy brought three new groups of readers.
- Children: primary school became compulsory, so textbooks mattered. A children's press was set up in France in 1857. The Grimm Brothers collected peasant folk tales and published them in 1812, but edited out anything thought vulgar or unsuitable. So print both saved the old tales and changed them.
- Women: penny magazines and manuals were written for them; famous novelists included Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot, whose heroines had will, strength and the power to think.
- Workers: lending libraries educated clerks and artisans. As the working day got shorter, workers wrote political tracts and autobiographies.
Faster machines, new ways to sell. By the mid-19th century, Richard M. Hoe of New York had built a cylindrical press driven by power: 8,000 sheets per hour, ideal for newspapers. The offset press printed as many as six colours together; later, electric presses sped things up. Publishers found new ways to sell:
- magazines serialised novels, chapter by chapter;
- in the 1920s, cheap 'Shilling Series' in England;
- the book jacket;
- in the Great Depression of the 1930s, cheap paperbacks to keep people buying.
India before print: manuscripts. India had a long, rich tradition of manuscripts written by hand in Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic and many local languages, on palm leaves or handmade paper, sometimes beautifully illustrated. They were made even into the late 19th century. But they were expensive and fragile, and written in different styles that were hard to read. In Bengal's village schools, children often learnt only to write: teachers dictated from memory, so many became literate without ever reading a text.
Print comes to India. In the mid-16th century, Portuguese missionaries brought the printing press to Goa; Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed tracts. Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book at Cochin in 1579, and the first Malayalam book in 1713. From 1780, James Augustus Hickey edited the Bengal Gazette, a weekly that called itself 'open to all, but influenced by none'. He printed gossip about Company officials, so Warren Hastings persecuted him and encouraged government-approved papers. The first Indian newspaper was the weekly Bengal Gazette of Gangadhar Bhattacharya, a friend of Rammohun Roy.
Print and religious debate. From the early 19th century, reformers and orthodox groups argued in print, in everyday language, about widow immolation, monotheism, priests and idol worship. A wider public could join in.
- From 1821, Rammohun Roy brought out the Sambad Kaumudi; the Hindu orthodoxy started the Samachar Chandrika to oppose him.
- From 1822, two Persian papers (Jam-i-Jahan Nama, Shamsul Akhbar) and a Gujarati one, the Bombay Samachar.
- In north India, the ulama (Islamic scholars), anxious about colonial rule, printed cheap Persian and Urdu translations of scriptures; the Deoband Seminary (founded 1867) published thousands of fatwas (rulings) on everyday conduct.
- The first printed Ramcharitmanas came out from Calcutta in 1810; cheap editions followed, and presses in Lucknow and Bombay printed religious texts in local languages that could be read anywhere or read aloud to those who could not read.
Newspapers also carried news from place to place, building a sense of all-India identity.
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