Print Culture and the Modern World
New forms, new readers and censorship in India
Explain how print gave voice to new groups and how the colonial state tried to control it.
New kinds of writing and pictures. New readers wanted books that showed lives and feelings like their own. The novel took on Indian forms; so did lyrics, short stories and essays. A new visual culture grew: Raja Ravi Varma made images for mass printing, and cheap prints and calendars let even the poor decorate their walls. From the 1870s, cartoons in journals mocked Indians copying Western ways, or imperial rule, or nationalists.
Women and print. Women's reading grew in middle-class homes; journals explained why women should be educated. But conservative families feared it: some Hindus believed a literate girl would be widowed, and some Muslims feared girls would be corrupted by Urdu romances. Some women defied this:
- Rashsundari Debi, a young wife in an orthodox East Bengal home, learnt to read secretly in her kitchen; her autobiography Amar Jiban (1876) was the first full-length autobiography in Bengali.
- From the 1860s, Kailashbashini Debi wrote about women kept at home and in ignorance; in the 1880s, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote angrily about upper-caste women's lives, especially widows.
- In 1926, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein condemned men who denied women education in the name of religion.
Hindi printing took off from the 1870s, much of it for women's education. In Calcutta, the Battala area printed cheap popular books that pedlars took to women at home.
Print and the poor. Very cheap books were sold at crossroads in Madras towns, and public libraries spread from the early 20th century. Writers attacked caste:
- Jyotiba Phule, pioneer of 'low caste' protest, wrote Gulamgiri (1871);
- later, B.R. Ambedkar and Periyar wrote on caste and were read all over India.
Factory workers had little time or education to write, but Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal (1938) linking caste and class exploitation. Millworkers in Bombay and Bangalore set up their own libraries.
Censorship under the Company. Before 1798, the Company barely censored. Its first controls were aimed at Englishmen in India who criticised Company misrule. By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court regulated the press and the Company encouraged papers praising British rule. In 1835, after petitions from editors, Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise the laws, and Thomas Macaulay wrote rules that restored press freedom.
The Vernacular Press Act (1878). After the revolt of 1857, attitudes hardened, and Indian-language papers grew nationalist. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878, modelled on Irish press laws, gave the government wide powers to censor Indian-language newspapers. The government tracked them province by province. If a report was judged seditious, the paper was first warned; if it ignored the warning, the press could be seized and its machines confiscated.
Nationalist papers keep growing. Despite repression, nationalist newspapers spread across India, reporting colonial misrule. When Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907, Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote sympathetically about them in his Kesari; he was jailed in 1908, sparking protests across India.
- During the First World War, the Defence of India Rules made 22 newspapers deposit securities; 18 shut down rather than obey.
- In August 1942, during the Quit India movement, about 90 newspapers were suppressed.
The more a government tries to control print, the more it shows how powerful the printed word is.
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