India and the World of Print -- Manuscripts, Reform, Women & Censorship

NCERT India and the Contemporary World-II | Chapter 5: Print Culture and the Modern World

6. India and the World of Print

6.1 Manuscripts Before the Age of Print

India possessed a rich and ancient tradition of handwritten manuscripts^? -- in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and various vernacular languages. Manuscripts were copied onto palm leaves or handmade paper. Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated, then either pressed between wooden covers or sewn together for preservation. This manuscript tradition continued well after the introduction of print, persisting into the late nineteenth century.

However, manuscripts had significant drawbacks. They were extremely expensive and fragile, requiring careful handling. They were difficult to read because scripts were written in varying styles. Their circulation remained limited. Even in pre-colonial Bengal, which had an extensive network of village primary schools, students rarely read texts directly. Teachers would dictate passages from memory, and students would write them down. Many people thus became literate without ever actually reading a text.

6.2 Print Comes to India

The printing press arrived in India through European missionaries and traders. The arrival of print followed a distinctive trajectory quite different from the European experience.

7. Religious Reform and Public Debates

From the early nineteenth century, intense debates erupted around religious issues in India. Different groups confronted colonial-era changes in different ways, offering varied new interpretations of religious beliefs. Some criticised existing practices and campaigned for reform; others countered the reformers' arguments. These debates were carried out in public and in print -- printed tracts and newspapers shaped the nature of the discourse and allowed wider public participation.

In north India, the ulama^? were deeply worried about the decline of Muslim dynasties under colonial rule and feared that the British would encourage conversion and alter Muslim personal laws. To counter this, they used cheap lithographic^? presses to publish Persian and Urdu translations of holy scriptures, along with religious newspapers and tracts. The Deoband Seminary, founded in 1867, published thousands of fatwas^? advising Muslim readers on everyday conduct and explaining Islamic doctrines.

Among Hindus, print encouraged the reading of religious texts in vernacular languages. The first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas appeared from Calcutta in 1810. By the mid-nineteenth century, cheap lithographic editions flooded north Indian markets. From the 1880s, the Nawal Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published numerous religious texts in vernacular languages. In their portable printed form, these could be read by the faithful anywhere and at any time -- and also read aloud to large groups of illiterate men and women.

8. New Forms of Publication

Printing created an appetite for entirely new kinds of writing. As the reading public expanded, people wanted literature that reflected their own lives, experiences, emotions, and relationships. The novel, which had developed in Europe, soon acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles. Other new literary forms also entered the reading world -- lyrics, short stories, and essays on social and political matters.

By the late nineteenth century, a new visual culture was emerging. Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation. Wood engravers set up shops near letterpresses. Cheap prints and calendars, available in bazaars, could be purchased even by the poor to decorate their homes. These prints shaped popular ideas about modernity, tradition, religion, politics, society, and culture.

By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers, commenting on social and political issues. Some ridiculed educated Indians' fascination with Western tastes, while others expressed anxiety about social change. Imperial caricatures lampooned nationalists, and nationalist cartoons criticised imperial rule.

8.1 Women and Print

Women's lives and feelings began to be portrayed with particular vividness in nineteenth-century Indian literature. Women's reading expanded enormously in middle-class homes. Liberal fathers and husbands educated women at home and later sent them to the women's schools that were established in cities and towns after the mid-nineteenth century.

Not all families were liberal. Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed, and some Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances. Yet rebel women defied these prohibitions. In a conservative Muslim family of north India, a girl secretly taught herself to read and write in Urdu, insisting on learning a language she could understand rather than reading only the Arabic Quran.

In the early twentieth century, women's journals became extremely popular, discussing education, widowhood, widow remarriage, and the national movement. In the Battala area of central Calcutta, cheap editions of religious tracts, literature, and even scandalous works were profusely illustrated and sold by pedlars who took them directly to homes, enabling women to read in their leisure time.

8.2 Print and the Poor People

Very cheap small books were sold at crossroads in nineteenth-century Madras towns, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy them. Public libraries established from the early twentieth century further expanded access to books.

From the late nineteenth century, issues of caste discrimination were addressed in printed tracts and essays. Jyotiba Phule^?, the Maratha pioneer of lower-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 (Periyar) in Madras wrote powerfully on caste, and their writings were read across India. Factory workers also turned to print: Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938, linking caste and class exploitation. By the 1930s, Bangalore cotton millworkers established their own libraries for self-education.

9. Print and Censorship

Before 1798, the colonial East India Company was not particularly concerned with censorship. Its earliest efforts to control printed matter were directed against Englishmen in India who criticised Company misrule -- the Company feared such criticisms could be used by opponents in England to attack its trade monopoly.

By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court introduced regulations to control press freedom. In 1835, following petitions from editors, Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise press laws. Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial official, formulated new rules restoring earlier freedoms.

The situation changed dramatically after the Revolt of 1857. Enraged Englishmen demanded a crackdown on the 'native' press. As vernacular newspapers became increasingly nationalist, the colonial government debated stringent controls.

Despite these repressive measures, nationalist newspapers continued to grow in all parts of India, reporting on colonial misrule and encouraging nationalist activities. When Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907, Balgangadhar Tilak wrote about them with great sympathy in his newspaper Kesari. This led to his imprisonment in 1908, which in turn provoked widespread protests across India.