41 
The History of the Book in the Indian Subcontinent
41 ABHIJIT GUPTA
The Indian subcontinent is home to more languages than anywhere else in the world. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 official languages, but the number of mother tongues in India exceeds 1,500, of which 24 are spoken by a million or more people. Any history of such a diverse constituency is bound to be selective and incomplete. This is true for the book as well, especially in the pre-print era. Although the first printing with movable type in India occurred as early as in 1556, almost two and a half centuries were to pass before print was able to infiltrate the intellectual world configured by the MS book. This should not be surprising, for the history of the MS book in the Indian subcontinent is a long and highly sophisticated one, dating back to at least the 5th century BC. It is beyond the scope of this essay to treat the MS book in any detail, but it is essential to have an understanding of some of its basic features.
The rise of heterodox movements such as Buddhism and Jainism triggered a movement from orality to literacy in India. Orthodox Hinduism set little store by writing, and its key texts, the Vedas, were memorized and transmitted orally (see 2). A great deal of significance was attached to the spoken word and the performative aspects of the text. There are some technical terms in later Vedic works that might be taken as evidence for writing, but that task was assigned to the clerical caste of kayasthas who did not enjoy any great social prestige. On the other hand, the need to transcribe correctly the teachings of the Buddha and Mahavira led to a widespread MS tradition from the 5th century BC in which authenticity and canonicity were the chief impulses, as opposed to the more prosaic aims of Hindu MS practice. The Jatakas (collections of stories about the Buddha) mention wooden writing boards (phalaka) and wooden pens (varnaka), and lekha or writing as part of the school curriculum. Buddhist MSS were mostly produced in monasteries and universities. When the Chinese traveller Fa Xian visited India in the 5th century CE, he saw professional copyists at work at Nalanda University; two centuries later, another Chinese visitor to the university, Yi Jing, reportedly carried away 400 Buddhist MSS. Similarly, Jain copyists were monks and novices, sometimes even nuns.
The earliest known substrate for recording texts in ancient India is the talipat or writing palm (Corypha umbraculifera), which is native to the Malabar coast of southern India and has palmate leaves folding naturally around a central rib. The tree was extensively cultivated, since the leaves were also used for thatching and the sap fermented to make palm wine. It is believed that there was a rich trade in the leaves from the south to the north, but this also meant that the Buddhist scriptoria in Bihar and Nepal were heavily dependent on the availability of the leaf. One of the earliest accounts of the general use of the talipat throughout India is from Xuan Zang, who described it in the 7th century CE. In about 1500 CE, the talipat was supplanted by the palmyra, which was easier to cultivate and commercially more valuable, owing to the range of products it yielded. Reed pens were used with the talipat, while an iron stylus was used with the palmyra. After the grooves were scored, they were smeared with ink and then cleaned with sand. In north India, the bark of birch and aloe seem to have been extensively used, the former in the western Himalayas, the latter in the Assam valley. Birch bark was known as bhurjapatra, and is frequently mentioned in northern Buddhist and Brahmanical Sanskrit works (Buhler, 1973). After writing, the finished stack of leaves was strung on a cord through pre-bored holes and protected by a pair of wooden covers. This form of the book—known as the puthi or pothi—survived until the mid-19th century, with some minor variations. In Nepal, for example, covers of valuable MSS were sometimes made of embossed metal, while Jain MSS were kept in sacks made of white cotton.
Papermaking had been known in China from the beginning of the first millennium CE, but it reached India via the Turks after their conquest of northern India in the early 13th century (see 10). There is some evidence of papermaking in the Himalayan region before this period, especially in Nepal, but it never posed a serious challenge to palm-leaf MSS. With the beginnings of Muslim rule in India, paper became the substrate of choice, as no material other than paper was considered suitable for writing in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu (see 40). The rich traditions of illumination, illustration, and calligraphy in these languages required exceptionally high-quality paper, which sometimes had to be imported from places such as Iran. For bindings, leather and board were used: these could not be used for Hindu MSS. Perhaps the richness and sophistication of the Mughal MS tradition was one reason why printing failed to make much impact in north India, despite the presentation to the Emperor Akbar of a copy of Christopher Plantin’s polyglot Bible in 1580. This historic gift was made when a delegation of Portuguese Jesuits visited the emperor at Fatehpur Sikri (see 7). In a richly symbolic response, the emperor had several of the engravings in the Bible copied by his own painters.
Although the Hindu and Muslim MS traditions took somewhat different routes, they were both instrumental in creating highly evolved communication networks. Access to the production and ownership of MSS was restricted in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, yet the rise of the vernaculars in the second millennium CE saw a much wider diffusion of the culture of writing and reading. The examples of the great Indian epics Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa demonstrate how new interpretive communities were formed once the Sanskrit hegemony was challenged, and created a kind of ‘social memory’ mediated by the book. On the other hand, the Islamic MS tradition in India was a direct result of court patronage, and consequently much more opulent. Given the centrality of the Qur’ān to Islam, book arts such as calligraphy and illumination were accorded the highest prestige. Outside court circles, guilds of scribes acted as purveyors of knowledge and information, leading to the creation of a robust public sphere.
The coming of print did not immediately precipitate a battle of books. More often than not the printed book took its cue from the MS book, and for a while there was space for both forms. Ultimately, however, it was the loss of political power to the British that undermined the cultural and social authority of the MS tradition. Under the new political dispensation, the voice of power would henceforth be articulated through print.
Print arrived in India by accident. In 1556, King João III of Portugal despatched a group of Jesuit missionaries and a printing press to Abyssinia, at the request of its emperor. When the ship put in at Goa, a Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, news came that the emperor had changed his mind. The Portuguese authorities in Goa had not been particularly keen to introduce printing to the area, but they now found themselves with not just a press but a printer. He was Juan de Bustamante, a Jesuit brother from Valencia, reportedly accompanied by an Indian assistant trained in printing at Lisbon (see 9).
The first book to be printed in Goa was Conclusões e outras coisas, in 1556. Unfortunately, no copy is extant, a fate shared by most of the early publications from Goa. The first Indian language rendered in the medium of print was Tamil. This might appear odd, given that the lingua franca in and around Goa was Konkani. But the Jesuits, led by Francis Xavier, who died in Goa in 1552, had established an extensive network of Jesuit missions along the Coromandel coast and had baptized more than 10,000 Tamil-speaking Parava fisher-people. A key figure in the new technology was Henrique Henriques, a Portuguese Jew, who produced five books in Tamil script and language, as well as a Tamil grammar and Dictionary. In 1577 Henriques’s first book was printed at Goa: Doctrina Christam, Tampiran Vanakkam, a translation of a Portuguese catechism of 1539. This book was not only the first to be printed with Indian type, but the first with non-roman, metallic type anywhere in the world. The Tamil type for the book was prepared by the Spaniard Juan Gonsalves, a former blacksmith and clockmaker, with assistance from Father Pero Luis, a Tamil Brahmin, who had entered the Jesuit order in 1562.
Bustamante was asked by the Portuguese Jesuits to set up a press at the College of St Paul in Goa, and it was under the imprint of the college that most of the early publications were issued. Other printers who were active in Goa during this period were João de Endem and João Quinquencio. Their output may be described as modest, having little or no impact outside the immediate circle of missionary activity. Printing was too alien and expensive an activity to elicit more than polite interest locally, while the finished product—the printed book—was regarded as part of the paraphernalia of church ritual. Even within missionary circles, the protocols and potential of printing were only partially appreciated. In the context of Goa, it seems that the printed book was seen solely as a tool for evangelizing. According to Priolkar, ‘Printing activity continued to prosper so long as the importance of local languages for the purpose of proselytisation was fully appreciated’ (Priolkar, 23). This was reinforced by the Concílio Provincial of 1606, which stated that no cleric should be placed in charge of a parish unless he learnt the local language. Yet Priolkar has argued that this stipulation was steadily undermined through the 17th century, until a decree was promulgated in 1684 which required that the local populace abandon the use of their mother tongues and switch to Portuguese within three years. It is therefore not surprising that printing came to a standstill in Goa at about the same time, in 1674. Another century and a half was to pass before it would reappear, in 1821.
The next significant printing initiative took place in Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi), on the east coast of India, and was triggered by the arrival of the Danish Lutheran missionary Bartholomew Ziegenbalg in 1706. The nearest Jesuit mission at Elakkuricci was less than 50 miles away, and a battle began between the two rival missions to win the hearts and minds of the local people. Ziegenbalg spent long sessions with an Indian pundit learning local language and customs. To his parent body, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, he wrote:
I must confess that my School-Master … has often put such Philosophical Questions to me, as really made me believe … one might discover things very fit to entertain the curiosity of many a learned Head in Europe … We hope to bring him over to the Christian Knowledge; but he is confident as yet, that one time or other we will all turn Malabarians. (Priolkar, 37)
He sent his emissaries far and wide, to buy up books from the widows of scholarly Brahmins, and left detailed descriptions of the MSS:
As for the Outside of these Books, they are of a quite different Dress from those in Europe. There is neither Paper nor Leather, neither Ink nor Pen used by the Natives at all, but the Characters are by Iron Tools impressed on a Sort of Leaves of a Certain Tree, which is much like a Palm-Tree. At the End of every Leaf a Hole is made, and through the Hole a String drawn, whereby the whole Sett of Leaves is kept together. (Priolkar, 39)
Between 1706 and 1711, Ziegenbalg wrote a number of letters to the SPCK asking for a printing press:
We heartily wish to be supplied with a Malabarick and a Portuguese printing press to save the expensive charges of getting such books transcribed as are necessary for carrying on this work. I have hitherto employed Six Malabarick writers in my house … ’Tis true those books which we get from the Malabar heathens must be entirely transcribed; or brought up for ready money, if people will part with them; but such as lay down the grounds of our holy religion, and are to be dispersed among the heathens, must be carefully printed off for this design. (Priolkar, 40)
In a remarkably shrewd move, Ziegenbalg argued that the book’s form and content were indivisible, and the ‘superior’ technology of printing must be employed to confer an equivalent superiority upon Christian teachings. Convinced by his arguments, the SPCK despatched a press to Ziegenbalg in 1711, with a printer, Jonas Finck. After many vicissitudes the ship arrived, but not Finck, who disappeared off the Cape of Good Hope after the ship had been waylaid by the French and diverted to Rio de Janeiro. A soldier was found to work the press, and printing began in October 1712.
The press’s crowning work was Ziegenbalg’s 1715 Tamil translation of the New Testament—the first such translation in any Indian language. The fount bore a close resemblance to the letters in the palm-leaf MSS, while the language used was a version of demotic Tamil spoken in and around Tranquebar. The type had originally been cast at Halle in Germany, but it became necessary to cast smaller founts for the various publications undertaken by Ziegenbalg. A typefoundry was set up in Poryar, the first in India, and this was followed by the establishment of the first modern paper mill in the country in 1715. With these, the Lutheran mission attained a degree of self-sufficiency in printing, and was no longer entirely dependent on the long supply chain from Germany. This self-sufficiency can be gauged from the press’s high output: 65 titles from 1712 to 1720, 52 more in the next decade, and a total of 338 titles for the 18th century. The mission also received requests from the Dutch in Ceylon to print in Tamil and Sinhalese. A press at Colombo was reportedly set up by Peter Mickelsen, one of the casters of Tranquebar’s types. The first book printed in Ceylon was an octavo Singhalese prayer book produced in 1737–8 for the East India Company.
And what of the Jesuits? In 1717, the controversial and colourful C. G. Beschi arrived in Elakkuricci near Trichinopoly and stayed there for the next three decades. Despite his meddling in local politics and ostentatious habits, he was unable to raise sufficient resources to take on the well-funded Lutherans and was forced to fall back on palm-leaf MSS. The only weapon in his arsenal was his vastly superior knowledge of Tamil: what ensued was a battle of books—MS versus print, Jesuit versus Lutheran, purity versus contamination—in many ways anticipating the clash between the rival intellectual worlds of MS and print in 19th-century Bengal. Though Beschi poured scorn on his rivals for their imperfect knowledge of Tamil and their flawed translations of the scriptures, he was fighting a losing cause, and soon the Jesuits were in retreat in the region, leaving the field clear for Protestants.
After Tranquebar and Colombo, the scene for printing shifted to Madras (now Chennai). In 1726, Benjamin Schultze set up a branch of the SPCK at Vepery, outside Madras. By the middle of the century, it was under the care of Johann Philipp Fabricius. In 1761, the English under Sir Eyre Coote successfully besieged the French at Pondicherry, and the spoils of war included a printing press seized from the French governor’s palace. This press would probably have been used for Jesuit printing, so its loss was a further blow to the Society of Jesus in the region. Coote took the press and its printer to Madras, where Fabricius persuaded him to donate the press to the SPCK, on condition that printing orders from Fort St George—the seat of the Madras presidency—would take precedence over mission work. Soon the SPCK acquired its own press: the English war booty was returned to Fort St George, where it was renamed the Government Press, while the Vepery Press now became the SPCK Press. It was on this press that Fabricius printed his famous Tamil–English dictionary in 1779. In 1793 the Press produced a Tamil translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress: this was a bilingual edition, with English on the left and Tamil on the right side of every page.
In many ways the fortunes of the Pondicherry press were symbolic of the momentous changes taking place in mid-18th-century India. Coote’s military action dealt a decisive blow to French colonial aspirations, leaving the way clear for the British. Just four years earlier, in 1757, Robert Clive had won a historic battle at Plassey in Bengal, defeating the last independent nawab of Bengal, and paving the way for the territorial expansion of the East India Company in India. As centres of administration were set up in the three presidencies of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, print became an indispensable component of the engine of colonization. The missionaries, who had thus far championed print, suddenly found their efforts being swiftly outstripped by government printing.
If religion was behind the coming of print to west and south India, the initial impulse in Bengal was almost entirely political. In 1778 Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, a civil servant of the East India Company, produced the first printed book in the Bengali language and script, A Grammar of the Bengal Language. Initially, William Bolts was asked to design the Bengali type, but his design was not to Halhed’s liking. The task was then entrusted to Charles Wilkins, also a civil servant with the Company, who cast the type with the help of Pancānan Karmakār, a smith, and Joseph Shepherd, a seal- and gem-cutter. The printing was carried out on a press at Hooghly, possibly owned by one John Andrews. The Company itself paid for the printing, in a somewhat miserly manner.
The first British use of Bengali founts: N. B. Halhed, A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (EE 48 Jur., title page)
By the end of 1800, there were as many as 40 printers working in Calcutta (now Kolkata). This was unprecedented not just in India, but in the whole of south Asia. Although presses in Madras remained mainly in government hands, Calcutta saw a large number of private entrepreneurs open printing offices. The almost overnight rise of the periodical press is also remarkable. In the period 1780–90, seventeen weekly and six monthly periodicals were launched in Calcutta; almost all of the city’s printers were connected with the periodical press at some time. Chief among them was James Augustus Hicky, who was the editor of the first newspaper in India, the weekly English-language Bengal Gazette (1780), and who went to jail for his fearless—and sometimes scurrilous—criticism of the governing council. As far as book publishing was concerned, Andrews’s press had travelled to Calcutta via Malda and had acquired a new name—the Honourable Company’s Press—and was now run by Charles Wilkins. This press accounted for a third of all books printed in Calcutta before 1800, including Asiatick Researches, the journal of the newly established Asiatic Society. Books and periodicals were, however, not the chief sources of revenue for the Calcutta printing trade. stationery, legal and mercantile forms, handbills, etc. formed the staple of their survival, a further sign that the trade was coming of age. The most characteristic product of the trade was the almanac, with three different calendars: Muslim, Hindu, and Christian. In fact, the trade in almanacs still continues to be a lucrative sector of the Bengali book trade.
Materials and equipment—type, paper, ink, and the presses—had to be imported from Europe. Some type was manufactured locally, notably by Daniel Stuart and Joseph Cooper, who set up a foundry for their Chronicle Press. Along with Bengali, this foundry also made Devnagari and nasta‘līq types, the latter being used for printing in Persian. The availability of paper continued to be a problem. Good-quality paper had to be imported from Britain, while Patna supplied the local handmade variety, which was considerably cheaper. There were several unsuccessful attempts to set up paper mills in Calcutta during this period. John Borthwick Gilchrist, principal of Fort William College in Calcutta and founder of the Hindustanee Press, was not alone in complaining bitterly about the unscrupulous and fraudulent behaviour of printers, referring to ‘typographical quicksands, and whirlpools, on the siren shores of oriental literature’ and deploring the ‘eternal treacherous behaviour’ of his Bengali assistants (Shaw, Printing, 24–5).
Two events in 1800 were to have a momentous effect on printing in south and southeast Asia. The first was the establishment in Calcutta of the Fort William College to train the British civilians of the East India Company. The second was the establishment of a Baptist mission at Serampore (25 km from Calcutta) by William Carey, an ex-cobbler, who arrived at Calcutta in 1793. His first few years in India were spent in Malda, working for an indigo planter, and learning Bengali and Sanskrit from his munshi (language teacher), Rām Rām Basu. His early attempts to set up a mission in British India failed, as the Company was hostile towards missionary activity. Eventually, Carey was permitted to establish his mission in Danish-controlled Serampore (then known as Fredericksnagar), where he was joined by two other Baptists, William Ward and Joshua Marshman. In the meantime Carey had acquired a wooden hand press, thanks to the munificence of George Udny, the indigo planter who had supported Carey and his family.
The Serampore mission was founded on 10 January 1800. In August that year, a Bengali translation of St Matthew’s Gospel was published by the press. About the same time, Carey joined Fort William College as a teacher of Bengali and Sanskrit, for a salary of Rs. 500. The same mission that had been refused permission by the government now became a partner in training the future elite of the Raj.
The efforts of Carey and his assistants soon made the Serampore Mission Press the most important centre of printing in Asia. Pancānan Karmakār, the goldsmith trained in type production by Wilkins, was ‘borrowed’ by Carey from Colebrooke, and then put under virtual house arrest in Serampore. With the help of Pancānan and his son-in-law Manohar, a typefoundry was set up in March 1800. In its first ten years, the foundry produced type in at least thirteen languages. The printing press was in the immediate charge of Ward, who left detailed accounts of its day-to-day running. In a letter of 1811 he wrote:
As you enter, your see your cousin in a small room, dressed in a white jacket, reading or writing, and looking over the office, which is more than 170 ft. long. There you find Indians translating the scriptures into the different tongues and correcting the proof-sheets. You observe, laid out in cases, types in Arabic, Persian, Nagari, Telugu, Panjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Chinese, Oriya, Burmese, Kanarese, Greek, Hebrew and English. Mussulmans and Christian Indians are busy composing, correcting, distributing. Next are four men throwing off the scripture sheets in different languages, others folding the sheets and delivering them to the large storeroom, and six Mussulmans do the binding. Beyond the office are varied type-casters besides a group of men making ink, and in a spacious open-walled round place, our paper-mill, for we manufacture our own paper. (Koschorke, 59–60)
Not surprisingly, translations of the Bible accounted for the bulk of the publications. Between 1800 and 1834, the Serampore Press printed bibles in almost 50 languages, 38 of which were translated at Serampore by Carey and his associates. There were altogether 117 editions, of which 25 were in Bengali. It seems that the Press supplied bibles to almost all significant Baptist missions in the region, from Indonesia in the east to Afghanistan in the west. From the report for 1813, it appears that a Malay bible in roman characters was in preparation, while a five-volume reprint of the entire Bible in Arabic was being undertaken for the lieutenant-governor of Java. The memorandum of 1816 claims that a Chinese Pentateuch was in the press, and that ‘the new moveable metal type, after many experiments, are a complete success’. The 1820 report records the printing of the New Testament in Pashto, and also the setting up of a paper factory: ‘After experiments lasting for twelve years, paper equally impervious to the worm with English paper, and of a firmer structure, though inferior in colour, is now made of materials [from] the growth of India’ (Grierson, 247).
Perhaps even more significant than the bibles were the Bengali translations of the two great epics Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata. These were published during 1802–3, and marked the first appearance of the epics in printed form, in any language. The Press also published dictionaries, grammars, dialogues or colloquies, Sanskrit phrasebooks, philosophy, Hindu mythological tales, tracts, and the first newspaper in Bengali, the Samachar Durpun. The first number of this twice-weekly, bilingual (Bengali and English) paper was published in May 1818. According to a calculation made by the missionaries themselves, a total of 2,120,000 items of print in 40 languages were issued by the Serampore Press from 1800 to 1832.
Along with the mission’s own publications, the Press also filled orders from Fort William College. During the first two decades of the 19th century, the college played a crucial role in producing grammars and lexicons in all the major Indian languages, a task carried out by Indian and European scholars. Altogether, 38 such works were produced in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, Braj, Bengali, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Telugu, and Kannada. Another important category was ancient Indian tales and verses, translated for classroom use into modern languages, especially Urdu and Bengali. The college’s publications programme had a twofold aim: to produce textbooks for its students, and to encourage scholarly editions of books with no immediate pedagogical value. Besides the Mission Press, two other presses printed for the College. The first was the Hindustanee Press of John Gilchrist, which specialized in Persian-Arabic printing, especially in nasta‘līq. The second was the Sanskrit Press of Bāburām Śarmmā, the first Indian to own a press in Bengal (he was succeeded by Lallulāl in 1814–15, who was also a teacher at the college). In 1808 the college noted:
a printing press has been established by learned Hindoos, furnished with complete founts of improved Nagree types of different sizes, for the printing of books in the Sunskrit language. This press has been encouraged by the College to undertake an edition of the best Sunskrit dictionaries, and a compilation of the Sunskrit rules of grammar. (Das, Sahibs, 84)
The College’s publications did not have much impact beyond the classroom and European circles. This lack was filled by the Calcutta School-Book Society (founded in 1817), which began to commission and publish some of the earliest secular school textbooks in Bengali and English. Its establishment coincided with that of the Hindu College in the same year. For more than half a century, the CSBS published hundreds of titles for ‘cheap or gratuitous supply … to schools and seminaries of learning’. Significantly, the Society’s charter stated that it was not its design ‘to furnish religious books: a restriction however very far from being meant to preclude the supply of books of moral tendency’ ([Calcutta School Book Society, iii]). From 1821, the Society was assisted by a monthly grant from the government; a few years later it acquired its own press and depository at Lallbazar. In 1823, the Calcutta Christian Tract and Book Society was set up to supply books to missionary-aided vernacular schools. Within a short time it had published a large number of tracts whose press runs often went into five figures. A similar role was played by the Christian Vernacular Literature Society. But the man who had the most impact on the textbook trade was the scholar and reformer Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgar. While a teacher at Fort William College, he started the Sanskrit Press in 1847, along with his colleague Madanmohan Tarkālaṇkār. Both men produced Bengali primers which became legendary: the former’s two-part Barṇaparicay (1855) and the latter’s Śiśuśikṣā (1849). Their popularity can be gauged from the fact that in 1890, the 149th and 152nd editions (respectively) of the two primers were issued. Vidyāsāgar reformed Bengali typography into an alphabet of 12 vowels and 40 consonants and designed the so-called Vidyāsāgar saat or type case, for greater ease of composition.
By the middle of the 19th century, printing had spread to Assam, with Baptist missionaries setting up a press there and starting the first Assamese periodical, Aruṇoday, in 1846. After a slow beginning, Dhaka exploded into print in the second half of the century, with the Girish Press printing more than 500 titles by 1900. The trade in Bengal had become sufficiently large to require bibliographical control. James Long, a philologist and ethnographer, compiled three bibliographies of printed works in the 1850s, the first of their kind in India. His Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Works (1855) contained 1,400 entries on books and periodicals in Bengali. A high proportion of the titles were accounted for under such categories as textbooks, translations, dictionaries, grammars, law books, and religious literature, but the trade in popular books flourished as well. This was commonly—and often pejoratively—known as ‘the Bat-tala trade’, in reference to the north Calcutta location where such books were mostly printed. According to Long,
Few Bengali books are sold in European shops. A person may be twenty years in Calcutta, and yet scarcely know that any Bengali books are printed by Bengalis themselves. He must visit the native part of the town and the Chitpoor road, their Pater Noster Row, to gain any information on this point. The native presses are generally in by-lanes with little outside to attract, yet they ply a busy trade. (Ghosh, 118)
One of the pioneers of this new literature was Gaṇgakiśor Bhattāchārya, considered the first Bengali printer, publisher, bookseller, and newspaper editor. After beginning his life as a compositor at the Mission Press, in 1818 he set up his own Bangal Gezeti Press, and was also responsible for printing the first illustrated book in Bengal, Bhāratcandra’s Annadāmangal, in 1816.
Tales, light verses, and farces were common examples of Bat-tala printing, and Long recorded with disapproval that many of these dealt with erotic themes, ‘equal to the worst of the French school’ (Ghosh, 87). Long’s reservations notwithstanding, the Bat-tala trade was thoroughly indigenous, unmediated by missionary or reformist values. Yet, it was not until the mid-century that the Bat-tala trade assumed a truly commercial character. In 1857, Long listed 46 presses in the area—along the Garanhata, Ahiritola, Chitpur, and Barabazar roads—which printed a wide range of genres such as almanacs, mythological literature, farces, songs, medical texts, and typographically distinct Muslim-Bengali works. This last category is particularly remarkable for the way in which it retained some of the protocols of the MS book. In fact, many Bat-tala productions show a divided commitment to MS and printed forms of the book, especially in the disposition of the title-page, whose paratextual excess seemed to signal some kind of confusion about proprietorship, authority, and entailment. Although the production values of Bat-tala literature often left a lot to be desired, there is no doubting the energy and vitality of its genres. Bat-tala publications consciously distanced themselves from the moralizing and reformist agenda of print, and dealt unabashedly in subgenres such as erotica, scandals, current events, doggerel, and songs. These proved so irksome to the reformist lobby that they pushed for and, in 1856, succeeded in having an Act passed to prevent the public sale or display of obscene books and pictures. Shortly afterwards, Long reported with some satisfaction that three people had been arrested for selling an obscene book of songs by Dāśarathi Roy, and that 30,000 copies of the book had been sold at the price of four annas. The Supreme Court imposed a fine of Rs. 1,300 upon the vendors, then a considerable sum. This post-publication censorship was in fact the first of a number of official measures to impose some kind of restriction on print—an initiative that would gain urgency after the failed 1857 uprising by the sepoys and the consequent takeover of India by the British Crown. Matters reached a crisis with the furore over the English translation of Dīnabandhu Mitra’s Nīl-darpaṇa (The Indigo Planting Mirror), a play fiercely critical of indigo planters. Following a successful libel action by the planters, Long went to jail (for a month) for his role in facilitating the translation. It was therefore not surprising that the Indian Press and Registration of Books Act (1867) mandated that all publications in British India be registered. The Act was a watershed in the history of Indian printing and, in hindsight, an acknowledgement that print had truly become a part of everyday life in India.
Printing came to Goa in as early as 1556, but bypassed Bombay (now Mumbai), fewer than 500 miles away. The Marathas of the Peshwa period did not seem interested in printing, although there is some evidence that Bhīmjī Pārekh, a Gujarati trader, set up a press in 1674. After this, there was a hiatus for more than a century until 1780, when Rustom Caresajee printed the Calendar for the Year of Our Lord for 1780, a 34-page publication priced at two rupees.
In the last years of the century, the Courier Press was the most important in Bombay. It printed the periodical The Bombay Courier, which was probably started in 1791. An advertisement carried by it in 1797 is thought to be the first in Gujarati characters: its type was cast by a press employee named Jijibhāi Chhāpghar. Robert Drummond, who wrote a Grammar of the Malabar Language in 1799 and for whom Jijibhāi also cast type, hailed him as an ‘ingenious artist who, without any other help or information than what he gleaned from Chamber’s Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, succeeded in completing a font of the Guzzeratty types a few years ago’ (Priolkar, 73). The first Maratha characters are likewise thought to have appeared in an advertisement in the Bombay Courier in July 1802. The first Gujarati press proper was established in 1812 by Ferdunji Mārzābān, who used to visit his friend Jijibhāi at the Courier Press, and was inspired by his example to start a printing office of his own. The first book to be printed by Ferdunji’s press was an almanac, in 1814.
As in Bengal, missionaries were quick to appear on the scene. In 1813, although they had been turned away from Calcutta, a group of Americans were allowed by the governor, Sir Evan Nepean, to open a mission in Bombay. A printing office was started in 1816 with a single wooden press and a single fount of Marathi type, acquired in Calcutta, with which an eight-page scriptural tract was produced in 1817. Over the next two decades, the press steadily grew in size until it employed a staff of 25. It had its own typefoundry, which could cast type in at least nine languages, a bindery, and a lithographic press. Thanks to the ingenuity of a young apprentice, Thomas Graham, by the mid-1830s the press was able to produce vastly improved Marathi and Gujarati type. The 1840s also saw the beginning of printing in Mangalore, on the west coast. A mission from Basle was established there in 1836; the first newspaper in Kannada came from its press in 1843.
At the end of the third and decisive Anglo-Maratha War in 1818, British power replaced the Peshwas in Maharashtra. The new regime established the Bombay Education Society, whose task was to produce vernacular textbooks. With the help of a group of shastris, pandits, and munshis (teachers) the society produced the first Marathi dictionary (Shabdakosh) in 1824. The availability of Marathi type was a recurring problem, so a government lithographic printing unit was inaugurated with six machines. Printing by lithography was considerably aided by the discovery in 1826 that the Kurnool stone was particularly suitable for lithographic use. For a period, lithography was preferred over typographical printing in government circles, principally owing to the large size and crude contours of the available type. As far as private initiatives were concerned, the Parsi trading community took the lead in setting up printing presses. Consequently, a commercial print culture in western India first developed in Gujarati, rather than in Marathi. Veena Naregal has suggested that the slow growth of a Marathi print culture was largely due to high-caste repugnance towards the manual labour associated with the print trade.
In the mid-19th century, two men changed the face of Marathi printing. In 1840, Gaṇpat Kṛsṇājī built a wooden hand press and started experimenting with ink-making and type design. In order to print the Hindu almanacs that were his stock-in-trade, he designed and cast improved type in both Marathi and Gujarati. Until Bhau Mahājan established his press in 1843, Kṛsṇājī’s press was the sole producer of Marathi books outside government and missionary circles. His ‘pioneering efforts to publish sacred and “popular” precolonial texts illustrated many trends that were to characterise the emerging sphere of vernacular production’ (Naregal, 185). Bhau Mahājan’s Prabhakar Press printed progressive periodicals such as the Prabhakar and the Dhumketu. The task of typographical reform, on the other hand, was carried on by Jāvjī Dādājī, who had started his career by working at the American Mission Press, and later joined the staff of the Indu-Prakash Press. In 1864 he opened a small typefoundry, and he established the Nirnaya-Sagara Press in 1869. Along with his friend Ranojī Rāojī Aru, he set a very high standard for Marathi, Gujarati, and Sanskrit typography.
In keeping with the two other presidencies, Madras became the undisputed centre of 19th-century print culture, although mention must also be made of Maharaja Serfoji II of Tanjore. In his palace in 1805, he set up a press that produced eight books in Marathi and Sanskrit. But it was in Madras that a ‘nexus between pundits, printing and public patronage was cemented with the establishment of the College of Fort St George in 1812’ (Blackburn, 74). This was followed by the establishment of the Madras School Book Society in 1820, to cater for students in missionary-run schools. The SPCK’s Vepery Press continued to be active: along with the Madras Male Asylum Press (established in 1789), it accounted for a major share of periodical printing. At the suggestion of the Vepery Press, the government decided to train local goldsmiths in cutting type. This resulted in the creation of the first Telugu type in India. However, advances in Telugu printing were hampered by confusion over competing renderings: the Telugu used by missionaries, for example, was a mishmash of dialects and styles, to which Hindu scholars paid no attention. This confusion delayed the advent of print in the language by almost half a century.
The founding of the College of Fort St George in 1812 marked the entry of the pundits into the world of printing, and initiated a fascinating encounter between the worlds of print and MS. The publishing history of the Tamil epic Tirukkurāl in 1812, for instance, shows how the MS book’s editorial and textual protocols were being exploited to arrive at an authentic version for print. With the pundits drafted into teaching at the college, in its first two decades the press produced 27 books, mostly in Tamil and Telugu. More importantly, teachers acquired a familiarity with print that would later be employed in a radical reshaping of literary culture. From the third decade of the century, a number of ‘pundit-presses’ began to appear, such as the Kalvi Vilakkam, founded by the Aiyar brothers in 1834, Tiru Venkatacala Mutāliyār’s Sarasvati Press, and the Vidya-anubalana-yantra-sala or the Preservation of Knowledge Press of the famous Jaffna Tamil scholar Ārumaka Nāvalar, a remnant of which still exists. Many of these presses played an important role in shaping public opinion, especially during the anti-missionary campaigns of the 1840s. Another important development of the period was the rise of journalism in several languages—European and Indian—representing almost all shades of political and social opinion. By the middle of the century, printing in Tamil had encompassed almost all major genres, and a standardized orthography was more or less in place. In 1862, the Revd Miron Winslow of the American Mission Press published his landmark Tamil–English dictionary; three years later, the missionary John Murdoch produced the first bibliography of Tamil printed books. The founts for the dictionary, cut by P. R. Hunt, were a high water mark of Tamil typography.
When printing began to spread westward in the first third of the 19th century, it took the lithographic rather than the typographic route. Lithography was particularly suitable for printing in Urdu and Persian, as it was an inexpensive technology, and ‘reproduced the elegant hand of calligraphers, who in turn found cheap employment’ (Orsini, ‘Detective Novels’, 437). The problems associated with the development of Indian types could be bypassed through the new technology of lithography, and by mid-century, Lucknow and Kanpur became the principal centres of lithographic printing in all of South Asia.
That is not to say that there was no typography in Hindi publishing. Printing in Devanagari (the script in which Hindi and many Indian languages is written) dates back to the 17th century, but its appearances were sporadic until the Serampore missionaries began to use Devanagari type to print in a large range of north Indian languages and dialects. Of the 2,120,000 volumes issued from the press in its first three decades, as many as 65,000 were printed in Devanagari. There was a good deal of printing in Devanagari at Bombay as well, but primarily in Marathi and Sanskrit. In Europe too, the rise of Indian studies led to the casting of high-quality Devanagari founts, especially in Germany, where Schlegel and Bopp produced editions of the Bhagavadgītā and the Hitopadeśa in the 1820s. Thanks to the refinements in Devanagari, printers in Calcutta and Benares (Varanasi) were able print books in the Nepali language as well.
Printing came to Lucknow in 1817 when the Matba-i Sultani, or Royal Press, was established; but printing did not begin in earnest until the coming of lithography in 1830. That year, Henry Archer, superintendent of the Asiatic Lithographic Company in Kanpur, was invited to set up a press in Lucknow. In the beginning, the trade was not commercial, in the sense that books were usually published to an author’s or a patron’s order. Nevertheless, a score or so of lithographic presses were operating in the city by the 1840s, chief among which was Muṣṭafá Khān’s Mustafai Press, which published expensive books as well as popular genres such as masnavis and qissas. The quissas—moral tales, short anecdotes, fables—were first published at Fort William College in Calcutta for pedagogical purposes, but soon became a staple of commercial publishing in Persian and Urdu. A particularly popular title was the Tuti nāmā (Tales of a Parrot) of which at least fifteen different editions appeared in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, Lucknow, and Delhi between 1804 and 1883.
Largely owing to the activities of schoolbook societies and missionaries, printing also spread to nearby towns and cantonments such as Agra, Allahabad, Meerut, and Lahore. A schoolbook society for the North-Western Provinces, with its headquarters at Agra, was set up in 1838. The same year saw the establishment of a missionary schoolbook society in Benares. Two major blows were subsequently dealt to printing at Lucknow, however. In 1849 the Nawab Wajid Ali Shah imposed a temporary ban on printing, as a result of which many firms shifted to Kanpur. This was followed by the sepoy uprising in 1857, leading to further uncertainty in the trade. The one beneficiary of this state of affairs was Nawal Kishore Bhargava of Agra, who in 1858 set up the Nawal Kishore Press at Lucknow, in a field virtually devoid of competition. Munshi Nawal Kishore had started his career as an Urdu journalist and had learnt presswork while employed at the Kohinoor Press of Lahore. In Lucknow, he started by printing in Urdu, but soon became the pioneer of Hindi printing in the city. More crucially, he enjoyed English patronage, which meant that the Press received the lion’s share of government custom, especially extremely lucrative textbook contracts. In the 1860s the Press issued cheap editions of famous Hindi classics, in printings of several thousands at a time, followed by Hindi translations of Sanskrit scriptures, and bilingual editions of Sanskrit texts with Hindi commentary. Another important centre of printing in Hindi was Benares, although a fully fledged print culture would develop there only in the 1870s. This was largely brought about by the efforts of the remarkable Bhāratendu Hariścandra, who wrote and published in every possible literary genre in his short but extremely productive life. His lead was followed by the likes of Rāmakṛsṇā Varmā, whose Bharat Jiwan Press (established in 1884) specialized in Brajbhasa poetry, as well as translations of Bengali novels: the latter paved the away ‘for the explosion in fiction writing that took place in Benares in the 1890s’ (Orsini, ‘Pandits’, 120).
By the turn of the century, print had spread to almost every part of the Indian subcontinent, with an elaborate network of production and distribution in place. The rise of public libraries and reading rooms created new spaces for the consumption of print. The Calcutta Public Library (established in 1836) showed the way, by involving its subscribers, both Indian and British, in decision-making, especially with regard to acquisitions. The gradual increase in literacy and the formation of new interpretative communities created new tastes and reading habits, as embodied most visibly in the phenomenal rise of the Indian novel. The pioneer in this regard was the Bengali author Bankimcandra Cattopādhyāy, who is credited with having written the first novel in an Indian language, in 1865. The rise of this genre was perhaps the most decisive indication of the extent to which print had penetrated and modified the literary protocols of Indian languages.
The potentially large Indian market now began to attract overseas publishers. The two houses that took the lead in this initiative were Macmillan and Oxford University Press. The rapid spread of education made the textbook market in India highly lucrative, and Macmillan entered it with a splash, taking over Peary Churn Sircar’s Books of Reading in 1875 from the firm of Spink, & Co. Macmillan published F. T. Palgrave’s famous Golden Treasury, and the algebra and geometry of Hall and Knight, and Hall and Stevens, which are still in use. In 1886, the firm ventured into fiction, with ‘Macmillan’s Colonial Library’ and ‘Macmillan’s English Classics’ for Indian Universities. OUP took a more scholarly route, by publishing the monumental 50-volume Sacred Books of the East (edited by F. Max Müller), as well as the ‘Rulers of India’ series, although it set up an Indian branch office only in 1912, in Bombay, under E. V. Rieu. Other British firms following their lead included Longman and Blackie & Son, the latter publishing the ubiquitous Wren and Martin Grammar. In the field of distribution, A. H. Wheeler & Co. obtained the franchise for bookselling at railway stations all over India, and became an essential part of Indian travelling experience. Another bookselling giant was Higginbothams Bookstore of Madras; it started as the Wesleyan Book Depot in 1844 and is currently India’s oldest surviving bookshop. The Oxford Book and Stationery Company (not connected to OUP), a chain of bookshops run by the Primlanis, set up business in 1920 and opened bookshops in Calcutta, Bombay, and Allahabad which continue to operate.
By the beginning of the 20th century, print had become an integral part of the public sphere and thoroughly indigenous. The competition between traditional and modern knowledge systems was now firmly enacted in the arena of print. There was an enthusiastic collaboration between print and the rise of regional-language literatures, involving figures such as Subramaṇiya Bhārati, Rabindranath Tagore, Fakirmohan Senāpati, and Munṣī Premcānd. The beginnings of the freedom movement during this period also saw the emergence of what may be called print nationalism. Print, especially in the periodical press, was widely mobilized in the task of articulating the idea of a nation, and focusing opinion about the evils of colonial rule. The proposed partition of Bengal in 1905, and the swadeshi movement in its wake, saw extensive use of print, with leadership provided by men of letters such as Tagore and periodicals such as the Jugāntar. Not surprisingly, the hand of the Raj began to come down heavily upon so-called ‘seditious’ literature, and books were often proscribed and withdrawn from circulation. Raids on bookshops, the interrogation of suspects, and the arrest of authors, publishers, and printers became common. In 1907, Gaṇeś Deśmukh was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for distributing a seditious songbook, while the minstrel poet Mukundadās was jailed for three years for performing a jatra, or musical drama, critical of the Raj. There were attempts at circumvention, however. After the passage in 1910 of the Indian Press Act, which aimed to prevent the publication and dissemination of seditious literature in all forms, nationalist literature was often circulated via princely states and non-British foreign enclaves such as Pondicherry and Chandannagar. Returning Indian and European sailors provided another conduit for overseas revolutionary literature. The civil disobedience movement brought in its wake the repressive 1931 Indian Press Act, which sought to prevent the distribution of material considered an incitement to violence.
The new century also saw the rise of a number of firms that took the lead in standardizing publishing, and bringing it more into line with international practice. The first attempts to form trade associations took place during this time, notably in the College Street book mart in Calcutta. The passing of the Indian Copyright Act of 1914 ratified the 1911 British Act with minor changes, and helped clarify author–publisher relations. Another notable development was the rise of specialist publishers, leading to the standardization of editorial and scholarly practices, a task initiated by learned societies such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Kasi and the Bangīya Sāhitya Parişat in Calcutta. When Tagore set up the publishing arm of his world university, Visva-Bharati, it became one of the first publishing houses in India to adopt uniform editorial conventions. A similar role was played by the South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society in Madras.
The first two decades after Independence saw the coming of age of a number of young firms. Many of them had been loosely associated with the freedom movement, such as Hind Kitab and Renaissance Publishers, set up to publish the works of the revolutionary M. N. Roy. But the field was dominated by Asia Publishing House of Bombay, founded in 1943 by Peter Jayasinghe, and widely regarded as the first Indian publishing house to be organized along truly professional lines. Over a period of four decades it published nearly 5,000 titles, mostly in the social sciences and politics, and in its heyday was able to maintain branch offices in London and New York. Nevertheless, it may have overreached itself, for its decline in the 1980s was sharp and sudden. Another publisher of serious books was Popular Prakashan, which was started as a bookshop in 1924 but soon went into publishing, and which distinguished itself by issuing the seminal works of the historian D. D. Kosambi in the 1950s. In fact, many firms that had begun life as booksellers and distributors branched out into publishing after Independence, making intelligent use of their networks. Such was the case with Rupa & Co., which was founded in 1936 and became one of the largest wholesalers, distributors, and exporters in India before diversifying into publishing. Allied, established in 1934, took the same route and went into textbook publishing.
In the paperback sector, two firms led the way: Jaico Books, founded in 1946 in anticipation of Independence, was the first publisher of paperbacks in English. Hind Pocket Books, started in 1958 by D. N. Malhotra, began the paperback revolution by printing ten Hindi titles. It published fiction and non-fiction in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and English, and started two book clubs, one for books in Hindi and one in English. But perhaps the most energetic publisher of the period was a late entrant, Vikas Publishing House (established in 1969), which published in a wide range of subjects, at an average of 500 titles every year. A key factor in the firm’s success was the access it had to its sister concern, the UBSPD, which had one of the most sophisticated distribution networks in the country. Alternative models of publishing were provided by the Sahitya Pravarthaka Cooperative Society, set up as a cooperative for Malayalam authors, and P. Lal’s Writers Workshop in Calcutta, which has published over 3,000 young English-language authors since 1958.
A large part of the publishing market was accounted for by the government and its subsidiaries. In 1954 the government founded the Sahitya Akademi as a national academy of letters, with the mandate of publishing in Indian languages, both in the original and in translations. The Akademi has since published several thousand titles, but its distribution network is practically nonexistent. The National Book Trust was established in 1957 to provide books at cheap prices. Among overseas publishers, OUP India led the field, steadily consolidating its position, while others such as Macmillan, Blackie, and Orient Longman (the post-Independence avatar of Longman) closed their Indian businesses following restrictions on foreign firms’ holding equity. OUP was unaffected because it is a department of the University and enjoys exemption from corporate taxes in many countries. Currently, it is India’s leading publisher of scholarly and reference books, with a list of more than 3,000 titles. In the 1960s, the United States’ PL 480 programme resulted in more than a thousand American college-level textbooks being registered in India at subsidized prices. Some four million books were distributed through this route. American publishers were late to enter the field and when they did so, it was with higher-level textbooks. Prentice Hall set up business in 1963, while McGraw-Hill entered the market in collaboration with the Tata family in 1970.
This was roughly the state of the publishing business until economic liberalization was set in motion in the early 1990s. Penguin India started publishing from 1987, and currently publishes 200 titles annually, with a backlist of 750 titles, making it one of the biggest publishers of English books in South Asia. Macmillan returned to India after a period of absence, and has tried to reclaim the prominence it once enjoyed in educational publishing. The loosening of import and equity restrictions led to the entry in recent years of conglomerates such as HarperCollins, Random House, and the Pearson Group: HarperCollins was the first out of the starting gate, and has recently allied with the India Today group. All this portends an imminent boom in publishing in India, and one not merely restricted to the English language. Penguin has plans to enter into regional-language publishing, a market whose full potential is far from being tapped. India is also in the process of becoming the ‘back office’ for overseas publications, with increasing volumes of editorial and production work being outsourced to it.
According to the Federation of Indian Publishers, there are more than 11,000 publishing firms in India, some four-fifths of which are publishing in regional languages. Unfortunately, most of them seem unable to break out of their outdated business models. There are some exceptions, of course, such as Ananda, which is the leading publisher of Bengali books, and belongs to the group of companies that includes Anandabazar Patrika, the first Bengali daily to have used Linotype. In contrast, English-language and bilingual publishing has seen the entry of a number of independent niche firms, which have brought creativity and energy to publishing. Tara in Madras publishes for the neglected young adult sector, while Kali for Women and Stree have distinguished themselves in women’s studies. Permanent Black has set a high standard for scholarly publishing; Seagull is noted for the quality of its theatre and arts books, and Roli publishes expensive art books for an overseas market. Translation is another sector that is beginning to register growth after decades of inexplicable neglect. Thus, with an expanding population, solid businesses, overseas and domestic investment, and a degree of commercial innovation, the future of Indian publishing seems highly promising.
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