Print Culture and The Modern World
(Notes)
1. Introduction
We read printed literature, see printed images, follow the news
through newspapers, and track public debates that appear in print. We take for
granted this world of print and often forget that there was a time before
print. We may not realise that print itself has a history which has, in fact,
shaped our contemporary world. What is this history? When did printed
literature begin to circulate? How has it helped create the modern world? We
are going to read about development of print, from its beginnings in East Asia
to its expansion in Europe and in India. We will understand the impact of the
spread of technology and consider how social lives and cultures changed with
the coming of print.
1.1 The First
Printed Books
The earliest kind of
print technology was developed in China, Japan and Korea. This was a system of
hand printing. From AD 594 onwards, books in China were printed by
rubbing paper – also invented there – against the inked surface of woodblocks.
As both sides of the thin, porous sheet could not be printed, the traditional
Chinese ‘accordion book’ was folded and stitched at the side. Superbly
skilled craftsmen could duplicate, with remarkable accuracy, the beauty
of calligraphy. The imperial state in China was, for a very long time,
the major producer of printed material. China possessed a huge bureaucratic
system which recruited its personnel through civil service examinations.
Textbooks for this examination were printed in vast numbers under the
sponsorship of the imperial state. From the sixteenth century, the number
of examination candidates went up and that increased the volume of print. By
the seventeenth century, as urban culture bloomed in China, the uses of print
diversified. Print was no longer used just by scholar officials. Merchants used
print in their everyday life, as they collected trade information. Reading
increasingly became a leisure activity. The new readership preferred fictional
narratives, poetry, autobiographies, anthologies of literary masterpieces, and
romantic plays. Rich women began to read, and many women began publishing their
poetry and plays. Wives of scholar-officials published their works and
courtesans wrote about their lives. India and the Contemporary World This new
reading culture was accompanied by a new technology. Western printing
techniques and mechanical presses were imported in the late nineteenth century
as Western powers established their outposts in China. Shanghai became the hub
of the new print culture, catering to the Western-style schools. From hand
printing there was now a gradual shift to mechanical printing.
1.2 Print in Japan
Buddhist missionaries
from China introduced hand-printing technology into Japan around AD 768-770.
The oldest Japanese book, printed in AD 868, is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra,
containing six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations. Pictures were printed
on textiles, playing cards and paper money.
In the late eighteenth century, in the flourishing urban circles at Edo (later to be known as Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings depicted an elegant urban culture, involving artists, courtesans, and teahouse gatherings. Libraries and bookstores were packed with hand-printed material of various types – books on women, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower arrangements, proper etiquette, cooking and famous places.
A page from the Diamond Sutra. |
In the late eighteenth century, in the flourishing urban circles at Edo (later to be known as Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings depicted an elegant urban culture, involving artists, courtesans, and teahouse gatherings. Libraries and bookstores were packed with hand-printed material of various types – books on women, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower arrangements, proper etiquette, cooking and famous places.
2. Print Comes To Europe
For centuries, silk and spices from China flowed into Europe through the silk route. In the eleventh century, Chinese paper reached Europe via the same route. Paper made possible the production of manuscripts, carefully written by scribes. Then, in 1295, Marco Polo, a great explorer, returned to Italy after many years of exploration in China. As you read above, China already had the technology of woodblock printing. Marco Polo brought this knowledge back with him. Now Italians began producing books with woodblocks, and soon the technology spread to other parts of Europe. Luxury editions were still handwritten on very expensive vellum, meant for aristocratic circles and rich monastic libraries which scoffed at printed books as cheap vulgarities. Merchants and students in the university towns bought the cheaper printed copies. As the demand for books increased, booksellers all over Europe began exporting books to many different countries. Book fairs were held at different places. Production of handwritten manuscripts was also organised in new ways to meet the expanded demand. Scribes or skilled handwriters were no longer solely employed by wealthy or influential patrons but increasingly by booksellers as well. More than 50 scribes often worked for one bookseller. But the production of handwritten manuscripts could not satisfy the ever-increasing demand for books. Copying was an expensive, laborious and time-consuming business. Manuscripts were fragile, awkward to handle, and could not be carried around or read easily. Their circulation therefore remained limited. With the growing demand for books, woodblock printing gradually became more and more popular. By the early fifteenth century, woodblocks were being widely used in Europe to print textiles, playing cards, and religious pictures with simple, brief texts. There was clearly a great need for even quicker and cheaper reproduction of texts. This could only be with the invention of a new print technology. The breakthrough occurred at Strasbourg, Germany, where Johann Gutenberg developed the first-known printing press in the 1430s.
2.1 Gutenberg and the Printing Press
Gutenberg was the son of
a merchant and grew up on a large agricultural estate. From his childhood he
had seen wine and olive presses. Subsequently, he learnt the art of polishing
stones, became a master goldsmith, and also acquired the expertise to create
lead moulds used for making trinkets. Drawing on this knowledge, Gutenberg
adapted existing technology to design his innovation. The olive press provided
the model for the printing press, and moulds were used for casting the metal
types for the letters of the alphabet. By 1448, Gutenberg perfected the
system. The first book he printed was the Bible. About 180 copies were printed
and it took three years to produce them. By the standards of the time this was
fast production. In the hundred years between 1450 and 1550, printing
presses were set up in most countries of Europe. Printers from Germany
travelled to other countries, seeking work and helping start new presses. As
the number of printing presses grew, book production boomed. The second half of
the fifteenth century saw 20 million copies of printed books flooding the
markets in Europe. The number went up in the sixteenth century to about 200
million copies. This shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the
print revolution.
3. The Print Revolution and Its Impact
It can not just a
development, a new way of producing books; it transformed the lives of people,
changing their relationship to information and knowledge, and with institutions
and authorities. It influenced popular perceptions and opened up new ways of
looking at things. Let us explore some of these changes.
3.1 A New Reading Public
With the printing press,
a new reading public emerged. Printing reduced the cost of books. The time and
labour required to produce each book came down, and multiple copies could be
produced with greater ease. Books flooded the market, reaching out to an ever-growing
readership. Access to books created a new culture of reading. Earlier, reading
was restricted to the elites. Common people lived in a world of oral culture.
They heard sacred texts read out, ballads recited, and folk tales narrated.
Knowledge was transferred orally. People collectively heard a story, or saw a
performance. Now books could reach out to wider sections of people. But the
transition was not so simple. Books could be read only by the literate, and the
rates of literacy in most European countries were very low till the twentieth
century. How, then, could publishers persuade the common people to welcome the
printed book? To do this, they had to keep in mind the wider reach of the
printed work: even those who did not read could certainly enjoy listening to
books being read out. Oral culture thus entered print and printed material was
orally transmitted. The line that separated the oral and reading cultures
became blurred. And the hearing public and reading public became intermingled.
3.2 Religious Debates and the Fear of
Print
Print created the
possibility of wide circulation of ideas, and introduced a new world of debate
and discussion. Not everyone welcomed the printed book. Many were apprehensive
of the effects that the easier access to the printed word and the wider
circulation of books, could have on people’s minds. It was feared that if there
was no control over what was printed and read then rebellious and irreligious
thoughts might spread. If that happened the authority of ‘valuable’ literature
would be destroyed.
Let us consider the implication of this in religion.
Let us consider the implication of this in religion.
In 1517, the religious
reformer Martin Luther wrote Ninety Five Theses criticising
many of the practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. A printed copy
of this was posted on a church door in Wittenberg. It challenged the Church to
debate his ideas. Luther’s writings were immediately reproduced in vast
numbers and read widely. This lead to a division within the Church and to the
beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s
translation of the New Testament sold 5,000 copies within a few weeks and a
second edition appeared within three months. Deeply grateful to print, Luther
said, ‘Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest
one.’ Several scholars, in fact, think that print brought about a
new intellectual atmosphere and helped spread the new ideas that led to the
Reformation.
3.3 Print and Dissent
Print and popular
religious literature stimulated many distinctive individual
interpretations of faith even among little-educated working people. In the
sixteenth century, Menocchio, a miller in Italy, began to read books that were
available in his locality. He reinterpreted the message of the Bible and
formulated a view of God and Creation that enraged the Roman Catholic Church.
When the Roman Church began its inquisition to repress heretical ideas,
Menocchio was hauled up twice and ultimately executed. The Roman Church,
troubled by such effects of popular readings and questionings of faith, imposed
severe controls over publishers and booksellers and began to maintain an Index
of Prohibited Books from 1558.
4. The Reading Mania
By the end of the
eighteenth century, in some parts of Europe literacy rates were as high as 60
to 80 per cent. As literacy and schools spread in European countries, there was
a virtual reading mania. People wanted books to read and printers produced
books in everincreasing numbers. New forms of popular literature appeared in
print, targeting new audiences. Booksellers employed pedlars who roamed around
villages, carrying little books for sale. There were almanacs or ritual
calendars, along with ballads and folktales. But other forms of reading matter,
largely for entertainment, began to reach ordinary readers as well. In England,
penny chapbooks were carried by petty pedlars known as chapmen, and sold for a
penny, so that even the poor could buy them. In France, were the “Biliotheque Bleue”,
which were low-priced small books printed on poor quality paper, and bound in
cheap blue covers. Books were of various sizes, serving many different purposes
and interests. The periodical press developed from the early eighteenth
century, combining information about current affairs with entertainment.
Similarly, the ideas of scientists and philosophers now became more accessible
to the common people. Ancient and medieval scientific texts were compiled and
published, and maps and scientific diagrams were widely printed. When
scientists like Isaac Newton began to publish their discoveries, they could
influence a much wider circle of scientifically minded readers. The writings of
thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau were also
widely printed and read.
4.1 ‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of
the world!’
Louise-Sebastien Mercier, a novelist in eighteenth-century France, declared: ‘The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force that will sweep despotism away.’ In many of Mercier’s novels, the heroes are transformed by acts of reading. They devour books, are lost in the world books create, and become enlightened in the process. Convinced of the power of print in bringing enlightenment and destroying the basis of despotism, Mercier proclaimed: ‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtual writer!’
4.2 Print Culture and the French
Revolution
Many historians have
argued that print culture created the conditions within which French Revolution
occurred.Three types of arguments have been usually put forward.
First: print popularised the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. Collectively, their writings provided a critical commentary on tradition, superstition and despotism. They argued for the rule of reason rather than custom, and demanded that everything be judged through the application of reason and rationality. They attacked the sacred authority of the Church and the despotic power of the state, thus eroding the legitimacy of a social order based on tradition. The writings of Voltaire and Rousseau were read widely; and those who read these books saw the world through new eyes, eyes that were questioning, critical and rational.
Second: print created a new culture of dialogue and debate. All
values, norms and institutions were re-evaluated and discussed by a public that
had become aware of the power of reason, and recognised the need to question
existing ideas and beliefs. Within this public culture, new ideas of social
revolution came into being.
Third: by the 1780s there
was an outpouring of literature that mocked the royalty and criticised their
morality. In the process, it raised
questions about the existing social order. Cartoons and caricatures typically suggested that the monarchy remained absorbed only in sensual pleasures while the common people suffered immense hardships. This literature circulated underground and led to the growth of hostile sentiments against the monarchy. Cartoons and caricatures typically suggested that the monarchy remained absorbed only in sensual pleasures while the common people suffered immense hardships. This literature circulated underground and led to the growth of hostile sentiments against the monarchy.
First: print popularised the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. Collectively, their writings provided a critical commentary on tradition, superstition and despotism. They argued for the rule of reason rather than custom, and demanded that everything be judged through the application of reason and rationality. They attacked the sacred authority of the Church and the despotic power of the state, thus eroding the legitimacy of a social order based on tradition. The writings of Voltaire and Rousseau were read widely; and those who read these books saw the world through new eyes, eyes that were questioning, critical and rational.
questions about the existing social order. Cartoons and caricatures typically suggested that the monarchy remained absorbed only in sensual pleasures while the common people suffered immense hardships. This literature circulated underground and led to the growth of hostile sentiments against the monarchy. Cartoons and caricatures typically suggested that the monarchy remained absorbed only in sensual pleasures while the common people suffered immense hardships. This literature circulated underground and led to the growth of hostile sentiments against the monarchy.
5. The Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century
saw vast leaps in mass literacy in Europe, bringing in large numbers of new
readers among children, women and workers.
5.1 Children, Women and Workers
As primary education
became compulsory from the late nineteenth century, children became an
important category of readers. Production of school textbooks became critical
for the publishing industry. A children’s press, was set up in France in
1857. This press published new works as well as old fairy tales and folk
tales. The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years compiling traditional folk
tales gathered from peasants. What they collected was edited before the stories
were published in a collection in 1812. Rural folk tales thus acquired a
new form. In this way, print recorded old tales but also changed them. Women
became important as readers as well as writers. When novels began to be written
in the nineteenth century, women were seen as important readers. Some of the
bestknown novelists were women: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot.
Their writings became important in defining a new type of woman: a person with
will, strength of personality, determination and the power to
think. Lending libraries had been in existence from the seventeenth
century onwards. In the nineteenth century, lending libraries in England became
instruments for educating white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class
people. Sometimes, self-educated working class people wrote for themselves.
After the working day was gradually shortened from the mid-nineteenth century,
workers had some time for self-improvement and self-expression. They wrote
political tracts and autobiographies in large numbers.
5.2 Further Innovations
By the mid-nineteenth
century, Richard M. Hoe of New York had perfected the power-driven cylindrical
press. This was capable of printing 8,000 sheets per hour. This press was
particularly useful for printing newspapers. In the late nineteenth century,
the offset press was developed which could print up to six colours at a time.
From the turn of the twentieth century, electrically operated presses
accelerated printing operations. A series of other developments followed.
Methods of feeding paper improved, the quality of plates became better,
automatic paper reels and photoelectric controls of the colour register were
introduced. The accumulation of several individual mechanical improvements
transformed the appearance of printed texts. Nineteenth-century periodicals
serialised important novels, which gave birth to a particular way of writing
novels. In the 1920s in England, popular works were sold in cheap series, called
the Shilling Series. The dust cover or the book jacket is also a
twentieth-century innovation. With the onset of the Great Depression in the
1930s, publishers feared a decline in book purchases. To sustain buying, they
brought out cheap paperback editions.
6. India and the World of Print
Now we will see when
printing began in India and how ideas and information were written before the
age of print.
6.1 Manuscripts 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. Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated. They
would be either pressed between wooden covers or sewn together to ensure
preservation. Manuscripts continued to be produced till well after the
introduction of print, down to the late nineteenth century.
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’. So it was private English enterprise, proud of its independence from colonial influence, that began English printing in India. Hickey published a lot of advertisements, including those that related to the import and sale of slaves. But he 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. By the close of the eighteenth century, a number of newspapers and journals appeared in print. 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.
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’. So it was private English enterprise, proud of its independence from colonial influence, that began English printing in India. Hickey published a lot of advertisements, including those that related to the import and sale of slaves. But he 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. By the close of the eighteenth century, a number of newspapers and journals appeared in print. 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.
7. Religious Reform and Public Debates
From the early
nineteenth century, as you know, there were intense debates around religious
issues. Different groups confronted the changes happening within colonial
society in different ways, and offered a variety of new interpretations of the
beliefs of different religions. Some criticised existing practices and campaigned
for reform, while others countered the arguments of reformers. These debates
were carried out in public and in print. Printed tracts and newspapers not only
spread the new ideas, but they shaped the nature of the debate. A wider public
could now participate in these public discussions and express their views. New
ideas emerged through these clashes of opinions. This was a time of intense
controversies between social and religious reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy
over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and
idolatry. In Bengal, as the debate developed, tracts and newspapers
proliferated, circulating a variety of arguments. To reach a wider audience,
the ideas were printed in the everyday, spoken language of ordinary people.
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 were deeply anxious about the
collapse of Muslim dynasties. They feared that colonial rulers would encourage
conversion, change the Muslim personal laws. To counter this, they used cheap
lithographic presses, published Persian and Urdu translations of holy
scriptures, and printed religious newspapers and tracts. 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 ofthe 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. Religious texts, therefore, reached a very wide
circle of people, encouraging discussions, debates and controversies within and
among different religions.
Print did not only stimulate 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.
Print did not only stimulate 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.
8. New Forms of Publication
Printing created an
appetite for new kinds of writing. As more and more people could now read, they
wanted to see their own lives, experiences, emotions and relationships
reflected in what they read. The novel, a literary firm which had developed in
Europe, ideally catered to this need. It soon acquired distinctively Indian
forms and styles. For readers, it opened up new worlds of experience, and gave
a vivid sense of the diversity of human lives. Other new literary forms also
entered the world of reading lyrics, short stories, essays about social and
political matters. In different ways, they reinforced the new emphasis on human
lives and intimate feelings, about the political and social rules that shaped
such things. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new visual culture was
taking shape. With the setting up of an increasing number of printing presses,
visual images could be easily reproduced in multiple copies.
Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation. Poor wood engravers who made woodblocks set up shop near the letterpresses, and were employed by print shops. Cheap prints and calendars, easily available in the bazaar, 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. There were imperial caricatures lampooning nationalists, as well as nationalist cartoons criticising imperial rule.
8.1 Women and Print
Lives and feelings of
women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways. Women’s
reading, therefore, increased enormously in middle-class homes. Liberal
husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and sent them to
schools when women’s schools were set up in the cities and towns after the
mid-nineteenth century. Many journals began carrying writings by women, and
explained why women should be educated. They also carried a syllabus and
attached suitable reading matter which could be used for home-based schooling.
But not all families were liberal. 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. We
know the story of a girl in a conservative Muslim family of north India who
secretly learnt to read and write in Urdu. Her family wanted her to read only
the Arabic Quran which she did not understand. So she insisted on
learning to read a language that was her own. In East Bengal, in the early
nineteenth century, 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. India and the
Contemporary World Since social reforms and novels had already created a great
interest in women’s lives and emotions, there was also an interest in what
women would have to say about their own lives. 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. 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. 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. Inthe 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. In Punjab, too, a similar folk literature was
widely printed from the early twentieth century. Ram Chaddha published the
fast-selling Istri Dharm Vichar 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. 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.
8.2 Print and the Poor People
Very cheap small books
were brought to markets in nineteenth-century Madras towns and sold at
crossroads, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy them. Public
libraries were set up from the early twentieth century, expanding the access to
books. These libraries were located mostly in cities and towns, and at times in
prosperous villages. From the late nineteenth century, issues of caste
discrimination began to be written about in many printed tracts and essays.
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.
9. Print and Censorship
Before 1798, the
colonial state under the East India Company was not too concerned with
censorship. By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court passed certain regulations
to control press freedom and the Company began encouraging publication of
newspapers that would celebrate Britsh rule. In 1835, faced with urgent
petitions by editors of English and vernacular newspapers, Governor-General
Bentinck agreed to revise press laws. Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial
official, formulated new rules that restored the earlier freedoms. After the
revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the press changed. Enraged
Englishmen demanded a clamp down on the ‘native’ press. As vernacular
newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government began
debating measures of stringent control. 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. 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. They reported on colonial misrule and encouraged
nationalist activities. When Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907,
Balgangadhar Tilak wrote with great sympathy about them in his Kesari. This led
to his imprisonment in 1908, provoking in turn widespread protests all over
India.
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