Part-I
Introduction
We will study the 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.
The first printed books
(i) 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. The traditional chinese ‘accordian book’ was folded and stitched at the side. Skilled craftsmen could duplicate, with remarkable accuracy, the art of beautiful and stylised writing called calligraphy.
(ii) 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 number 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.
(iii) 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.
(iv) 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. The new reading culture was accompanied by a new technology. Western powers established their outposts in China.
(v) 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.
Print in Japan
(i) 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.
(ii) Pictures were printed on textiles, playing cards and paper money. In medieval Japan, poets and prose writers were regularly published, and books were cheap and abundant.
(iii) Printing of visual material led to interesting publishing practices.
(iv) 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.
Print comes to Europe
(i) In the eleventh century, Chinese paper reached Europe via the silk route. Paper made possible the production of manuscripts, carefully written by scribes.
(ii) China already had the technology of woodblock printing. Marco Polo brought this knowledge back with him. Now Italiansbegan producing books with woodblocks, and soon the technology spread to other parts of Europe.
(iii) 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.
(iv) 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.
(v) 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 not to be carried around or read easily. Their circulation therefore remained limited.
(vi) 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.
(vii) 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 occured at Strasbourg, Germany where Johann Gutenberg developed the first-known printing press in the 1430s.
Gutenberg and the Printing Press
(i) 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 (small precious ornaments).
(ii) 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.
(iii) 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.
(iv) In the books printed for the rich, space for decoration was kept blank on the printed page. Each purchaser could choose the design and decide on the painting school that would do the illustrations.
(v) 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.
(vi) This shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the print revolution.
The print Revolution and its impact
The print revolution was not just a development, a new way of producing books; it transformed the lives of people, institutions and authorities. It influenced popular perceptions and opened up new ways of looking at things.
A new Reading Public
(i) 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.
(ii) Access to books created a new culture of reading. Earlier, reading was restricted to the elite. 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.
(iii) Before the age of print, books were not only expensive but they could not be produced in sufficient numbers. Now bookscould reach out to wider sections of people.
(iv) Books could be read only by the literate, and the rates of literacy in most European countries were very low till the twentieth century. Printers began publishing popular ballads and folk tales, profusely illustrated with pictures. These were then sung & recited at gatherings in villages & in taverns in towns.
(v) 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.
Religious Debates and the Fear of Print
(i) Print created the possibility of wide circulation of ideas, and introduced a new world of debate and discussions.
(ii) Through the printed message, they could persuade people to think differently, and move them to action. This had significance in different spheres of life.
(iii) Not everyone welcomed the printed book, and those who did also had fears about it. It was feared that if there was no control over what was printed and read then rebellious & irreligious thoughts might spread.
(iv) If that happened the authority of ‘valuable’ literature would be destroyed. Expressed by religious authorities and monarchs, as well as many writers and artists, this anxiety was the basis of widespread criticism of the new printed literature that had began to circulate.
(v) It is desirable to consider the implication of this in one sphere of life in early modern Europe – namely, religion.
(a) 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 pasted on a Church door in Wittenberg. It challanged 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.
(b) Luther’s translation of the New Testament sold 5,000 copies within a few weeks and a second edition appeared within three months.
Print and Dissent
(i) Print and popular religious literature stimulated many distinctive individual interpretations of faith even among little-educated working people.
(ii) In the sixteenth century, Manocchio, 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.
(iii) When the Roman Church began its inquisition to repress heretical ideas, Manocchio 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.
The Reading Mania
(i) As literacy and schools spread in European countries, there was a virtual reading mania. People wanted books to read and printers produced books in ever increasing numbers.
(ii) 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 folk tales.
(iii) 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.
(iv) In France, were the ‘Biliotheque Bleue’, which were low-priced small books printed on poor quality paper, and bound in cheap blue covers.
(v) Newspapers and journals carried information about wars and trade, as well as news of development in other places.
(vi) 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.
(vii) When scientists like Issac 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.
Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world
(i) By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a common conviction that books were a means of spreading progress and enlightenment. Many believed that books could change the world, liberate society from despotism and tyranny, and herald a time when reason and intellect would rule.
(ii) Louise-Sebastien Mercier, was a novelist in eighteenth-century France. 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 world ! Tremble before the virtual writer!’
Print Culture and the French Revolution
(i) Many historians have argued that print culture created the conditions within which French Revolution occurred.
(ii) 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.
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. This literature circulated underground and led to the growth of hostile sentiments against the monarchy.
(iii) There can be no doubt that print helps the spread of ideas. But we must remember that people did not read just one kind of literature. They were not influenced directly by everything they read or saw. They accepted some ideas and rejected others. They interpreted things their own way. Print did not directly shape their minds, but it did open up the possibility of thinking differently.
The nineteenth Century
Children, Women and Workers
(i) 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.
(ii) A children’s press, devoted to litreature for children alone, was set up in France in 1857. This press published new works as well as old fairy tales and folk tales.
(iii) The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years compiling traditional folk tales gathered from peasants. Rural folk tales thus acquired a new form. In this way, print not only recorded old tales but also changed them.
(iv) 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 best known 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.
(v) Lending libraries had been in existence from the seventeenth century onwards. In the nineteenth century, lending librariesin England became instruments for educating white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people. Sometimes, self-educated working class people wrote for themselves.
Further Innovations
(i) Through the nineteenth century, there were a series of further innovations in printing technology.
(ii) In the late nineteenth century, the offset press was developed which could print up to six colours at a time.
(iii) From the turn of the twentieth century, electrically operated presses accelerated printing operations. A series of other developments followed.
(iv) Methods of feeding paper improved, the quality of plates became better, automatic paper reels and photoelectric controls of the colour register were introduced.
(v) Printers and publishers continuously developed new strategies to sell their product. Nineteenth-century periodicals serialised important novels, which gave birth to a particular way of writing novels.
(vi) In the 1920s in England, popular works were sold in cheap series, called the Shilling Series.
(vii) 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.
Part-II
India and the World of Print
Manuscripts before the age of Print
(i) India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages.
(ii) Manuscripts, however, were highly expensive and fragile. They had to be handled carefully, and they could not be read easily as the scripts was written in different styles. So manuscripts were not widely used in everyday life.
Print comes to India
(i) The printing press first came to Goa with Portguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century. Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts.
(ii) 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.
(iii) From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, 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.
(iv) 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 newspaper that could counter the flow of information that damaged the image of the colonial government.
(v) There were Indians, too, who began to publish Indian newspaper. The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya who was close to Rammohan Roy.
Religious Reform and Public Debates
(i) 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.
(ii) Printed tracts and newspapers not only spread the new ideas, but they shaped the nature of the debate.
(iii) A wider public could now participate in these public discussions and express their views. New ideas emerged through these clashes of opinions.
(iv) 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.
(v) Rammohan 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.
(vi) In north India, the ulema were deeply anxious about the collapse of Muslim dynasties. They feared that colonial rulers would encourage conversion, change the Muslim personal laws.
(vii) To counter this, they used cheap lithographic presses, published Persian and Urdu translations of holy scriptures, and printed religious newspapers and tracts.
(viii) 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.
(ix) Among Hindus, too, print encouraged the reading of religious texts, especially in the vernacular languages. The first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century text, came out from Calcutta in 1810.
(x) 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.
(xi) Religious texts, therefore, reached a very wide circle of people, encouraging discussions, debates and controversies within and among different religions.
(xii) 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.
New Forms of Publication
(i) 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.
(ii) 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.
(iii) 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.
(iv) Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation. Poor wood engravers who made woodblocks set up shops near the letterpresses, and were employed by print shops.
(v) Cheap prints and calenders, easily available in the bazaar, could be bought even by the poor to decorate the walls of their homes or places of work.
(vi) 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.
Women and Print
(i) 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.
(ii) Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why women should be educated. They also carried asyllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be used for home-based schooling.
(iii) 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.
(iv) 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 published in the Bengali language.
(v) 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.
(vi) 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.
(vii) In the 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.
(viii) 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.
(ix) In Bengal, an entire area in central Calcutta – the Battala – was developed to the printing of popular books.
Print and the Poor People
(i) Very cheap small books were brought into markets in nineteenth-century Madras towns and sold at crossroads, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy them.
(ii) 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.
(iii) 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.
(iv) Workers in factories were too overloaded 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.
(v) 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.
(vi) These were sponsored by social reformers who tried to restrict excessive drinking among them, to bring literacy and, sometimes, to propogate the message of nationalism.
Print and Censorship
(i) Before 1798, the colonial state under the East India Company was not too concerned with censorship. Strangely, its early measures to control printed matter were directed against Englishmen in India who were critical of Company misrule and hated the actions of particular Company officers.
(ii) By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court passed certain regulations to control press freedom and the Company began encouraging publication of newspaper that would celebrate British rule.
(iii) In 1835, faced with urgent petitions by editiors of English and vernacular newspaper, Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise press laws. Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial official, formulated new rules that restored the earlier freedom
(iv) After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the press changed. Enraged Englishman demanded a clamp down on the‘native’ press.
(v) As vernacular newspaper became assertively nationalist, the colonial government began debating measures of stringment control.
(vi) 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.
(vii) From now on the government kept regularly track of the vernacular newspapers when a report was judged as seditious, the newspaper was warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press was liable to be sized and the printing machinery confiscated.
(viii) Despite repressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India. They reported on colonial misrule and encouraged nationalist activities.
(ix) Attempts to throttle nationalist criticism provoked militant protest. This in turn led to a renewed cycle of persecution and protests. 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 widerspread protests all over India.
New terms
(1) Calligraphy : The art of beautiful and stylised writing.
(2) Vellum : A parchment made from the skin of animals.
(3) Platen : In letterpress printing, platen is a board which is pressed on to the back of the paper to get the impression from the type. At one time it used to be a wooden board; later it was made of steel.
(4) Compositor : The person who composes the text for printing.
(5) Galley : Metal frame in which the types are laid and the text composed.
(6) Ballad : A historical account or folk tale in verse, usually sung or recited.
(7) Taverns : Places where people gathered to drink alcohol, to be served food and to meet friends and exchange news.
(8) Protestant Reformation : A sixteenth-century movement to reform the Catholic Church dominated by Rome. Martin Luther was one of the main Protestant reformers. Several traditions of anti-Catholic Christianity developed out of the movement.
(9) Inquisition : A former Roman Catholic court for identifying and punishing heretics.
(10) Haretical : Beliefs which do not follow the accepted teachings of the Church. Heretical beliefs were severely punished.
(11) Satiety : The state of being fulfilled much beyond the point of satisfaction.
(12) Seditious : Action, speech or writing that is seen as opposing the government.
(13) Denominations : Sub-groups within a religion.
(14) Almanac : An annual publication giving astronomical data, information about movement of the sun, moon, eclipses etc., and that was important in the everyday life of the people.
(15) Chapbook : A term used to describe pocket size books that were sold by travelling pedlers called chapmen. These became popular from the time of the sixteenth-century print revolution.
(16) Despotism : A system of governance in which absolute power is exercised by an individual unregulated by legal and constitutional checks.
(17) Ulama : Legal scholars of Islam & the Sharia (a body of Islamic law).
(18) Fatwa : A legal pronouncement on Islamic law usually given by a legal scholar (mufti) to clarify issues on which the law is uncertain.
Add to your Knowledge
(1) Much before printing began in India, in the sixteenth century, the texts were dictated, written and illustrated by hand. For e.g. Akhlaq-i-Nasiri in 1595.
(2) A Japanise artist Kitagawa Utamaro, born in Edo in 1753, was widely known for his contributions to an art form called Ukiyo or pictures of the floating world. In this art form, artists draw the theme in outline. Then a skilled woodblock carver pastes the drawing on a wood block and carves a printing block to reproduce the painter’s lines. In the process, the original drawing is destroyed and only prints survive.
(3) It was in 11th century that Chinese paper reached Europe via the silk route.
(4) The model of printing press at Gutenberg came to be known as movable type printing machine, which remained the basic print technology over the next 300 years. The machine had a long handle used to turn the screw and press down the platen over the printing block that was placed on top of a sheet of damp paper. It also developed metal types for each of the 26 characters of the Roman alphabet, printing 250 sheets on one side per hour.
(5) ‘Gita Govinda’ of Jayadeva is eighteenth century palm-leaf handwritten manuscript in accordian format.
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