A Companion to the History of the Book (25 page)

In the case of some religious texts, such as Tulsidas’s immensely popular Hindi reworking of the
Ramayana
story, large-scale manuscript production went on alongside frequent oral performance, the relish in the work being heard feeding in turn the desire for the work to be read. The same is true of secular genres such as the
nautanki
folk theatrical tradition of northern India. Handwritten play-scripts circulated among troupes of actors helping them to memorize their parts for the stage, and from the 1860s onward cheap lithographed chapbooks of the plays performed the same function – an example of the interplay not only of orality and manuscript culture but of print also (Hansen 1992). Print and orality could also interact in a political context. In Hindu-ruled Kashmir in the early twentieth century, the movement for Kashmiri Muslim identity did not channel its views through newspapers, as might have been expected, because they were tightly controlled by state legislation. Instead, it channeled them through privately printed pamphlets, usually in the form of poetry familiar to the intended audience. These poems were then read aloud to pilgrims visiting shrines or at public recitations (
mushayras
; Zutshi 2004).

The Impact of Print

Although the existence of a widespread multipurpose manuscript culture in South Asia cannot be denied, this does not altogether negate the impact of print in the subcontinent. Rather, it puts that impact into a perspective unfamiliar to Western eyes. In the subcontinent, print did not enter a world of non-communication and fill the vacuum. It simply expanded the range of the modes of production and dissemination of texts available within existing cultural parameters, and accelerated the pace of communication within communities. It did not eliminate manuscript production altogether or completely erase oral traditions of learning and performance. Many of the genres which were in popular circulation in the era of the manuscript were simply continued in print – almanacs and astrological works, traditional ballads and stories, folk dramas, medical and religious pamphlets, and so on. There was, of course, one notable exception to this continuity of literary forms from the manuscript into the print era: South Asian writing in English. Its appearance was a direct consequence of British colonial rule and coincided closely with the formation of a modern print culture in the region. As a result, South Asia today stands both inside and outside the world of the English-language book.

The introduction of typographic printing from Europe in the mid-sixteenth century was very much a false dawn. The first two hundred and fifty years up to 1800 can almost be described as the “non-history” of printing in South Asia. Without any take-up by indigenous powers or communities, printing was very sporadic, confined to coastal enclaves, and entirely the preserve of Europeans – Christian missionaries and colonizers. The vast hinterland of South Asia and the overwhelming majority of its population were entirely unaffected by its arrival. Only nineteen works were produced in the sixteenth century, forty in the seventeenth, 454 in the first half of the eighteenth, and 1,258 in the second half (Shaw 1987). These figures show that the pace of publication was accelerating towards 1800, matching the development of an embryonic Indian book-trade infrastructure. But print was still catering only for the small expatriate European communities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, or feeding their early attempts at conversion to Christianity. There were no Indian-owned presses at all, although many Indians provided the manual labor for the European-owned presses. Gangakishor Bhat-tacharya, for instance, who started the first Bengali-owned press in 1816, had previously worked in the famous Baptist Mission Press at Serampore. The only instance before 1800 of the press being used
by
Indians
for
Indians (without any direct European stimulus or involvement) was when two Parsee compositors working at the Courier Press in Bombay produced an edition of their Zoroastrian holy book, the
Khordeh Avesta
, in 1798 – truly a landmark in the history of South Asian publishing.

The trade in books from Britain to India is primarily thought of as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, as British publishers sought to take advantage of the vast potential of colonial markets for their books, particularly in the educational sphere. But up until the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the British in India were entirely dependent upon books published in Britain for their information and recreational reading needs. British books had been reaching India from the earliest decades of the seventeenth century, taken out in the baggage of East India Company employees. The Company itself also regularly exported batches of Christian literature to its trading settlements or “factories” in India, out of concern for the spiritual well-being of its employees, as well as works needed for military or administrative purposes. These initially small shipments formed the nuclei of the factory libraries which were placed in the care of the local Company chaplain. The 1729 catalogue of the library at Fort St. George (Madras) lists 1,235 works. These were mainly Christian texts, but there were editions of classical authors, travels, and utilitarian works, as well as plays and poetry for leisure-time reading. Next to the Company and its employees, the most prominent early exporters of books to India were missionary societies, primarily the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge which supported missions in Madras and Bengal. The missionaries were responsible for the introduction of Western-style education through their charity schools, and books specifically for teaching purposes were first shipped out in 1717.

As well as books, Britain was also the source of materials and manpower for printing in South Asia. Types, presses, printers’ tools, ink, and particularly paper (as local varieties were found unsuitable for printing) all had to be imported. Trained printers too began to chance a career in India, such as James Augustus Hicky who had been apprenticed to William Faden, and George Gordon, nephew of the King’s printer, William Strachan. The commercial importation of British books began with the captains and officers of East Indiamen who could ship out freight-free a certain weight of speculative cargo, and some chose books. By the 1780s, when the first newspapers appeared in India, there were frequent advertisements for British books, magazines, and newspapers imported as speculative cargoes and bought up by local general merchants. The London newspapers were a common feature of Calcutta coffee-house life as the information available locally to the eighteenth-century British expatriate was otherwise very limited. Both newspapers and magazines were unashamedly plagiarized to provide content for the local weeklies.

One of the largest markets for imported British books were the circulating libraries which opened in the three British Presidency capitals, Calcutta in the 1770s and Madras and Bombay in the 1790s. These libraries were also the first local bookshops selling directly to the public. Thacker, Spink and Company, destined to become one of the Raj’s leading booksellers, started this way in 1819. By the 1830s, the importation of books into India had become quite sophisticated. Compressed editions were especially desirable, as they reduced the costs of shipping and were more portable for the Company’s peripatetic employees. The trade had also become more international, with cheap editions of English-language books imported from A. and W. Galignani in Paris and J. and J. Harper in New York. Book distribution within India was almost non-existent outside the three metropolitan centers (Shaw 2007).

Novels quickly became the most popular category of British books from the early nineteenth century onward. It was the more sensational novels, such as those issued by the Minerva Press, that sold best (Joshi 2002). Authors such as George W. M. Reynolds fared better than Charles Dickens, although an edition of
Pickwick Papers,
for instance, was published in Calcutta in the 1830s. Sir Walter Scott was also very popular, and many of his works were translated into regional languages such as Bengali and Gujarati. During the 1790s, over £150,000 worth of books were exported from Britain to India, doubling in the 1800s to over £340,000 and staying at that level for the next few decades. Once Thomas Macaulay’s famous Minute on Indian Education of 1835 led to the widespread adoption of English as a medium of instruction and its adoption as the official language of government in 1844, the demand for English-learning among South Asians multiplied. This opened up a great new textbook market for British publishers who specialized in educational works, such as Macmillan, Blackie, Longman, and Oxford University Press. They were not slow to seize the opportunity, and on the back of that success they also launched fiction series aimed at the expatriate market, such as Macmillan’s “Colonial Library” begun in 1886.

The key century during which print made its long-delayed impact upon the South Asian population as a whole was the nineteenth. This coincided with the development of religious revivals – Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist – and cultural renaissances throughout the subcontinent, partly at least directly stimulated by the intrusiveness of colonial rule and the activities of Christian missionaries in particular. The presses of English, Scottish, American, and other missionary societies produced a welter of publications, biblical editions and scriptural tracts: in one decade alone, 1852–63, for instance, a total of nearly nine and a half million volumes. Missionaries often misread the eagerness with which these books were received by local communities. It was not the Word of God that was the attraction but the free source of paper, a valuable commodity widely used, for instance, for wrapping up spices and medicines in the bazaar. Large single sheets containing the Ten Commandments were used by boys to make kites (Shaw 2004).

What had taken Europe three centuries to achieve, the emergence of a fully fledged book culture, was in South Asia telescoped into less than one hundred years. At the beginning of the century all presses were still European-owned, so publishing even in the regional languages was under foreign direction. Few typefaces had been developed for the regional scripts (Bengali and Tamil being notable exceptions), which is another facet of lithography’s importance in South Asia. It aided the “democratization” of print by extending the possibility of publication to any script and any language. The only prerequisite was trained scribes, of whom there was never any lack. This is why lithography entered the mainstream of publishing in South Asia, unlike Europe where it remained a marginal technology. By 1850, probably a thousand editions had been published in South Asia using this technology. Lucknow-Kanpur emerged as the lithographic capital of the subcontinent, and the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow became the premier commercial publisher in the region. Perhaps most importantly, the relaxation of the press laws in 1835 paved the way for the widespread ownership and operation of presses by South Asians as well as Europeans.

The publishing of newspapers, books, and magazines of all kinds rapidly proliferated in all the major regional languages. Print served “low” culture as well as “high,” epitomized in Bengal, for instance, by the chapbooks produced in the Battala suburb of Calcutta satirizing the newly Westernized Bengali middle class (Ghosh 2006). Commercial, religious, institutional, and private presses gradually spread out from the metropolitan centers of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras into the hinterland, along with a network of booksellers, bookbinders, type-foundries, libraries, and reading rooms. The Calcutta Public Library, for example, founded in 1835, would form the nucleus of the National Library of India. By the end of the century, virtually no region of the subcontinent was without a rudimentary book-trade infrastructure in place. In terms of book history, the modern geopolitical boundaries of the subcontinent are largely irrelevant. For instance, there was no printing press in Nepal until the 1860s but prior to that Nepalese books were published in Darjeeling, Varanasi, even as far away as Bombay. The Bengali book is as vibrant in Bangladesh as in the Indian state of West Bengal. Both Urdu and Panjabi publishing straddle Pakistan and India. All this enterprise was spurred on by the religious revivals (Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist), the cultural renaissances, and the social reform movements that were springing up in different regions.

This print explosion in the regional languages inevitably raised concerns for the colonial government who sought to monitor its output and content. In 1867, the Government of British India passed an Indian Press and Registration of Books Act (later imitated by many of the Princely States and by Ceylon), but even before this, official surveys had been undertaken in each Presidency, such as James Long’s three overviews of Bengali publishing during the 1850s. After the 1857 uprising against British rule, reports on regional-language newspapers throughout the subcontinent were compiled and printed on a regular fortnightly basis. Out of all this change came a heightened political consciousness which gave greater momentum to the independence movement, beginning with the first meeting of the Indian National Congress in 1885. In this struggle for freedom, publishing played an important role in rallying support and raising awareness of events. Revolutionary activity following the partition of Bengal in 1905 led to the passing of a draconian Indian Press Act in 1910, which attempted to prevent the publication and dissemination of seditious literature in all forms, whether home-grown or smuggled in from abroad. The Jallianwala Bagh atrocity in Amritsar of 1919 and the execution of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh in 1930 provoked great outpourings of anti-British pamphleteering, and the two non-cooperation campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920–2 and 1930 were buoyed up by the mass circulation of nationalist poetry in hastily printed collections.

Publishing from Independence to Today

After independence, locally owned companies found it difficult to catch up and compete with British-owned companies with subsidiaries in the subcontinent, particularly in the lucrative field of educational publishing. The first Indian-owned publishing house to produce good-quality academic books in English along professional lines was the Asia Publishing House of Bombay, founded in 1943 just before independence. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it represented all that was best in Indian educational publishing, paving the way for later firms, such as the Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, to emerge. Oxford University Press (OUP) was the largest of the British subsidiaries, with its Indian branch established in 1912 (Chatterjee 2006). It has now published over three thousand titles. OUP Pakistan began much later, in 1952, and is much smaller. Initially, it was mainly concerned with importing and promoting titles published in the UK, but more recently has started a local schools publishing program. Penguin India now claims to be the largest English-language publisher in the subcontinent. Founded in 1985 in New Delhi, it began publishing in 1987 and now releases over two hundred fiction and nonfiction titles per year. Interestingly, Penguin India has just moved into regional-language publishing, beginning with Hindi and Marathi, to be followed by Malayalam, Urdu, and Bengali by the end of 2006. A “phenomenal growth curve” in Indian regional-language publishing is predicted (Abraham 2005). HarperCollins, a subsidiary of News Corporation, has recently strengthened its position by entering into partnership with the India Today Group, which publishes India’s largest-selling weekly news magazine, and gaining access to the Thomson Press, the largest commercial printing facilities in South Asia. Macmillan India, established in 1893, is diversifying into web-related services with its new division Emacmillan started in 2000. Macmillan has found its traditional educational business slowing down recently due to poor demand from Nepal (traditionally one of its largest market segments) and a ban on the use of private publishers’ books by the State Government of Madhya Pradesh in India.