Print Culture
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.
1.1 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.
2 Print Comes to Europe
In 1295, Marco Polo, a great explorer, returned to Italy after many years of exploration in China. 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
By 1448, Gutenberg perfected the system. The first book he printed was the Bible. About 180 copies were
printed.
3 The Print Revolution and Its Impact
3.1 A New Reading Public
3.2 Religious Debates and the Fear of Print
In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther wrote Ninety Five Theses criticising many of the practices
and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. This led to a division within the Church and to the beginning of
the Protestant Reformation. Deeply grateful to print, Luther said, ‘Printing is the ultimate gift of God and
the greatest one.’
3.3 Print and Dissent
In the sixteenth century, Menocchio, a miller in Italy, began to read books that were available in his
locality. When the Roman Church began its inquisition to repress heretical ideas, Menocchio was hauled up
twice and ultimately executed. The Roman Church imposed severe controls over publishers and
booksellers and began to maintain an Index of Prohibited Books from 1558.
4 The Reading Mania
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. The periodical press developed
from the early eighteenth century, combining information about current affairs with entertainment. The
writings of thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau were also widely printed
and read. Thus their ideas about science, reason and rationality found their way into popular literature.
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.’
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
Three types of arguments have been usually put forward:
First: print popularised the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers.
Second: print created a new culture of dialogue and debate.
Third: by the 1780s there was an outpouring of literature that mocked the royalty and criticised their
morality.
5 The Nineteenth Century
5.1 Children, Women and Workers
A children’s press, devoted to literature for children alone, was set up in France in 1857. 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. Penny magazines were
especially meant for women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping. 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. Thomas Wood, a Yorkshire mechanic, narrated how he would rent old
newspapers and read them by firelight in the evenings as he could not afford candles. Autobiographies of
poor people narrated their struggles to read against grim obstacles: the twentieth-century Russian
revolutionary author Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood and My University provides glimpses of such
struggles.
5.2 Further Innovations
By the mid-nineteenth century, Richard M. Hoe of New York had perfected the power-driven cylindrical
press. 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. In the 1920s in England, popular works were sold in cheap series, called the Shilling Series.
With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, publishers feared a decline in book purchases.
6 India and the World 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.
Manuscripts were highly expensive and fragile.
6.2 Print Comes to India
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. 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’. 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. The first Indian newspaper to appear was the
weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy.
7 Religious Reform and Public Debates
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 1822, a Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay Samachar, made its
appearance. 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. The first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century text,
came out from Calcutta in 1810. From the 1880s, the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri
Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published numerous religious texts in vernaculars.
8 New Forms of Publication
Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation.
8.1 Women and Print
Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed and Muslims feared that educated
women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances. 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. 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. From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like
Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women. 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. 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.
8.2 Print and the Poor People
9 Print and 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. In 1878, the
Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on the Irish Press Laws. 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.
