THE FIRST PRINTED BOOKS
->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 [LIMITATION]
->Chinese ‘accordion book’ was folded and stitched at the
side.
->Superbly skilled craftsmen could duplicate, with
remarkable accuracy, the beauty of calligraphy.
Chinese Bureaucracy & its Role in Print
1. China's huge bureaucratic system recruited its personnel
through civil service examinations.
2. Textbooks for this examination were printed in vast
numbers under the sponsorship of the imperial state.
3. From the sixteenth century, the number of examination
candidates went up, and that increased the volume of print.
Reading increasingly became a leisure activity
1. The new readership preferred fictional narratives, poetry,
autobiographies, anthologies of literary masterpieces, and
romantic plays.
2. Rich women began to read, and many women began
publishing their poetry and plays.
3. Wives of scholar-officials published their works and
courtesans wrote about their lives.
Role of Technology in Spreading Reading Culture
1. Western printing techniques and mechanical presses were
imported in the late nineteenth century as Western powers
established their outposts in China.
2. Shanghai became the hub of the new print culture,
catering to Western-style schools.
3. From hand printing there was now a gradual shift to
mechanical printing.
Print in Japan
->The oldest Japanese book, printed in AD 868, is the
Buddhist Diamond Sutra, containing 6 sheets of text and
woodcut illustrations.
Upcoming visual material in printing
1. Printing of visual material led to interesting publishing
practices.
2. 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.
3. Libraries and bookstores were packed with hand-printed
material of various types – books on women, musical
instruments, calculations, tea ceremonies, flower
arrangements, proper etiquette, cooking, and famous
places.
4. Shift from hand to mechanical printing.
PRINT COMES TO EUROPE
Silk Route and its Significance
1. Silk and spices from China flowed into Europe through the
Silk Route.
2. In the eleventh century, Chinese paper reached Europe via
the same route.
3. Paper made possible the production of manuscripts,
carefully written by scribes.
-> Marco Polo, a great explorer, returned to Italy after many
years of exploration in China.He brought his knowledge.
IMPACT-
1. Italians began producing books with woodblocks.
2. Soon the technology spread to other parts of Europe.
-> Luxury editions were still handwritten on very expensive
vellum.
-> Aristocratic circles and rich monastic libraries scoffed at
printed books as cheap vulgarities.
-> Merchants and students in the university towns bought
the cheaper printed copies.
IMPACT-
Demand for Books ↑ = Bookseller ↑ = Book fairs ↑
How the increasing demand was met?
1. Production of handwritten manuscripts was also
organized in new ways to meet the expanded demand.
2. Scribes or skilled hand writers were no longer solely
employed by wealthy or influential patrons but increasingly
by booksellers as well.
3. More than 50 scribes often worked for one bookseller.
GUTENBERG AND THE PRINTING PRESS
1. The breakthrough occurred at Strasbourg, Germany,
where Johann Gutenberg developed the first-known printing
press in the 1430s.
2. Gutenberg was the son of a merchant and grew up on a
large agricultural estate.
3. From his childhood he had seen wine and olive presses.
4. 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.
->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.
“About 180 copies were printed and it took three years to
produce them.”
1. The metal letters imitated the ornamental handwritten
styles.
2. Borders were illuminated by hand with foliage and other
patterns.
3. Illustrations were painted.
4. In the books printed for the rich, space for decoration was
kept blank on the printed page.
5. Each purchaser could choose the design and decide on the
painting school that would do the illustrations.
Printing production expanded
1. Between 1450 and 1550, printing presses were set up in
most countries of Europe
2. Printers from Germany traveled to other countries,
seeking work and helping start new presses.
3. The second half of the fifteenth century saw 20 million
copies of printed books flooding the markets in Europe.
4. The number went up in the sixteenth century to about 200
million copies.
5. This shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to
the PRINT REVOLUTION.
THE PRINT REVOLUTION AND ITS
IMPACT
Why Print Revolution?
1. It transformed the lives of people.
2. Changing their relationship to information and knowledge.
3. It influenced popular perceptions.
4. Opened up new ways of looking at things.
A New Reading Public
1. Printing reduced the cost of books.
2. The time and labor required to produce each book came
down, and multiple copies could be produced with greater
ease.
3. Books flooded the market, reaching out to an ever-
growing readership.
Problem
1. Printers began publishing popular ballads and folk tales,
and such books would be profusely illustrated with pictures.
2. These were then sung and recited at gatherings in
villages and in taverns in towns.
3. Print was transmitted orally & the hearing public &
reading public became intermingled
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.
-> Even those who disagreed with established authorities
could now print and circulate their ideas.
Fears
1. It was feared that if there was no control over what was
printed and read then rebellious and irreligious thoughts
might spread.
2. If that happened the authority of ‘valuable’ literature
would be destroyed.
3. This anxiety was the basis of widespread criticism of the
new printed literature that had begun to circulate.
->In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther wrote
Ninety-Five Theses criticising many of the practices and
rituals of the Roman Catholic Church.
->It challenged the Church to debate his ideas.
->Luther’s writings were immediately reproduced in vast
numbers and read widely.
->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.’
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.
Print and Dissent
1. 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.
2. When the Roman Church began its inquisition to repress
heretical ideas, Menocchio was hauled up twice and
ultimately executed.
3. 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
->Churches of different denominations set up schools in
villages.
->Carrying literacy to peasants and artisans.
->As literacy and schools spread in European countries,
there was a virtual reading mania.
WHAT WERE THE DIFFERENT FORMS OF LITERARY
MATERIAL THAT EMERGED DURING READING MANIA?
1. Booksellers employed pedlars who roamed around
villages, carrying little books for sale. There were almanacs
or ritual calendars, along with ballads and folktales.
2. 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.
3. In France, were the “Biliotheque Bleue”, which were low-
priced small books printed on poor quality paper, and bound
in cheap blue covers.
4. The periodical press combining information about current
affairs with entertainment. Newspapers and journals carried
information about wars and trade.
5. the ideas of scientists and philosophers now became more
accessible to the common people 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.
‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!’
By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a common
conviction that books were a means of spreading progress
and enlightenment:
1. Books could change the world, liberate society from
despotism and tyranny, and herald a time when reason and
intellect would rule.
2. 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.’
3. Mercier proclaimed: ‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the
world! Tremble before the virtual writer!’
Print Culture and the French Revolution
FIRST: Print popularised the ideas of the
Enlightenment thinkers.
1. Their writings provided a critical commentary on tradition,
superstition and despotism.
2. Demanded that everything be judged through the
application of reason and rationality.
3. 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.
4. 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.
1. All values, norms and institutions were re-evaluated and
discussed by a public that had become aware of the power
of reason.
2. The need to question existing ideas and beliefs.
THIRD: By the 1780s there was an outpouring of
literature that mocked the royalty and criticized their
morality.
1. Questions about the existing social order.
2. Cartoons and caricatures typically suggested that the
monarchy remained absorbed only in sensual pleasures
while the common people suffered immense hardships.
Did Print Culture lead to the French Revolution?
->Print did not directly shape their minds, but it did
open up the possibility of thinking differently
1. We must remember that people did not read just one kind
of literature
2. If they read the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau, they were
also exposed to monarchical and Church propaganda.
3. They accepted some ideas and rejected others.
THE 19TH CENTURY
CHILDREN
1. Production of school textbooks became critical for the
publishing industry.
2. A children’s press, devoted to literature for children
alone, was set up in France in 1857.
3. The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years compiling
traditional folk tales gathered from peasants.
4. Anything that was considered unsuitable for children or
would appear vulgar to the elites, was not included in the
published version.
5. As primary education became compulsory from the late
nineteenth century, children became an important category
of readers.
WOMEN
1. Penny magazines (see Fig. 12) were especially meant for
women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and
housekeeping.
2. Some of the best known novelists were women: Jane
Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot.
3. Their writings became important in defining a new type of
woman: a person with will, strength of personality,
determination and the power to think.
4. Women became important as readers as well as writers
WORKERS
1. Lending libraries had been in existence from the
seventeenth century onwards.
2. In the nineteenth century, lending libraries in England
became instruments for educating white-collar workers,
artisans and lower-middle-class people.
3. Sometimes, self-educated working class people wrote for
themselves.
4. After the working day was gradually shortened from the
mid-nineteenth century, workers had some time for self-
improvement and self-expression.
5. They wrote political tracts and autobiographies in large
numbers.
Further Innovations
1. By the mid-nineteenth century, Richard M. Hoe of New
York had perfected the power-driven cylindrical press.
2. In the late nineteenth century, the offset press was
developed which could print up to six colours at a time.
3. Electrically operated presses accelerated printing
operations.
4. A series of other developments followed.
5. Methods of feeding paper improved, the quality of plates
became better, and automatic paper reels and photoelectric
controls of the color register were introduced.
IMPACT-
With time printing technology was improving.
“Printers and publishers continuously developed new
strategies to sell their product.”
1. Nineteenth-century periodicals serialised important
novels, which gave birth to a particular way of writing
novels.
2. In the 1920s in England, popular works were sold in cheap
series, called the Shilling Series.
3. The dust cover or the book jacket is also a twentieth-
century innovation.
-> The Great Depression in the 1930s, publishers
feared a decline in book purchases. To sustain
buying, they brought out cheap paperback editions.
INDIA AND THE WORLD OF PRINT
BEFORE
1. Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or on handmade
paper.
2. Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated.
3. They would be either pressed between wooden covers or
sewn together to ensure preservation.
4. Manuscripts continued to be produced till well after the
introduction of print, down to the late nineteenth century.
Problems ->
1. Highly expensive and fragile
2. They had to be handled carefully, and they could not be
read easily as the script was written in different styles.
3.There was a possibility of a Human error while copying the
Manuscript.
AFTER
-> The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese
missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century.
1. Jesuit priests learned Konkani and printed several tracts.
2. By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in the Konkani
and in Kanara languages.
3. Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at
Cochin.
4. In 1713 the first Malayalam book was printed by them.
5. 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’.
IMPACT- 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.
-> The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette,
brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to
Rammohun Roy.
RELIGIOUS REFORM AND PUBLIC
DEBATES
-> 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.
1. Tracts and newspapers proliferated, circulating a variety
of arguments.
2. Ideas were printed in ordinary people's everyday, spoken
language.
3. Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi in 1821
and the Hindu orthodoxy commissioned the Samachar
Chandrika to oppose his opinions.
4. From 1822, two Persian newspapers were published, Jam-
i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar.
5. In the same year, a Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay
Samachar, appeared.
Fears
1. The ulama were deeply anxious about the collapse of
Muslim dynasties.
2. They feared that colonial rulers would encourage
conversion, change the Muslim personal laws.
IMPACT- 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.
“Among Hindus, too, print encouraged the reading of
religious texts, especially in the vernacular
languages”
1. The first printed edition of Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a
sixteenth-century text, came out from Calcutta in 1810.
2. From the 1880s, the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and
the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published numerous
religious texts in vernaculars.
3. Printed and portable form, these could be read easily by
the faithful at any place and time.
CONCLUSION
1. Religious texts, therefore, reached a very wide circle of
people, encouraging discussions, debates and controversies
within and among different religions.
2. It also connected communities and people in different
parts of India.
3. Newspapers conveyed news from one place to another,
creating pan-Indian identities.
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.
-> For readers, it opened up new worlds of experience and
gave a vivid sense of the diversity of human lives.
-> New literary forms also entered the world of reading –
lyrics , short stories , essays about social and political
matters.
-> They reinforced the new emphasis on human lives and
intimate feelings, about the political and social rules that
shaped such things.
Visual Culture Taking Shape
1. With the setting up of an increasing number of printing
presses, visual images could be easily reproduced in
multiple copies.
2. Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass
circulation.
3. Poor wood engravers who made woodblocks set up shop
near the letterpresses, and were employed by print shops.
4. 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.
5. 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.”
1. Some caricatures ridiculed the educated Indians’
fascination with Western tastes and clothes, while others
expressed the fear of social change.
2. There were imperial caricatures lampooning nationalists.
3. As well as nationalist cartoons criticising imperial rule.
Women And Print
1. Women’s reading, therefore, increased enormously in
middle-class homes.
2. Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their
womenfolk at home, and sent them to schools.
3. When women’s schools were set up in the cities and
towns after the mid-nineteenth century.
PROBLEMS
->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.
-> 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.
“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.”
1. 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 labor and treated
unjustly by the very people they served.
2. 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
3. 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 book.’
“While Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi print culture
had developed early, Hindi printing began seriously
only from the 1870s.”
1. Large segment of it was devoted to the education of
women.
2. Journals, written for and sometimes edited by women,
became extremely popular.
3. They discussed issues like women’s education,
widowhood, widow remarriage and the national movement.
4. Some of them offered household and fashion lessons to
women and brought entertainment through short stories
and serialized novels.
PUNJAB
1. Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling Istri Dharm
Vichar to teach women how to be obedient wives
2. The Khalsa Tract Society published cheap booklets with a
similar message.
3. Many of these were in the form of dialogues about the
qualities of a good woman.
BENGAL
1. An entire area in central Calcutta – the Battala – was
devoted to the printing of popular books.
2. Here you could buy cheap editions of religious tracts and
scriptures, as well as literature that was considered obscene
and scandalous.
3. Pedlars took the Battala publications to homes, enabling
women to read them in their leisure time.
Print and the Poor People
1. 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.
2. Public libraries were set up from the early twentieth
century, expanding the access to books.
3. For rich local patrons, setting up a library was a way of
acquiring prestige.
“From the late nineteenth century, issues of caste
discrimination began to be written about in many
printed tracts and essays.”
1. Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest
movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system
in his Gulamgiri (1871).
2. 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.
3. 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.”
1. Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote and published
Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 to show the links
between caste and class exploitation
2. 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.
3. By the 1930s, Bangalore cotton millworkers set up
libraries to educate themselves, following the example of
Bombay workers.
4. 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.
PRINT AND CENSORSHIP
AGAINST ENGLISHMEN
1. Before 1798, the colonial state under the East India
Company was not too concerned with censorship.
2. 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.
3. The Company was worried that such criticisms might be
used by its critics in England to attack its trade monopoly in
India.
4. By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court passed certain
regulations to control press freedom and the Company
began encouraging the publication of newspapers that
would celebrate British rule.
5. In 1835, faced with urgent petitions by editors of English
and vernacular newspapers.
6. Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise press laws.
7. Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial official, formulated
new rules that restored earlier freedoms.
AGAINST VERNACULAR & NATIONALIST PRESS
-> After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the
press changed.
1. In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled
on the Irish Press Laws.
2. It provided the government with extensive rights to
censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press.
3. From now on the government kept regular track of the
vernacular newspapers published in different provinces.
4. 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.
IMPACT- Despite repressive measures, nationalist
newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India.
1. They reported on colonial misrule and encouraged
nationalist activities.
2. Attempts to throttle nationalist criticism provoked
militant protest.
3. This in turn led to a renewed cycle of persecution and
protests.
4. 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.
PRINT
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