An Uncertain "Coming of the Book": Early Print Cultures in Colonial India

Much has been written about the history of the book in Europe and North America, but, even now, comparatively little is known of the printed book in the rest of the world. Such knowledge is essential not only to secure a spatial balance but also to test generalizations offered in a specific Euro-American cultural context. ¹ India offers an interesting case study to help redress this gap. Scholars have only just started to explore the rich and complex sociocultural world of Indian print. ² But, as Robert Darnton urges in preceding volumes of Book History, there is a pressing need for a wider topographical survey of the nineteenth-century printing scene on the subcontinent. ³ The strong tradition of orality, the colonial context of print- ing and publishing, the very dramatic and sudden coming-of-age of print—all contribute to making print cultures in colonial India a significant theme of study.

Printing in India dates to the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese set up the first printing press on the subcontinent, but the indigenous printing and publishing industry really took off in Bengal in the first half of the nineteenth century. The purpose of this essay, however, is not to provide a descriptive narrative account of printing in colonial India. ⁴ Inspired by new questions posed by historians of the book, this essay challenges received wisdom about the printed book and the dominance of "high" print in a modernizing and reforming nineteenth-century Bengal. At the same time, it locates specific cultural contexts for the operation of print in India, involving complex relationships between texts and reading practices that diverge from more buoyant theories about the printed book's coming-of-age in Europe. My aim is not to explore precise local and cultural contexts of particular books or even genres, but briefly to sketch the transition from a manuscript world to a printed world.

The printed book in Europe, as has been established in classic studies by Eisenstein and Febvre, played a central role in the diffusion of classical literature and later in the propagation of Reformation doctrines. It also helped fix vernacular languages and encouraged the development of national literatures. ⁵ In Asian and African contexts, Benedict Anderson has further demonstrated how standard print cultures were powerful forces in forging national identities among the colonial intelligentsia, following from the European model. ⁶

Studies of print in colonial India have continued to be influenced by such writings, which focus on "high" literature and perpetuate images of a Western-educated indigenous intelligentsia effecting modernization and reform.The enormous impact of the "Bengal Renaissance" has been driven home by implicit comparison with the European Renaissance. ⁷ Significantly, the Bengali language itself is thought to have evolved into a modern, refined vernacular, crafting for the nation the earliest of her modern literatures. Some alternative approaches suggested in other regional contexts in very recent times have underscored the importance of vernacular mediation in this cultural process. These studies explore the reception and "cultural translation" of Western modernity in the Indian imagination, although the focus is still on modern genres and "respectable" reading. ⁸

Bengal emerges as the focus of this study for various reasons. It was not only the seat of the first established vernacular press ⁹ and the earliest indigenous printing and publishing industry in the country, but also the seedbed of Indian nationalism. Besides, in nineteenth-century Bengal, more than anything else, the Bengali language and its written literature became the object of intense scrutiny, surveillance, and debate among both the people and their rulers. For the British bureaucracy it was a language that had to be mastered for administrative convenience and for gaining access to crucial local information. But more crucially, in the active intellectual climate that had been stirred up following the close encounter with the West, Bengali became the medium of self-expression of a conscious and articulate urban literati. The canons...