AIS NOIDA , HANDOUT ON PRINT CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD (2)

INDIA AND THE WORLD OF PRINT

Q1. Describe the use of manuscripts before the age of print in India.

A1. (a)India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, as
well as in various vernacular languages.

(b)Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or on handmade paper. Pages were sometimes beautifully
illustrated.

(c) They would be either pressed between wooden covers or sewn together to ensure preservation.

(d) Manuscripts continued to be produced till well after the introduction of print, down to the late
nineteenth century.

Q2. What was the negative aspect of the use of Manuscripts?

A2. The negative aspects of manuscripts were as follows:-

A) Manuscripts, however, were highly expensive and fragile.

B) They had to be handled carefully, and they could not be read easily as the script was written in
different styles.

C) So manuscripts were not widely used in everyday life.

D) Many students became literate without even actually reading any text.

Q3. When did print come to India?

A3.1)- The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century.
Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts.

2) 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.

3) By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts, many of them translations of
older works.
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Q4. How did the English Printing come to India?

A4. The English language press did not grow in India till quite late even though the English East India
Company began to import presses from the late seventeenth century.

a)From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine that began
English printing in India.

b)Hickey published a lot of advertisements, including those that related to the import and sale of slaves.
But he also published a lot of gossip about the Company’s senior officials in India.

Q5. Which was the first Indian newspaper to be printed?

A5.a)Governor-General Warren Hastings encouraged the publication of officially sanctioned newspapers

b) By the close of the eighteenth century, a number of newspapers and journals appeared in print. The
first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close
to Rammohun Roy.

Q.6 What was the impact of debates on religious issues in the early 19th century?

A6.a) From the early nineteenth century, as you know, there were intense debates around religious
issues.

b) 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.

c) Some criticised existing practices and campaigned for reform, while others countered the arguments
of reformers.

d) These debates were carried out in public and in print. Printed tracts and newspapers not only spread
the new ideas, but they shaped the nature of the debate.

e) A wider public could now participate in these public discussions and express their views. New ideas
emerged through these clashes of opinions.
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Q7. What were the main controversies about between social and religious reformers and Hindu
orthodoxy?

Intense controversies between social and religious reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy were over
matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry.

Q8. How and why did Muslim ulama and other religious sects use paintings?

A8. A) The ulama were deeply anxious about the collapse of Muslim dynasties and feared that colonial
rulers would encourage conversion, change the Muslim personal laws.

b) To counter this, they used cheap lithographic presses, published Persian and Urdu translations of Holy
Scriptures, and printed religious newspapers and tracts.

c) 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.

d) All through the nineteenth century, a number of Muslim sects and seminaries appeared, each with a
different interpretation of faith, each keen on enlarging its following and countering the influence of its
opponents. Urdu print helped them conduct these battles in public.

Q9. When did the first printed edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas come out?

The first print edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a sixteenth century text came out from
Calcutta in 1810.

Q10. Which were the two presses which published the Hindu religious texts in vernacular? What was its
advantage?

A) From the 1880s, the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay
published numerous religious texts in vernaculars.

BENEFIT/ADVANTAGE

a) In their printed and portable form, these could be read easily by the faithful at any place and time.
b) They could also be read out to large groups of illiterate men and women.

Disadvantage

Religious texts reached a very wide circle of people, encouraging discussions, debates and controversies
within and among different religions.
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Q11. What were the benefits of print?

The benefits of print were-

a) Print stimulated the publication of conflicting opinions amongst communities.

b) It also connected communities and people in different parts of India. Newspapers conveyed news
from one place to another, creating pan-Indian identities.

Q12. How did printing encourage new kinds of writing?

Printing created an appetite for new kinds of writing.

a) As more and more people could now read, they wanted to see their own lives, experiences, emotions
and relationships reflected in what they read.

b) The novel, a literary firm which had developed in Europe, ideally catered to this need. It soon
acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles.

c) Other new literary forms also entered the world of reading – lyrics, short stories, essays about social
and political matters.

d) In different ways, they reinforced the new emphasis on human lives and intimate feelings, about the
political and social rules that shaped such things.

Q13. Name the Indian painter who created images for mass circulation.

RAJA RAVI VARMA produced images for mass circulation.

Q14. Give 2 examples of new visual culture which began by the end of the 19th century.

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.

I) Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation.

2) Poor wood engravers who made woodblocks set up shop near the letterpresses, and were employed
by print shops. 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.

These prints began shaping popular ideas about modernity and tradition, religion and politics, and
society and culture.
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Q15. Give 2 examples of new visual culture which began by the end of 19th century?

By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers, commenting
on social and political issues.

a) Some caricatures ridiculed the educated Indians’ fascination with Western tastes and clothes, while
others expressed the fear of social change.

b) There were imperial caricatures lampooning nationalists, as well as nationalist cartoons criticizing
imperial rule.

Q16. When did Hindi printing begin?

A16. Hindi printing began only from the 1870’s and a large segment of it was devoted to the education
of women.

Q17. Who wrote the first autobiography in the Bengali language?

In east Bengal, in the early 19th century, Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox
household, learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen and later, she wrote her autobiography Amar
Jiban which was published in 1876.

Q18. How did print affect the lives and feelings of women?

Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways.

a) Women’s reading increased enormously in middle-class homes.

b) Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and sent them to schools
when women’s schools were set up in the cities and towns after the mid-nineteenth century.

c) Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why women should be educated.

d) They also carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be used for home-
based schooling.

Q19.Discuss contribution of women to Indian Literature.

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
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a)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.

b) 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.

c) A woman in a Tamil novel expressed what reading meant to women who were so greatly confined by
social regulations.

Q20. What did the women’s writings discuss?

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 serialized novels.

Q21. When did Hindi printing begin?

While Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi print culture had developed early, Hindi printing began
seriously only from the 1870s.

Q22.What was Battala area in Calcutta famous for?

In Bengal, an entire area in central Calcutta-the Battala-was devoted to the printing of popular books.

Q23. Who was Ram Chaddha?

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.

Q24. How did the press technology help the poor?

A) 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.

B) Public libraries were set up from the early twentieth century, expanding the access to books.

C) These libraries were located mostly in cities and towns, and at times in prosperous villages.

D) For rich local patrons, setting up a library was a way of acquiring prestige.
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Q25. Name the writers who wrote about caste.

From the late nineteenth century, issues of caste discrimination began to be written about in many
printed tracts and essays.

a) Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of
the caste system in his Gulamgiri (1871).

b) 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.

Q26. Mention 2 writings by workers in factories.

Workers in factories were too overworked and lacked the education to write much about their
experiences.

A) But Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote and published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 to
show the links between caste and class exploitation.

B) 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.

Q27. What was the attitude of East India Company towards censorship before 1798?

Before 1798, the colonial state under the East India Company was not too concerned with censorship.

a) East India Company’s 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. The
Company was worried that such criticisms might be used by its critics in England to attack its trade
monopoly in India.

b) 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 British rule.

d) In 1835, Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise press laws. Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial
official, formulated new rules that restored the earlier freedoms.

Q28. What was the change in attitude to freedom of press after 1857?

After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the press changed and enraged Englishmen
demanded a clamp down on the ‘native’ press.
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a) In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modeled on the Irish Press Laws. It provided the
government with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press.

b) From now on the government kept regular track of the vernacular newspapers published in different
provinces.

c) 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.

d) Despite repressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India and
reported on colonial misrule and encouraged nationalist activities.