CHAPTER 7- PRINT CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD (HISTORY SOCIAL SCIENCE CLASS 10)

India and the world of print

1. When did print come to India?

In the mid 16th century, the first printing press came in Goa through Portuguese missionaries. By 1674, more than 50 books were printed in Konkani and Karana languages. Next came the first Tamil book in 1579.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. 

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. 

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’. So it was private English enterprise, proud of its independence from colonial influence, that began English printing in India. 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. 

There were Indians, too, who began to publish Indian newspapers. The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy. 

2. Raja Rammohan Roy and his Contributions to Press

Ram Mohan Roy was born on May 22, 1772, in Hooghly, Bengal, to a Hindu Brahmin family. Ramkanto Roy, his father, was a Sanskrit, Persian, and English scholar who also studied Arabic, Latin, and Greek. Little is known about his early life, but it is usually assumed that he traveled extensively and learned languages like Persian, Arabic, and English, in addition to Sanskrit, Bengali, and Hindi.

While Roy is best known for his role in abolishing the social evils of sati and child marriage in India, his entrance into journalism was also one of his many endeavors to improve the country’s socio-cultural landscape via learning and education. 

In 1821, he launched Sambad Kaumudi, the first Bengali language weekly newspaper, and the first newspaper in the Indian language. The weekly publication promoted reading habits, the value of debate, and the significance of education for all. In 1822, he also produced Mirat-ul-Akhbar, a Persian newspaper.

3. What impact did print culture have on women in nineteenth-century India?

Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways. Women’s reading, therefore, increased enormously in middle-class homes. 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. Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why women should be educated. They also carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be used for home-based schooling. 

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. 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. 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. 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 books ...’ 

4. Describe the role of nationalist newspapers in spreading nationalistic feelings among the people in the early 20th century?

Despite repressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India. They reported on colonial misrule and encouraged nationalist activities. Attempts to throttle nationalist criticism provoked militant protest. This in turn led to a renewed cycle of persecution and protests. 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.

Many nationalist journals were published which aroused the sentiments of the Indian public against the British rule. Many papers fostered patriotism and ideas of liberty and justice in our country. Indians became aware of what was happening in the world which helped them to shape their own policies and programmes.

The power of the printed word is most often seen in the way governments seek to regulate and suppress print. The colonial government kept continuous track of all books and newspapers published in India and passed numerous laws to control the press. 

Gandhi said in 1922: 

‘Liberty of speech ... liberty of the press ... freedom of association. The Government of India is now seeking to crush the three powerful vehicles of expressing and cultivating public opinion. The fight for Swaraj, for Khilafat ... means a fight for this threatened freedom before all else ...’ 

5. What did the spread of print culture in nineteenth century India mean to:

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. Public libraries were set up from the early twentieth century, expanding the access to books. These libraries were located mostly in cities and towns, and at times in prosperous villages. For rich local patrons, setting up a library was a way of acquiring prestige. 

Workers in factories were too overworked and lacked the education to write much about their experiences. But Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote and published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 to show the links between caste and class exploitation. 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. By the 1930s, Bangalore cotton millworkers set up libraries to educate themselves, following the example of Bombay workers. 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.