Day 95 : Essay Excerpt: Disciplining The Printed Text

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the publishing industry, comprising the writing, printing, and distribution of books and periodicals, was perhaps the largest indigenous enterprise in Calcutta. In 1911, when the six jute mills located in Calcutta employed 15,111 people, there were ninety-nine printing presses with 11,880 people working in them, making printing the second largest industry in the city. However, unlike other industries, printing posed special problems of supervision and control. As is well known from examples from all over the world, the social impact of the printing of books went far beyond that of the mere triumph of technical ingenuity in the production of a commodity.

The culture of publishing and reading printed texts was, like most other items of everyday modernity, introduced into India by Europeans and, in some sense, grafted to prior indigenous traditions of learning and intellectual activity. James Augustus Hicky, whose otherwise questionable career earned him the disapproval of his contemporary expatriates, was one of the pioneers of printing in Calcutta. After Hicky, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Charles Wilkins, and the Srirampur missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman (and their typecasters, Panchanan Karmakar and his son-in-law Manohar Karmakar) made pioneering attempts at printing in the Bengali language. Although government presses were set up in the late eighteenth century, the year 1800 is really the most crucial date in the history of Bengali printing, because in that year Fort William College and the Srirampur Baptist Mission Press were established. Young officers of the East India Company, freshly arrived in India and unraveling the mysteries of the East at Fort William College, needed texts from which to learn the local language, and the Srirampur Baptists were keen on spreading literacy and Christianity. Together, they gave impetus to the printing and publishing of books in Bengali. Very roughly estimated, a total of 212,000 copies of books were published in forty languages between 1801 and 1832 from the Srirampur Mission. During this time, Bengali entrepreneurs also came forward to try their hand at this new cultural technology. It turned out to be a roaring success.

The first Bengali publisher was Gangakishor Bhattacharya, a former employee of the Srirampur press. Gangakishor set up a press entirely on his own and started a newspaper entitled Bengali Gazette in 1816. He also brought out printed editions of the popular eighteenth-century Bengali ballad Bidyasundar, the longer Annadamangal, and the classical tales from Betal, with woodcut illustrations. A contemporary source claims that the first book published at the initiative of a Bengali was Annadamangal. Gangakishor Bhattacharya can therefore be credited with having been a pioneer who foresaw the potential market for printed editions of popular books that were already in circulation as manuscripts or in oral performance. Nothing much, unfortunately, is known of this man; his newspaper, too, was short-lived.

But Bengali entrepreneurs came into the new trade in a big way as soon as it became apparent that books could become popular as a marketed commodity. The history of these early presses is hard to reconstruct; there is little or no documentary evidence to indicate anything of the background of the printers or the life of each press. For the period between 1820 and 1830, we have the names of twenty presses, from four lists quoted in two sources. As the lists are incomplete, there is no way of ascertaining when these presses were set up or how long each survived. In several cases, their locations are also not mentioned. We have thirteen place-names for seventeen of the presses: Bowbazar, Mirzapur, Sankharitola, and Arpuli were places claiming more than one press. The presses were quite widely dispersed in the Bengali settlements in the northern part of the city.

Sometime later, a major center of printing and publishing grew up along Chitpur Road, in the neighborhood of Shobhabazar, Ahiritola, and Goranhata. Exactly when this happened, it is hard to say because, except for mention of a single press in Shobhabazar, there is no indication in any of the available records of a printing center in the area until the 1830s. The exception was Bishwanath Deb's press, set up perhaps by one of the members of the Deb family of Shobhabazar. Sukumar Sen has suggested that Bishwanath began the press in 1817 or 1818 and was the first person after Gangakishor to start a press. Sometime later (once again, it is difficult to be exact), the presses in this area came to be referred to collectively as the Battala press. Sukumar Sen has declared Bishwanath Deb as the founder of the first Battala press and most scholars today accept this. 10 Battala, as a descriptive term for books and prints, first earned its name from this area of concentration of printing presses, although gradually it came to signify a whole range of popular productions that, in the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, found themselves displaced from the podium of high culture. By then, hierarchies had appeared in the domain of the printed text in Bengali and these were beginning to reflect the new social and cultural differences in Bengali literate society.

For our purposes, this sudden boom in the book trade had another very important consequence: it summoned the state to intervene and take cognizance of this rapidly proliferating industry. Ostensibly to keep itself informed about the effects of education on the native mind, the colonial state began to devise mechanisms of control and censure. The state's intervention was not without its effects on Bengal's literate society and how it set out its own criteria of classifying printed literature by quality and taste.

~~Essay Excerpt: Disciplining The Printed Text: Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance of Bengali Literature -by- Tapti Ray from the book "Texts of Power"