Abstract
Scholarship has recently begun to shed light on the understudied history of Islamic printing in South Asia, where the first printed Qur’an was produced by Muslims as early as 1828. This chapter traces the coexisting and competing modes of Qur’an printing in nineteenth-century colonial India, from the first Qur’ans printed with movable type in Hooghly and Calcutta to the ornate lithographed Qur’ans produced across northern India beginning in the 1840s. The second part explores the changes introduced in Qur’an printing by commercial mass production. Focusing on the editions and trade networks of the famous Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow (est. 1858), I discuss the socioeconomic, cultural, material, and aesthetic implications of shifting production technologies and the Holy Book’s transformation from calligraphic masterpiece to mass-produced and accessible scripture
