Chapter 7

Print Culture And The Modern World

Q21. What did the spread of print culture in nineteenth century India mean to:
a) children b) women c) the poor/workers

OR
How did vast leaps in mass literacy in Europe in the nineteenth century bring in
large number of new readers?
Ans: a) Children
1. As primary education became compulsory from the late nineteenth century, children
became an important category of readers.
2. A children’s press, devoted to literature for children alone, was set up in France in 1857.
This press published new works as well as old fairy tales and folk tales.
3. The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years compiling traditional folk tales gathered
from peasants. What they collected was edited before the stories were published in a
collection in 1812.
b) Women
1. Women became important as readers as well as writers. Penny magazines (see Fig. 12)
were especially meant for women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and
housekeeping.
2. When novels began to be written in the nineteenth century, women were seen as
important readers. Some of the best known novelists were women: Jane Austen, the
Bronte sisters, George Eliot.
3. Their writings became important in defining a new type of woman: a person with will,
strength of personality, determination and the power to think.
c) Workers
1. Lending libraries had been in existence from the seventeenth century onwards. In the
nineteenth century, lending libraries in England became instruments for educating white-
collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people.
2. Sometimes, self-educated working class people wrote for themselves. After the working
day was gradually shortened from the mid-nineteenth century, workers had some time for
self-improvement and self-expression.
3. They wrote political tracts and autobiographies in large numbers.
Q22. Describe the innovations introduced in printing technology in the 19th century.
 Ans: 1. By the late eighteenth century, the press came to be made out of metal. Through the
nineteenth century, there were a series of further innovations in printing technology. By the
mid-nineteenth century, Richard M. Hoe of New York had perfected the power-driven
cylindrical press. This was capable of printing 8,000 sheets per hour. This press was
particularly useful for printing newspapers.
2. In the late nineteenth century, the offset press was developed which could print up to six
colours at a time.
3. From the turn of the twentieth century, electrically operated presses accelerated printing
operations. A series of other developments followed.
4. Methods of feeding paper improved, the quality of plates became better, automatic paper
reels and photoelectric controls of the colour register were introduced.
5. The accumulation of several individual mechanical improvements transformed the
appearance of printed texts.
Q23. What were the new strategies adopted by printers and publishers in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries?
Ans: 1. Printers and publishers continuously developed new strategies to sell their product.
Nineteenth-century periodicals serialised important novels, which gave birth to a particular way
of writing novels.
2. In the 1920s in England, popular works were sold in cheap series, called the Shilling Series.
The dust cover or the book jacket is also a twentieth-century innovation.
3. With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, publishers feared a decline in book
purchases. To sustain buying, they brought out cheap paperback editions.

General Question
Q. Examine various innovations in printing and publishing in the 19th and 20th century.
Ans. (Ans to Q22 and Q23)

Q24. India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts. Explain. What
were the limitations?
Ans: 1. India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit, Arabic,
Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages. Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or
on handmade paper.
2. Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated. They would be either pressed between wooden
covers or sewn together to ensure preservation.
3. Manuscripts continued to be produced till well after the introduction of print, down to the late
nineteenth century.
Limitations:
1. Manuscripts were highly expensive and fragile.
2. They had to be handled carefully, and they could not be read easily as the script was written
in different styles. So manuscripts were not widely used in everyday life.
Q25. List out the early attempts at printing in India.
Ans: 1. The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth
century. Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts. By 1674, about 50 books had
been printed in the Konkani and in Kanara languages.
2. 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.
Q26. What were the contributions of James Augustus Hickey in the field of print in India?

Ans: 1. During the late 18th century, 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’.
2. 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.
3. But he also published a lot of gossip about the Company’s senior officials in India. Enraged by
this, Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted Hickey.
Q27. Print did not only stimulate the publication of conflicting opinions amongst
communities, but it also connected communities and people in different parts of India
examine the statement
OR
Evaluate the role of print in connecting various communities in different parts of India

Ans: 1. Printed tracts and newspapers not only spread the new ideas, but they shaped the nature
of the debate. A wider public could now participate in these public discussions and express their
views. New ideas emerged through these clashes of opinions.
2. There was an intense debate between social and religious reformers over matters like widow
immolation, child marriage Purdah system, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry. As the
debate developed, tracts and newspapers proliferated, circulating a variety of arguments. To
reach a wider audience, the ideas were printed in the everyday, spoken language of ordinary
people.
3. 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.
Among Hindus, too, print encouraged the reading of religious texts, especially in the
vernacular languages.
4. Religious texts reached a wide circle of people encouraging discussions, debate and
controversies within and among different religions.
5. Newspapers conveyed news from one place to another, creating pan-Indian identities.
Q28. Elaborate on the new forms of publication which were introduced with the
development of printing?
Ans:
A. Novels:
i. Printing created an appetite for new kinds of writing. As more and more people could
now read, they wanted to see their own lives, experiences, emotions and relationships
reflected in what they read.
ii. The novel, a literary firm which had developed in Europe, ideally catered to this need.
It soon acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles.
iii. For readers, it opened new worlds of experience, and gave a vivid sense of the
diversity of human lives.

B. Other literary forms:

i. Other new literary forms also entered the world of reading – lyrics, short stories, essays
about social and political matters.
ii. They reinforced the new emphasis on human lives and intimate feelings, about the
political and social rules that shaped such things.

C. Visual Images:
i. 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. Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for
mass circulation.
ii. 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.
iii. These prints began shaping popular ideas about modernity and tradition, religion and
politics, and society and culture.
 D. Caricatures and cartoons:
i. By late 19th century, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and
newspapers, commenting on social and political issues.
ii. Some caricatures ridiculed the educated Indians’ fascination with Western tastes and
clothes, while others expressed the fear of social change.
iii. There were imperial caricatures ridiculing nationalists, as well as nationalist cartoons
criticizing imperial rule.

Q29. What efforts were made by liberal minded people to spread the benefits of education
to women?
Ans:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
Q30. A. Conservative Hindus and Muslims were apprehensive of educating women. Why?
B. How did women rise against these restrictions?
Ans:
A.
1. Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed, and Muslims feared that
educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances. They therefore insisted on
not giving opportunities for education to women folk.
B.
1. Rebel women defied prohibition placed on them regarding reading and writing. A girl in a
conservative Muslim family of north India who secretly learnt to read and write in Urdu. Her
family wanted her to read only the Arabic Quran which she did not understand.
2. In East Bengal, Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household, learnt
to read in the secrecy of her kitchen. Later, she wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban in
Bengali language.
3. Kailashbashini Debi in Bengal wrote books highlighting the experiences of women – about
how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labor
and treated unjustly by the very people they served.
4. In Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the
miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows.
Q31. Discuss the growth of Hindi printing from 1870s?
1. Hindi printing began seriously only from the 1870s. Soon, a large segment of it was
devoted to the education of women.
2. 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.
3. 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. The Khalsa Tract Society published cheap booklets with a similar
message. Many of these were in the form of dialogues about the qualities of a good
woman.

Q32. What were the efforts made to spread the benefit of reading and writing to the poor
and workers?
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Issues of caste discrimination began to be written about in many printed tracts and essays.
Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the
injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri. B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V.
Ramaswamy Naicker in Madras, wrote powerfully on caste, and their writings were read
by people all over India.
4. 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 to show the links between caste and class exploitation. A Kanpur
millworker named Sudarshan Chakr wrote a collection of poems called Sacchi Kavitayan
5. By the 1930s, Bangalore cotton millworkers set up libraries to educate themselves.

Q33. What was the attitude of colonial state about printing and publishing in India before
the revolt of 1857?
 1. Initially, the colonial state under the East India Company was not too concerned with
censorship. Its 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.
2. 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.
3. In 1835, faced with urgent petitions by editors of English and vernacular newspapers,
Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise press laws. Thomas Macaulay, a liberal
colonial official, formulated new rules that restored the earlier freedoms.

Q34. Analyze the attitude of the British towards freedom of press in India after the revolt
of 1857. What was the response of Indians towards it?
1. After the revolt of 1857, the attitude of the British towards freedom of the press changed.
Enraged Englishmen demanded a clamp down on the ‘native’ press. As vernacular
newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government started taking strong
measures to control it.
2. In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed. It provided the government with extensive
rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press.
3. From then on, the government kept regular track of the vernacular newspapers published
in different provinces. 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.
4. Despite repressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India.
They reported on colonial misrule and encouraged nationalist activities. Attempts to
suppress nationalist criticism provoked militant protest.
5. For example, when Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907, Balgangadhar Tilak
wrote with great sympathy about them in his publication, Kesari. This led to his
imprisonment, provoking in turn widespread protests all over India.