Print Culture and the Modern World

1. Chapter at a Glance

It is hard to imagine a world without printed matter — books, newspapers, posters, calendars, tickets. Yet print is a relatively recent technology. This chapter traces the development of print from its beginnings in East Asia to its expansion in Europe and India, and shows how the spread of print transformed society: it created a new reading public, spread new ideas, sparked religious and political debates, helped revolutions and reform movements, and drew new groups — children, women, workers — into the world of reading. It also explains why authorities tried to control print through censorship.

2. The First Printed Books (East Asia)

• The earliest kind of print technology developed in China, Japan and Korea — a system of hand printing. From about 594 CE, books in China were printed by rubbing paper against the inked surface of woodblocks. Both sides of thin, porous paper could not be printed, so the traditional Chinese "accordion book" was folded and stitched at the side.
• For a long time the imperial state in China was the major producer of printed material. China had a huge bureaucracy recruited through civil service examinations, and textbooks for these exams were printed in vast numbers.
• By the 17th century, as urban culture bloomed, uses of print diversified. Print was no longer limited to scholar-officials; merchants used it in everyday life to collect trade information; reading became a leisure activity — fictional narratives, poetry, autobiographies, anthologies of literary masterpieces and romantic plays. Rich women began to read, and many published their poetry and plays; wives of scholar-officials published their works, and courtesans wrote about their lives.
• In the late 19th century, Western printing techniques and mechanical presses were imported as Western powers established outposts in China. Shanghai became the hub of the new print culture, catering to Western-style schools.

Print in Japan

Buddhist missionaries from China introduced hand-printing technology into Japan around 768–770 CE. The oldest Japanese book, printed in 868 CE, is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, containing six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations. Pictures were printed on textiles, playing cards and paper money. In medieval Japan, poets and prose writers were regularly published and books were cheap and abundant. In the late 18th century, in the flourishing urban circles of Edo (later Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings depicted an elegant urban culture involving artists, courtesans and teahouse gatherings. Libraries and bookstores were packed with hand-printed material — books on women, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower arrangements, proper etiquette, cooking and famous places. Kitagawa Utamaro, born in Edo in 1753, contributed to an art form called ukiyo ("pictures of the floating world") depicting ordinary human experiences; his prints travelled to the US and Europe and influenced artists like Manet, Monet and Van Gogh.

3. Print Comes to Europe

• For centuries, silk and spices from China flowed into Europe through the silk route. In the 11th century, Chinese paper reached Europe via the same route, allowing manuscripts carefully written by scribes. In 1295, Marco Polo, a great explorer, returned to Italy after many years in China, bringing knowledge of woodblock printing. Italians began producing books with woodblocks, and the technology spread to other parts of Europe.
• Luxury editions were still handwritten on very expensive vellum for aristocrats and rich monastic libraries who scorned printed books as cheap vulgarities. Merchants and students bought cheaper printed copies.
• As demand for books increased, booksellers exported books to many countries; book fairs were held. Production of handwritten manuscripts was organised in new ways — scribes or skilled handwriters were employed not just by wealthy patrons but increasingly by booksellers; more than 50 scribes often worked for one bookseller. But handwritten manuscripts could not satisfy the ever-increasing demand: copying was expensive, laborious and time-consuming; manuscripts were fragile, awkward to handle, and could not be carried around or read easily.
• By the early 15th century, woodblocks were widely used in Europe to print textiles, playing cards and religious pictures with simple, brief texts. There was clearly a great need for even quicker and cheaper reproduction of texts.

Gutenberg and the printing press

Johann Gutenberg, son of a merchant, grew up on a large agricultural estate and saw wine and olive presses from childhood. He learnt the art of polishing stones, became a master goldsmith, and acquired the expertise to create lead moulds for trinkets. Drawing on this knowledge, he adapted existing technology to design his innovation: the olive press provided the model for the printing press, and moulds were used for casting metal types for the letters of the alphabet. By 1448 Gutenberg perfected the system. The first book he printed was the Bible — about 180 copies printed in about three years, which by the standards of the time was fast production.

The new technology did not entirely displace the art of producing books by hand. Printed books at first closely resembled written manuscripts in appearance and layout; metal letters imitated ornamental handwritten styles; borders were illuminated by hand with foliage and other patterns; illustrations were painted. In books printed for the rich, space for decoration was kept blank on the printed page so that each buyer could choose the design and decide on the painting school.

In the hundred years between 1450 and 1550, printing presses were set up in most countries of Europe. The second half of the 15th century saw 20 million copies of printed books flooding the markets of Europe, rising in the 16th century to about 200 million copies. This shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the print revolution.

4. The Print Revolution and Its Impact

A new reading public

Printing reduced the cost of books; the time and labour needed to produce each book came down and multiple copies could be produced with greater ease. Books flooded the market, reaching an ever-growing readership. Earlier, reading was restricted to the elites; common people lived in an oral culture, hearing sacred texts read out, ballads recited and folk tales narrated. Now books could reach wider sections — a reading public came into being. But literacy rates were low, so printers began publishing popular ballads and folk tales with pictures, sung and recited at gatherings in villages and taverns. The line between oral and reading cultures became blurred.

Religious debates and the fear of print

Print created the possibility of wide circulation of ideas and introduced a new world of debate and discussion. Not everyone welcomed this: many feared the effects of easier access to printed words — irreligious thoughts, rebellious ideas, and the destruction of "valuable" literature. In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther wrote Ninety-Five Theses criticising many practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church; a printed copy was posted on a church door in Wittenberg. Luther's writings were immediately reproduced in vast numbers and read widely, leading to a division within the Church and to the Protestant Reformation. Luther's translation of the New Testament sold 5,000 copies within a few weeks, and a second edition appeared within three months. Deeply grateful, Luther said: "Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one."

Print and dissent

In the 16th century, Menocchio, a miller in Italy, began reading books available in his locality and reinterpreted the message of the Bible, formulating a view of God and Creation that enraged the Roman Catholic Church. When the Church began its inquisition to repress heretical ideas, Menocchio was hauled up twice and ultimately executed. The Church, troubled by such popular readings and questionings, imposed severe controls over publishers and booksellers and began to maintain an Index of Prohibited Books from 1558.

The reading mania

Through the 17th and 18th centuries literacy rates went up in most of Europe; churches set up schools in villages carrying literacy to peasants and artisans. By the end of the 18th century, in some parts of Europe literacy rates were as high as 60 to 80%. New forms of popular literature appeared: peddlers roamed villages selling little books. In England, penny chapbooks were carried by petty peddlers known as chapmen and sold for a penny; in France the "Bibliothèque Bleue" were low-priced small books printed on poor-quality paper and bound in cheap blue covers. Romances, almanacs, ballads and folk tales, and later newspapers and journals combining information about current affairs with entertainment, multiplied. Scientists' and philosophers' ideas — Isaac Newton's discoveries, the writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — reached wider audiences.

Print culture and the French Revolution

Historians have made three arguments: (1) print popularised the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers — Voltaire and Rousseau attacked the sacred authority of the Church and the despotic power of the state, encouraging people to see things critically, with reason; (2) print created a new culture of dialogue and debate — all values, norms and institutions were re-evaluated and discussed by a public that had become aware of the power of reason; (3) by the 1780s there was an outpouring of literature mocking the royalty and criticising their morality, raising questions about the existing social order — cartoons and caricatures suggested that the monarchy remained absorbed in sensual pleasures while the people suffered. Print did not directly shape ideas, but it made a different way of thinking possible. People did not believe everything they read; they selected some ideas and rejected others.

5. The Nineteenth Century

• Children: as primary education became compulsory from the late 19th century, children became an important category of readers. A children's press devoted to literature for children alone was set up in France in 1857. The Grimm brothers in Germany spent years compiling traditional folk tales gathered from peasants; what they collected was edited before publication in 1812 — anything considered unsuitable for children or vulgar was removed.
• Women: became important as readers and writers. Penny magazines were aimed at women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping. Novels in the 19th century were written by women such as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot; their writings helped define a new type of woman — a person with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think.
• Workers: lending libraries had existed from the 17th century; in the 19th century they became instruments for educating white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people. Sometimes self-educated working-class people wrote for themselves — after the working day shortened, workers had some time for self-improvement and self-expression, writing political tracts and autobiographies.
• Further innovations: by the late 18th century presses were made of metal. In the mid-19th century, Richard M. Hoe of New York perfected the power-driven cylindrical press, capable of printing 8,000 sheets per hour — useful for newspapers. In the late 19th century the offset press, which could print up to six colours at a time, was developed; from the turn of the 20th century electrically operated presses accelerated printing operations. Publishers sold cheap paperbacks; in the 1920s in England popular works were sold in cheap series called the Shilling Series; dust covers or book jackets came in the 20th century; and with the Great Depression in the 1930s, publishers brought out cheap paperback editions to keep buying going.

6. India and the World of Print

Manuscripts before print

India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and various vernacular languages, copied on palm leaves or handmade paper, sometimes beautifully illustrated and pressed between wooden covers or sewn together. They were highly expensive and fragile; they had to be handled carefully and could not be read easily, as the script was written in different styles. In pre-colonial Bengal, an extensive network of village primary schools existed, but students very often did not read texts — they only learnt to write; teachers dictated portions from memory and students wrote them down.

Print comes to India

• The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-16th century. Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts; by 1674 about 50 books had been printed in Konkani and Kanara languages.
• 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 translations of older works.
• The English East India Company began to import presses from the late 17th 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". It was private English enterprise, proud of its independence from colonial influence; Hickey published a lot of advertisements, including those relating to the import and sale of slaves, and much gossip about the Company's senior officials in India. Enraged, Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted Hickey and encouraged officially sanctioned newspapers.
• The first Indian newspaper was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, a close associate of Raja Rammohun Roy.

Religious reform and public debates

From the early 19th century there were intense debates around religious issues. Different groups confronted changes within colonial society and offered new interpretations of beliefs. Some criticised existing practices and campaigned for reform; others countered the arguments of reformers. Debates were carried out in public and in print. Printed tracts and newspapers spread new ideas and shaped the nature of debate, and a wider public could now participate. Raja Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821; Hindu orthodoxy commissioned the Samachar Chandrika to oppose his opinions. From 1822, two Persian newspapers were published — Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar; in the same year a Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay Samachar, made its appearance.

In north India, the ulama were deeply anxious about the collapse of Muslim dynasties; they feared colonial rulers would encourage conversion and change Muslim personal laws. They used cheap lithographic presses to publish Persian and Urdu translations of holy scriptures and printed religious newspapers and tracts. 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. Among Hindus, especially in north India, print encouraged reading of religious texts in vernacular languages: the first printed edition of Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a 16th-century text, came out from Calcutta in 1810; by the mid-19th century cheap lithographic editions flooded north Indian markets. From the 1880s the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published numerous religious texts in vernaculars. Print also connected communities and people in different parts of India; newspapers conveyed news from one place to another, creating pan-Indian identities.

New forms of publication

• As more people became interested in reading, they wanted to see their own lives, experiences and emotions reflected in what they read. The novel, a literary form developed in Europe, ideally catered to this need and soon acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles. Other new literary forms entered — lyrics, short stories, essays about social and political matters.
• By the end of the 19th century a new visual culture took shape: painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation; poor woodengravers set up shops near letterpresses. Cheap prints and calendars were easily available in the bazaar and could be bought even by the poor to decorate their walls. By the 1870s caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers, commenting on social and political issues — some ridiculed the educated Indians' fascination with Western tastes and clothes, while others expressed fear of social change.

Women and print

Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways. Women's reading 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 cities and towns after the mid-19th century. Many journals carried writings by women and explained why women should be educated. But conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed, and Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances. Sometimes rebel women defied such prohibitions. Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household in East Bengal, learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen; later she wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban, published in 1876 — the first full-length autobiography published in the Bengali language. In the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women — how they 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. In the early 20th century, journals written for and sometimes edited by women became extremely popular; in Punjab a similar folk literature was widely printed — Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling Istri Dharm Vichar to teach women how to be obedient wives. Bengal's Battala, an entire area in central Calcutta, was devoted to printing popular books — cheap editions of religious tracts and scriptures as well as literature considered obscene and scandalous.

Print and the poor

Very cheap small books were brought to markets in 19th-century Madras towns and sold at crossroads, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy them. Public libraries were set up from the early 20th century, expanding access to books — mostly in cities and towns, sometimes in prosperous villages. From the late 19th century 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 (1871). In the 20th century B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) in Madras wrote powerfully on caste. Local protest movements and sects created many popular journals and tracts criticising ancient scriptures and envisioning a new and just future. 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, 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.

7. Print and Censorship

• Before 1798, the colonial state under the East India Company was not too concerned with censorship; early measures were directed against Englishmen in India who were critical of Company misrule.
• 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. 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 earlier freedoms.
• After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the press changed; enraged Englishmen demanded a clampdown on the "native" press. As vernacular newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government passed the Vernacular Press Act (1878), modelled on the Irish Press Laws. It provided the government with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press. The government kept regular track of vernacular newspapers in different provinces; when a report was judged seditious, the newspaper was warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press was liable to be seized and the printing machinery confiscated.
• Despite repressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India. 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 widespread protests all over India.

8. Master Table: Key Terms

9. Master Summary Table

Chart — printed books in Europe (million copies):

10. Mind Map

11. Tips and Tricks

12. Important One-liners

• Woodblock printing in China began around 594 CE.
• Shanghai became the hub of new print culture in China.
• Kitagawa Utamaro was born in Edo in 1753.
• Gutenberg's first printed book was the Bible.
• Luther called printing "the ultimate gift of God".
• The Church's Index of Prohibited Books began in 1558.
• Mercier called the press "the most powerful engine of progress".
• Richard M. Hoe's press printed 8,000 sheets an hour.
• The printing press came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries.
• Rashsundari Debi wrote Amar Jiban (1876).
• Tilak was imprisoned in 1908 for writings in Kesari.

13. Previous-Year-Pattern Questions with Detailed Answers

14. Quick Revision Summary