Download or read book The Spread of Print in Colonial India written by Abhijit Gupta and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the spread of print in colonial India towards the middle and end of the nineteenth century. Till the first half of the century, much of the print production in the subcontinent emanated from presidency cities such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, along with centres of missionary production such as Serampore. But with the growing socialization of print and the entry of local entrepreneurs into the field, print began to spread from the metropole to the provinces, from large cities to mofussil towns. This Element will look at this phenomenon in eastern India, and survey how printing spread from Calcutta to centres such as Hooghly-Chinsurah, Murshidabad, Burdwan, Rangpur etc. The study will particularly consider the rise of periodicals and newspapers in the mofussil, and asses their contribution to a nascent public sphere.
Download or read book A Beginners Guide to the Early Realm of Colonial Print Culture in India written by Tapati Bharadwaj and published by Lies and Big Feet. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, a realm of print culture evolved in Calcutta serving the needs of empire. The East India Company used this realm--which printed news, gossip, Oriental scholarship, literary journals--to establish and maintain its control over the territories. Moreover, the printed scholarship of the scholar-administrators of the East India Company reveals their belief that print technology was a step into modernity, a move away from Indian scribal culture. Print culture, in Bengal pre-1800 was produced for a non-native audience, that was also located in Europe. As content determines how interpretations take place, I have argued that the white settlers read in order to create a sense of imperial identity and thus, print technology in the colonial context was never innocent. Between 1780 and 1800, many newspapers in Calcutta printed news in multiple languages side by side on the same sheet of paper. This was a moment in the history of newspapers in England and in India that had not happened before and was not replicated subsequently. Any reader of these beautiful multilingual sheets of paper would question as to why such newspapers went out of fashion in a few decades after they were printed. Not only had the new technology of print culture entered India with the Britishers but also, this technology, in the process of establishing itself within a colonial situation, underwent changes on how it was conceptualized. Is it possible that such a multilingual text could only happen in south Asia where a multilingual society exists. In some ways, and unwittingly so, the Britishers captured an aspect of Indian society within these printed texts and the sheer spirit of invention marks these newspapers. The possibilities of what could have been if newspapers had continued to be multilingual are not explored for it denotes an epistemic shift, thus answering a question: what happens when a technology that has its origins in a different social space enters a new geographical locale and how does it change?
Download or read book Print and Pleasure written by Francesca Orsini and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of commercial publishing in nineteenth century North India.
Download or read book Print and the Urdu Public written by Megan Eaton Robb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early twentieth century British India, prior to the arrival of digital medias and after the rise of nationalist political movements, a small-town paper from the margins of society became a key player in Urdu journalism. Published in the isolated market town of Bijnor, Madinah grew to hold influence across North India and the Punjab while navigating complex issues of religious and political identity. In Print and the Urdu Public, Megan Robb uses the previously unexamined perspective of the Madinah to consider Urdu print publics and urban life in South Asia. Through a discursive and material analysis of Madinah, the book explores how Muslims who had settled in ancestral qasbahs, or small towns, used newspapers to facilitate a new public consciousness. The book demonstrates how Madinah connected the Urdu newspaper conversation both explicitly and implicitly with Muslim identity and delineated the boundaries of a Muslim public conversation in a way that emphasized rootedness to local politics and small urban spaces. The case study of this influential but understudied newspaper reveals how a network of journalists with substantial ties to qasbahs produced a discourse self-consciously alternative to the Western-influenced, secularized cities. Megan Robb augments the analysis with evidence from contemporary Urdu, English, and Hindi papers, government records, private diaries, private library holdings, ethnographic interviews, and training materials for newspaper printers. This thoroughly researched volume recovers the erasure of qasbah voices and proclaims the importance of space and time in definitions of the public sphere in South Asia. Print and the Urdu Public demonstrates how an Urdu newspaper published from the margins became central to the Muslim public constituted in the first half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Indian Ink written by Miles Ogborn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, Indian Ink examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word. Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, Indian Ink uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.
Download or read book Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850 1922 written by Partha Mitter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partha Mitter's book is a pioneering study of the history of modern art on the Indian subcontinent from 1850 to 1922. The author tells the story of Indian art during the Raj, set against the interplay of colonialism and nationalism. The work addresses the tensions and contradictions that attended the advent of European naturalism in India, as part of the imperial design for the westernisation of the elite, and traces the artistic evolution from unquestioning westernisation to the construction of Hindu national identity. Through a wide range of literary and pictorial sources, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India balances the study of colonial cultural institutions and networks with the ideologies of the nationalist and intellectual movements which followed. The result is a book of immense significance, both in the context of South Asian history and in the wider context of art history.
Download or read book Print and Publishing in Colonial Bengal written by Tapti Roy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the history of print and publishing in colonial Bengal by tracing the unexpected journey of Bharat Chandra’s Bidyasundar, the first book published by a Bengali entrepreneur. The introduction of printing technology by the British in Bengal expanded the scope of publication and consumption of books significantly. This book looks at the developments and the parallel publishing initiatives of that time. It examines local enterprises in colonial Bengal engaged in producing and selling books and explores the ways in which they charted out a cultural space in the 19th century. The work sheds fresh light on book production and the culture of print, and narrates the processes behind the printing of books to understand the multi-layered literary practices they sustained. A valuable addition to the history of publishing in India, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian and Indian history, Bengali literature, media and cultural studies, and print and publishing studies. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Bengal and the Bengali diaspora.
Download or read book Domesticity in Colonial India written by Judith E. Walsh and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 1880s, Hindu domestic life and its most intimate relationships had become contested ground. For urban, middle-class Indians, the Hindu woman was at the center of a debate over colonial modernity and traditional home and family life. This book sets this debate within the context of a nineteenth-century world where bourgeois, European ideas on the home had become part of a transnational, hegemonic domestic discourse, a 'global domesticity.' But Walsh's interest is more in hybridity than hegemony as she explores what women themselves learned when men sought to teach them through the Indian advice literature of the time. As a younger generation of Indian nationalists and reformers attempted to undercut the authority of family elders and create a 'new patriarchy' of more nuclear and exclusive relations with their wives, elderly women in extended Hindu families learned that their authority in family life (however contingent) was coming to an end.
Download or read book Leprosy in Colonial South India written by J. Buckingham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-12-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leprosy is a neglected topic in the burgeoning field of the history of medicine and the colonized body. Leprosy in Colonial South India is not only a history of an intriguing and dramatic endemic disease, it is a history of colonial power in nineteenth-century British India as seen through the lens of British medical and legal encounters with leprosy and its sufferers in south India. Leprosy in Colonial South India offers a detailed examination of the contribution of leprosy treatment and legislative measures to negotiated relationships between indigenous and British medicine and the colonial impact on indigenous class formation, while asserting the agency of the poor and vagrant leprous classes in their own history.
Download or read book Tracks of Change written by Ritika Prasad and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a growing number of Indians. While allowing millions to collectively experience the endemic discomforts of third-class travel, the public opportunities for proximity and contact created by railways simultaneously compelled colonial society to confront questions about exclusion, difference, and community. It was not only passengers, however, who were affected by the transformations that railways wrought. Even without boarding a train, one could see railway tracks and embankments reshaping familiar landscapes, realise that train schedules represented new temporal structures, fear that spreading railway links increased the reach of contagion, and participate in new forms of popular politics focused around railway spaces. Tracks of Change explores how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly woven into everyday life in colonial India, how people negotiated with the growing presence of railways, and how this process has shaped India's history.
Download or read book An Empire of Books written by Ulrike Stark (Dr. phil.) and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Subject Lessons written by Sanjay Seth and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-29 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge “traveled” to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in 1835, India’s British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not only by the colonizers but also by the colonized, to the extent that today almost all “serious” knowledge about India—even within India—is based on western epistemologies. In Subject Lessons, Sanjay Seth’s investigation into how western knowledge was received by Indians under colonial rule becomes a broader inquiry into how modern, western epistemology came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others but as knowledge itself. Drawing on history, political science, anthropology, and philosophy, Seth interprets the debates and controversies that came to surround western education. Central among these were concerns that Indian students were acquiring western education by rote memorization—and were therefore not acquiring “true knowledge”—and that western education had plunged Indian students into a moral crisis, leaving them torn between modern, western knowledge and traditional Indian beliefs. Seth argues that these concerns, voiced by the British as well as by nationalists, reflected the anxiety that western education was failing to produce the modern subjects it presupposed. This failure suggested that western knowledge was not the universal epistemology it was thought to be. Turning to the production of collective identities, Seth illuminates the nationalists’ position vis-à-vis western education—which they both sought and criticized—through analyses of discussions about the education of Muslims and women.
Download or read book Gandhi s Printing Press written by Isabel Hofmeyr and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time that Gandhi, as a young lawyer in South Africa, began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper. Gandhi’s Printing Press is an account of how this project, an apparent footnote to a titanic career, shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma. Pioneering publisher, experimental editor, ethical anthologist—these roles reveal a Gandhi developing the qualities and talents that would later define him. Isabel Hofmeyr presents a detailed study of Gandhi’s work in South Africa (1893–1914), when he was the some-time proprietor of a printing press and launched the periodical Indian Opinion. The skills Gandhi honed as a newspaperman—distilling stories from numerous sources, circumventing shortages of type—influenced his spare prose style. Operating out of the colonized Indian Ocean world, Gandhi saw firsthand how a global empire depended on the rapid transmission of information over vast distances. He sensed that communication in an industrialized age was becoming calibrated to technological tempos. But he responded by slowing the pace, experimenting with modes of reading and writing focused on bodily, not mechanical, rhythms. Favoring the use of hand-operated presses, he produced a newspaper to contemplate rather than scan, one more likely to excerpt Thoreau than feature easily glossed headlines. Gandhi’s Printing Press illuminates how the concentration and self-discipline inculcated by slow reading, imbuing the self with knowledge and ethical values, evolved into satyagraha, truth-force, the cornerstone of Gandhi’s revolutionary idea of nonviolent resistance.
Download or read book Modernity Print and Sahitya written by Sumanyu Satpathy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of print heralded a significant chapter in the history of colonial modernity in South Asia. This book narrates the story of the emergence of a new literary culture, Utkal sahitya or Odia literature, in the context of similar but conflicting linguistic-territorial cultures of Eastern India. The book is the first cross-cultural study of the emergence of a new literary culture in Eastern India with diverse, yet cognate languages in the years between 1866 and 1919. By researching a large corpus of archival material, it traces the emergence of a new literary culture that marked significant departures from traditional practices and understanding of the “literary,” and that was subsequently called, adhunik sahitya and argues that this was facilitated mainly by the formation of a public sphere in tandem with the rapid growth of educated print-public. While the phenomenon was by no means unique to Odia, the study identifies several local factors that were distinctive about its literary sphere by looking at its imbrication with sister linguistic cultures. It traces how, under political compulsions, a new intellectual class of Odias used agents of modernity such as print, education, new sciences, travel and communication etc. to forge a new aesthetic without completely breaking with the past. It examines the role that the Odia periodical press played, and traces the course it took from the time of its emergence from local political compulsions to the defining and broadening of the scope and limits of the question of the literary. It investigates the shifting and mutating dispositions of the newly emerged Odia print culture and public sphere while highlighting major concerns such as linguistic identity, historiography, literary histories, and canon formation as well as pioneering and consolidating new aesthetic forms. This book will be an important addition to the growing body of scholarship on literary cultures of multilingual India. Rich in archival work, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of literary history, cultural history, cultural studies, literature, literary history, literary and critical theory, and languages of Asia.
Download or read book Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth Century Britain written by Joanne Shattock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.
Download or read book The Qur an in South Asia written by Kamran Bashir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book investigates modern Qur’an commentaries in South Asia and engages with how Muslim scholars have imagined and assessed their past intellectual heritage. The research is focused on British India from the time of the Mutiny of 1857 to the moment of the Partition of united India in 1947. Offering critical scrutiny of Muslim exegesis of the Qur’an in North India, the study especially focuses on the Qur’anic thought of Sayyid Ahmed Khan (d. 1989), Ashraf Ali Thanawi (d. 1943), and Hamid al-Din Farahi (d. 1930). The volume challenges widespread assumptions of an all-pervasive reform and revivalism underlying the academic study of Islam. Instead of looking for Muslim revivalism and reform as epistemological foundations, it stresses the study of modern Qur’an commentaries, in particular local and cosmopolitan contexts. Departing from the oft-repeated explanations of Muslim scholarship and modern Islam through the lens of traditionalism and modernism, it discovers how Muslim scholars viewed themselves in relation to the Islamic tradition, and how they imagined and assessed their past intellectual heritage. Studying the history of the interpretation of the Qur’an in the multiple contexts of nineteenth and early twentieth-century British India, the book will be of interest to readers of Qur’anic studies, modern Islam and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Required Reading written by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read. Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships. Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.
