India and the World of Print

Manuscript Before the Age of Print

•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.
•Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated.
•They would be either pressed between wooden covers or sewn together to ensure preservation.
•Manuscripts continued to be produced till well after the introduction of print, down to the late nineteenth century.

Even though pre-colonial Bengal had developed an extensive network of village primary schools, students very often did not read texts.
They only learnt to write.
Teachers dictated portions of texts from memory and students wrote them down.
Many thus became literate without ever actually reading any kinds of texts

•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 the Konkani and in 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 of them translations of older works

•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’.
•So 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. But he also published a lot of gossip about the Company’s senior officials in India.
•The first Indian Newspaper that appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy