New Forms of Publication

New forms of Publication

•A new visual culture started at the end of 19th century.
•Painters like Raja Ravi Verma produced images for mass circulation.
•Cheap Prints and calendars were printed.
•By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers, commenting on social and political issues.

•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 prohibition.
• In East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, 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 which was published in 1876. It was the first full-length autobiography published in the Bengali language.
•From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women – about how women 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.
• A woman in a Tamil novel expressed what reading meant to women who were so greatly confined by social regulations: ‘For various reasons, my world is small … More than half my life’s happiness has come from books …’

•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.

•In Bengal, an entire area in central Calcutta – the Battala – was devoted to the printing of popular books.
•Cheap editions of religious tracts and scriptures, as well as literature that was considered obscene and scandalous.
•By the late nineteenth century, a lot of these books were being profusely illustrated with woodcuts and coloured lithographs.
•Pedlars took the Battala publications to homes, enabling women to read them in their leisure time.

•Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri (1871).
• In the twentieth century, B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker in Madras, better known as Periyar, wrote powerfully on caste and were read by people all over India.
•Local protest movements and sects also created a lot of popular journals and tracts criticising ancient scriptures and envisioning a new and just future.
•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 Chakra between 1935 and 1955, 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., to bring literacy and, sometimes, to propagate the message of nationalism