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.

Women and Print 

• •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 …’

Folk  Literature 

• •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.

Cheap publications 

• •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.

Print and the Poor People 

• •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