Religious Reforms and Debates 

• Intense debates around religious issues.

• New interpretations of the beliefs of different religions.

• Criticism of existing practices and campaign for reform.

• Others countered the arguments of reformers.

• Printed tracts and newspapers shaped the nature of the debate.

• A wider public could now participate in these public discussions and express their views..

• Reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry.

• Ideas printed in the everyday, spoken language of ordinary people.

• Ram Mohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi in 1821 and the 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, appeared.

• Ulama were deeply anxious about the collapse of Muslim dynasties.

• They feared that colonial rulers would encourage conversion, and change the Muslim personal laws.

• 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.

• All Urdu print helped them conduct these battles in public.

Religious Reforms and Debates: Hindu 

•Print encouraged the reading of religious texts, especially in the vernacular languages.

•The first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century text, came out from Calcutta in 1810.

•By the mid-nineteenth 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. In their printed and portable form, these could be read easily by the faithful at any place and time.

•They could also be read out to large groups of illiterate men and women.

•Newspapers conveyed news from one place to another, creating pan-Indian identities.