Journey
The printing revolution in India
Print arrived in India in 1556 and did almost nothing for a hundred and fifty years, because the types were Latin. What changed everything was cutting type for Indian scripts — Tamil at Tranquebar in 1712, then forty languages at Serampore — after which a vernacular reading public came into existence within two generations.
Stops (5)
- Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) · Tranquebar — Tamil type, 1712
Ziegenbalg had the first press in India capable of printing an Indian script working in a Danish enclave, with Tamil types cut, cast and recast locally and paper made on the spot. He printed the New Testament in Tamil and a dictionary. Every Indian-language press that followed is downstream of that workshop.
- Serampore & the Mission Press · Serampore — forty languages, from 1800
The Baptists worked from a Danish enclave because the East India Company barred missionaries from its own territory, and their press published scripture, grammars and dictionaries in about forty Indian languages and dialects, casting type for scripts never printed before. It produced the first Bengali prose in quantity and the first Bengali newspaper.
- Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan · Fort William — the Company learns the languages
The College was founded in 1800 to teach Indian languages to Company officials, and it employed Indian munshis and pandits to write the textbooks. Those commissioned prose works — in Bengali, Urdu and Hindi — are among the first modern prose in each, so a colonial training institution helped standardise the languages it was set up to teach.
- Nawal Kishore Press · Nawal Kishore — the commercial press, 1858
Munshi Nawal Kishore founded his press at Lucknow the year after the revolt and made it the largest publishing house in Asia, printing the Qur'an, the Rāmāyana, Persian classics, Urdu poetry and Sanskrit texts alongside each other. Indian-owned commercial publishing begins here rather than with the missions.
- Santiniketan · Śāntiniketan — print and the vernacular argument
Tagore's school taught in Bengali on the argument that education imported wholesale produces clerks, and his own two thousand songs and the Visva-Bharati press belong to the same reasoning. The reading public the presses created is what made a Bengali Nobel Prize in literature possible in 1913.