Place · printing house · India
Nawal Kishore Press
Also known as Nawal Kishore Press — Lucknow
The Munshi Nawal Kishore Press founded in Lucknow in 1858 by Munshi Nawal Kishore (1836-1895), an Agarwal Hindu publisher who became one of South Asia's most important early publishers of Urdu, Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic texts. The press produced over 5,000 titles between 1858 and 1895 — classical Persian and Urdu poetry, the Qur'an in Urdu translation (first published 1864), Hindu Puranas in Hindi and Urdu, Sanskrit classics in Nagari script, Arabic grammars and histories. Nawal Kishore pioneered the use of lithographic printing (which could reproduce the complex Persian-Arabic calligraphic scripts that movable type could not) for mass South Asian publishing. The press continued operations under his descendants until 1950; its archive is now largely at Lucknow's Amir-ud-Daula library.
- Date
- 1858–1950
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Condition
- historic press / print legacy
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.850, 80.950
Connections (5)
- Monastic foundationMunshi Nawal Kishore
Nawal Kishore founded his press at Lucknow in 1858, in a city the British had just sacked, and recruited the scholars left unemployed by the destruction of the nawabi establishments. Within a generation it was the largest publishing house in Asia, issuing the Qur'an and the Rāmāyana, Persian classics and Sanskrit texts from the same shop. Indian commercial publishing begins here rather than with the missionary presses.
- Companion in the same setFarangi Mahal, Lucknow
Lucknow held both the Farangi Mahal, whose household curriculum shaped South Asian madrasa teaching for two centuries, and the Nawal Kishore Press, which printed that curriculum's texts cheaply enough for anyone to buy. Manuscript learning and mass print sat in the same city for fifty years, and the press is a large part of why the Dars-i Nizāmi spread as widely as it did.
- TransmissionAgra Fort
The Mughal translation bureau moved the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana, the Upanishads and Sanskrit mathematics into Persian across three reigns, in manuscripts made for a court. Nawal Kishore's press did something different two centuries later: printed the same material cheaply enough for anyone to buy, in several languages from one shop. Court translation made texts available to a hundred people; commercial print made them available to a hundred thousand.
- TransmissionSir Syed Ahmad Khan
Hindi and Urdu separated into two languages with two scripts and two literary canons in the decades Nawal Kishore's press was operating, and commercial printing is one of the instruments that made the separation stick, because a press has to choose a script for every title. Sir Syed's Aligarh argued for Urdu as the language of Muslim modernity in exactly those years, and the Hindi movement argued the other side just as hard.
- Site withinLucknow
Nawal Kishore Press lies within Lucknow — the two sites sit about 1 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Nawal Kishore Press is one of the specific sites that give Lucknow its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
On these journeys
- Texts that travel — translation and adaptation
- The making of Indian languages and scripts
- The printing revolution in India
Sources
Bibliographic histories of the Nawal Kishore Press and Urdu/Hindi print culture.
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