Print Culture and the Modern World

The imperial state in China was, for a very long time, the major producer of printed material. Explain. 

1. China possessed a huge bureaucratic system which recruited its personnel through civil service examinations. 

2. Textbooks for this examination were printed in vast numbers under the sponsorship of the imperial state. 

3. From the sixteenth century, the number of examination candidates went up and that increased the volume of print. 

Explain the chief characteristics of the earliest print culture of Japan. 

1. The oldest Japanese book, printed in AD 868, is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, containing six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations. 

2. Pictures were printed on textiles, playing cards, and paper money. 

3. In medieval Japan, poets and prose writers were regularly published, and books were cheap and abundant. 

4. In the late eighteenth century, in the flourishing urban circles at Edo (later to be known as Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings depicted an elegant urban culture, involving artists, courtesans, and teahouse gatherings. 

5. Libraries and bookstores were packed with hand-printed material of various types – books on women, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower arrangements, proper etiquette, cooking, and famous places. 

Woodblock print only came to Europe after 1295. Give reasons. 

1. In 1295, Marco Polo, a great explorer, returned to Italy after many years of exploration in China. 

2. China already had the technology of woodblock printing. Marco Polo brought this knowledge back with him. 

3. Now Italians began producing books with woodblocks, and soon the technology spread to other parts of Europe. 

4. Luxury editions were still handwritten on very expensive vellum, meant for aristocratic circles and rich monastic libraries which scoffed at printed books as cheap vulgarities. 

5. Merchants and students in the university towns bought the cheaper printed copies. 

The Gutenberg Printing Press did not entirely displace the existing art of producing books by hand. Explain.
(or)
What were the features of the first printed book / Bible? 

1. Printed books at first closely resembled the written manuscripts in appearance and layout. The metal letters imitated the ornamental handwritten styles. 

2. Borders were illuminated by hand with foliage and other patterns, and illustrations were painted. In the books printed for the rich, space for decoration was kept blank on the printed page. 

3. Each purchaser could choose the design and decide on the painting school that would do the illustrations. 

4. No two copies were the same. Every page of each copy was different. Elites everywhere preferred this lack of uniformity: what they possessed then could be claimed as unique, for no one else owned a copy that was exactly the same. 

5. The use of colour within the letters in various places. This had two functions: it added colour to the page and highlighted all the holy words to emphasise their significance. But the colour on every page of the text was added by hand. Gutenberg printed the text in black, leaving spaces where the colour could be filled in later. 

Oral culture thus entered print and printed material was orally transmitted. The line that separated the oral and reading cultures became blurred. And the hearing public and reading public became intermingled. Explain. 

1. Access to books created a new culture of reading. Earlier, reading was restricted to the elites. Common people lived in a world of oral culture. 

2. They heard sacred texts read out, ballads recited, and folk tales narrated. Knowledge was transferred orally. People collectively heard a story or saw a performance. 

3. Now books could reach out to wider sections of people. If earlier there was a hearing public, now a reading public has come into being. 

4. Books could be read only by the literate, and the rates of literacy in most European countries were very low till the twentieth century. 

5. So printers began publishing popular ballads and folk tales, and such books would be profusely illustrated with pictures. These were then sung and recited at gatherings in villages and in taverns in towns. 

Martin Luther was in favour of print and spoke out in praise of it. Give reasons. 

1. In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther wrote Ninety-Five Theses criticising many of the practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. 

2. A printed copy of this was posted on a church door in Wittenberg. It challenged the Church to debate his ideas. 

3. Luther’s writings were immediately reproduced in vast numbers and read widely. 

4. This led to a division within the Church and to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. 

5. Luther’s translation of the New Testament sold 5,000 copies within a few weeks and a second edition appeared within three months. Deeply grateful to print, Luther said, ‘Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.’ 

What were the new forms of popular literature in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries leading mania in Europe? 

16th & 17th Centuries: 

1. There were almanacs or ritual calendars, along with ballads and folktales. But other forms of reading matter, largely for entertainment, began to reach ordinary readers as well. 

2. In England, penny chapbooks were carried by petty pedlars known as chapmen, and sold for a penny, so that even the poor could buy them. 

3. In France, were the “Biliotheque Bleue”, which were low-priced small books printed on poor quality paper, and bound in cheap blue covers. 

18th Century: 

1. The periodical press developed from the early eighteenth century, combining information about current affairs with entertainment. 

2. Newspapers and journals carried information about wars and trade, as well as news of developments in other places. 

Why did some people in eighteenth-century Europe think that print culture would bring enlightenment and end despotism? 

1. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a common conviction that books were a means of spreading progress and enlightenment. 

2. Many believed that books could change the world, liberate society from despotism and tyranny, and herald a time when reason and intellect would rule. 

3. Louise-Sebastien Mercier, a novelist in eighteenth-century France, declared: ‘The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force that will sweep despotism away.’ 

4. Convinced of the power of print in bringing enlightenment and destroying the basis of despotism, Mercier proclaimed: ‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtual writer!’ 

The nineteenth century saw vast leaps in mass literacy in Europe, bringing in large numbers of new readers among children, women, and workers. Give reasons. 

Children: 

1. As primary education became compulsory in the late nineteenth century, children became an important category of readers. 

2. Production of school textbooks became critical for the publishing industry. A children’s press, devoted to literature for children alone, was set up in France in 1857. This press published new works as well as old fairy tales and folk tales. 

3. The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years compiling traditional folk tales gathered from peasants. What they collected was edited before the stories were published in a collection in 1812. 

4. Anything that was considered unsuitable for children or would appear vulgar to the elites, was not included in the published version. Rural folk tales thus acquired a new form. In this way, print recorded old tales but also changed them. 

Women: 

1. Women became important as readers as well as writers. Penny magazines were especially meant for women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping. 

2. Some of the best-known novelists were women: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot. 

3. Their writings became important in defining a new type of woman: a person with a will, strength of personality, determination, and the power to think. 

Workers: 

1. Lending libraries in England became instruments for educating white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people. 

2. After the working day was gradually shortened from the mid-nineteenth century, workers had some time for self-improvement and self-expression. They wrote political tracts and autobiographies in large numbers. 

List the new techniques adopted by printers and publishers to sell their products. 

1. Nineteenth-century periodicals serialised important novels, which gave birth to a particular way of writing novels. 

2. In the 1920s in England, popular works were sold in cheap series, called the Shilling Series. 

3. The dust cover or the book jacket is also a twentieth-century innovation. 

4. With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, publishers feared a decline in book purchases. To sustain buying, they brought out cheap paperback editions. 

When did print come to India? What was the first book to be printed? 

1. The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century. Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts. 

2. By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in the Konkani and in Kanara languages. 

3. Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin, and in 1713 the first Malayalam book was printed by them. 

4. By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts, many of them translations of older works. 

5. The English language press did not grow in India till quite late even though the English East India Company began to import presses from the late seventeenth century. 

How did print help connect communities and people in different parts of India? Explain with examples. 

1. Printed tracts and newspapers not only spread the new ideas, but they shaped the nature of the debate. A wider public could now participate in these public discussions and express their views. New ideas emerged through these clashes of opinions. 

2. This was a time of intense controversies between social and religious reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood, and idolatry. 

3. Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 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, made its appearance. 

By the end of the nineteenth century, a new visual culture was taking shape. What was it? Explain. 

1. Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation. 

2. Cheap prints and calendars, easily available in the bazaar, could be bought even by the poor to decorate the walls of their homes or places of work. 

3. These prints began shaping popular ideas about modernity and tradition, religion and politics, and society and culture. 

4. Caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers, commenting on social and political issues. 

5. Some caricatures ridiculed the educated Indians’ fascination with Western tastes and clothes, while others expressed the fear of social change. There were imperial caricatures lampooning nationalists, as well as nationalist cartoons criticising imperial rule. 

What was the printed literature available in Bengal & Punjab around the 20th century? 

1. Journals, written for and sometimes edited by women, became extremely popular. They discussed issues like women’s education, widowhood, widow remarriage, and the national movement. 

Punjab: 

1. Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling Istri Dharm Vichar to teach women how to be obedient wives. 

2. 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. 

Bengal: 

1. In Bengal, an entire area in central Calcutta – the Battala – was devoted to the printing of popular books. 

2. Here, people could buy cheap editions of religious tracts and scriptures, as well as literature that was considered obscene and scandalous. 

After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the press changed. Why? 

1. Enraged Englishmen demanded a clamp down on the ‘native’ press. As vernacular newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government began debating measures of stringent control. 

2. In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on the Irish Press Laws. 

3. It provided the government with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press. 

4. From now on the government kept regular track of the vernacular newspapers published in different provinces. 

5. When a report was judged as seditious, the newspaper was warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press was liable to be seized and the printing machinery confiscated.