The bazaar press

The man with the steam press

A man called Gaṅgāviṣṇu Śrīkṛṣṇadās owned a press at Kalyan and at Bombay that printed on steam, and he sold what it printed by post, at a price, with the postage written against each title.

He was the house’s mālik, its proprietor, and the house was the Lakṣmīveṅkaṭeśvar Press. It printed almost everything. Read the departments off its own title page and the shape of the business comes up at once: Vedic and Vedānta, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, Sāṅkhya and Nyāya, dharmaśāstra, the Purāṇas, grammar, jyotiṣ and vaidyaka, then mantraśāstra, then novels, then books for children and books for women. One department is dayānandamatakhaṇḍana, refutations of Dayananda Saraswati’s doctrine. The Arya Samaj was a market segment.

The same building produced the Mahābhārata and it produced pamphlets. Same machine, same trade discount.

One of the departments was tantra-mantra. A department like that, in a house like that, is how the Śābara corpus became a mass phenomenon in modern India.

Think about what a machine like that does to a genre.

Every reader who has ever met a Śābara mantra in India has met it in the same physical form. A stapled pamphlet on cheap paper. A hardbound Hindi collection with a saffron cover and a lurid frontispiece. A ṭīkā, a Hindi commentary, running under a line of Devanāgarī that is presented as the mūl, the root text. Plates of yantras, printed as diagrams, numbered.

Not a manuscript. Not an initiation. A book, with a price on it.

That form has a date. One title alone, the Uḍḍīśatantra, was set and reset between 1879 and 1954 at Calcutta, at Varanasi, at Moradabad, at Delhi and at the Lakṣmīveṅkaṭeśvar house itself: competing imprints, overlapping editors, the same five or six titles going round and round a small trade. Whatever these texts were before, the object a modern reader holds is manufactured. It comes off a machine, in an edition, with a postage rate written against it.

The word steam is not decoration. It is the argument.

So the question this chapter asks is a book-historian’s question, and it is answerable in a way that a good deal of this treatise is not. Where did that printed corpus come from, and who manufactured it?

The previous chapter left a costume on a Vindhya hillside and asked who was wearing it. Here the wearer has an address, a discount schedule and a postage rate.

A catalogue with a price and a postage rate

The document at the centre of this chapter is not a scholarly source. It is an advertisement.

It survives in the Kamalakar Mishra Collection at Varanasi, digitised and public, and it is the trade catalogue of the Lakṣmīveṅkaṭeśvar Press, Kalyan and Bombay. The English title on the cover says CATALOGUE. The Hindi beneath it says something more precise: this is the list of books offered for sale, with the price and the postage written against each.

Get the name on it right, because the archive record misleads. The proprietor named on the Devanāgarī title page is Gaṅgāviṣṇu Śrīkṛṣṇadās. Khemraj Śrīkṛṣṇadās does appear in the document, repeatedly, inside it: as the author of works it sells, and as proprietor of the Śrī Veṅkaṭeśvar Steam Press, Bombay. He is the more famous name and the more famous firm, and the archive.org uploader’s title calls the document his catalogue. The uploader is not the document. The two presses and the two men belong to the same publishing family and the same trade, and nothing in the argument below depends on which of them signed the cover, but a title page is a fact and it says Gaṅgāviṣṇu.

The tantra-mantra department

Deep in the numbered list, in one run of about fifteen entries, the catalogue has a section for tantra-mantra. Five of them are exhibited here, and this is what a customer was being offered.

The Aghorītantra, whose advertising line says the material is set out saral bhāṣā mẽ, in simple Hindi.

The Yogaratnamālā, attributed on the entry itself to the siddha Nāgārjuna, with a bhāṣāṭīkā, a Hindī commentary, by the late Pandit Baladevaprasād Miśra. The entry also carries a subject line naming the ṣaṭkarma, which this treatise records as the catalogue’s own bibliographic description and does not gloss.

The Bṛhad Indrajāl, offered with both mūl and bhāṣā, root text and Hindi. The entry advertises one hundred and thirty-eight yantras. That is a bibliographical fact about a printed book, a count of plates, and this treatise records it as a count and nothing more.

The Uḍḍīśatantra, ascribed on the entry to Rāvaṇa, mūl with a bhāṣāṭīkā.

The Kāmaratna, ascribed to Yogeśvara Nityanātha, with a bhāṣāṭīkā by the late Pandit Jvālāprasād Miśra.

Five named titles, three of them ascribed to legendary or semi-legendary authorities, and in every one of the five the selling point is the Hindi. Not the Sanskrit. The Hindi.

Count the ascriptions and the advertisements separately, because they do not run together. The Aghorītantra and the Bṛhad Indrajāl carry no author at all. Three ascriptions, then, and five advertisements of the vernacular out of five.

Five out of five is the whole of the claim, and it has to be said flatly, because a wider sentence is available and is not supported. That every single entry in the section carries the promise of the vernacular is not evidenced here. The section runs to roughly fifteen entries, only five are exhibited above, and the warning in the next paragraph is that the entry boundaries in the scan are not always legible. What is evidenced is five of five, and that is what this chapter claims. A reader who wants the stronger sentence will have to wait for a clean image of the page.

The scan available is an optical-character reading of a poorly inked page, and individual entry numbers and glosses in it should be treated as provisional until a clean image is examined. The titles, the ascriptions and the commentators are legible. The exact entry boundaries are not always.

The copy consulted carries no year on the pages examined, and this chapter will not date it. Two of the commentators are called svargīya, the late, which places this printing after their deaths, and that is as far as the document will go on its own.

The catalogue does not date itself. Something else dates the press.

Śaka 1841

Chapter three of this treatise carries the thing that dates the press, and it has carried it all along.

Goudriaan’s note on the printed editions of the Bṛhat-śābaratantra, in the 1981 handbook, records three of them. There is an edition by Hariśaṃkar Śāstrī with a Hindī translation, Cawnpore 1900. There is a new edition, Moradabad 1906. And there is an edition from the Lakṣmīveṅkaṭeśvara Press, Kalyan, Śaka 1841, which is 1918 or 1919 of the Common Era.

That is a dated Śābara imprint, from the press whose catalogue this chapter is reading, in the year Goudriaan gives.

It does not date the catalogue and nothing here pretends that it does. What it establishes is narrower and more useful than a plea for further research: by 1918 or 1919 the Lakṣmīveṅkaṭeśvar house was printing a book with śābara in its title, in Kalyan, and a European cataloguer working from the India Office Library’s Sanskrit catalogue sixty years later could still find the imprint and write it down. The catalogue’s tantra-mantra section and Goudriaan’s note are two documents about the same firm doing the same thing, and neither knew about the other.

In simple Hindi

Now press on the phrase under the Aghorītantra, because it is the reason this chapter matters more than its size suggests.

Saral bhāṣā mẽ. In simple Hindi.

That is not a doctrinal statement. Nobody writes it in a colophon. It is copy. It is the line a publisher puts in a catalogue because it is the line that converts a browser into a buyer, and it tells you exactly what the firm believed its customer wanted. The customer wanted access. The obstacle the advertisement promises to remove is the Sanskrit.

Chapter one of this treatise showed a verse in which Tulsīdās, building his invocations at the head of the Bālkāṇḍ, cited the Śābara mantras as precedent for writing his epic in Avadhi and sealed the passage with bhāṣā bhaniti prabhāu, the power of a vernacular composition. That was a theological argument about language, made in about 1574, by a poet defending his own decision.

Three centuries later the same argument is a price point.

The claim has not changed. Power is available in the language people actually speak. What has changed is who is making the claim and why. In Tulsīdās it is an apologia. In the Veṅkaṭeśvar catalogue it is a product feature, printed beside a postage rate.

That is the commercial form of a theological argument, and it is worth saying plainly that the commercial form is the one that reached the most people.

The neighbours on the shelf

A catalogue is also a shelving decision, and the neighbours in this one are eloquent.

In the same run of entries, a few numbers from the Aghorītantra, sits a book whose description offers yantra, mantra and tantra together with card tricks, ganjīfā, chess puzzles, sleight of hand and the astonishments of the bāzīgar, the street conjuror, in one volume. The next entry is a manual on making fireworks. Further down the same stretch there is another card-tricks title, and another book of jādū.

Occult printing and stage conjuring were not kept apart in this house’s list. They are on the same page, sometimes inside the same book, and the publisher evidently expected the same customer to want both.

A publisher’s classification is a claim about a reader. This one says: the man who buys the Uḍḍīśatantra also buys the book about how to make a firework.

That is a wounding fact if you have come to the subject expecting a sealed lineage. It is a clarifying fact if you have come to it expecting a market.

The house ṭīkākāras

The strongest corroboration is a coincidence of names, and it comes from a completely independent direction.

Goudriaan and Gupta’s survey of Hindu Tantric and Śākta literature, published at Wiesbaden in 1981, carries at page 119 a footnote, number 34, listing printed editions of the Uḍḍīśatantra. The note sits at the foot of 119, under the head “Tantras of Magic,” and 120 is the running head of the page that follows, which is where a careless citation lands.

The note lists printed editions of the Uḍḍīśatantra out of Calcutta, Varanasi, Moradabad and Delhi, and from the Lakṣmīveṅkaṭeśvar Press itself, at dates running from 1879 to 1954.

Now put the two documents side by side.

The Wiesbaden handbook names Śyāmsundarlāl Tripāṭhī and the Lakṣmīveṅkaṭeśvar Press for the Uḍḍīśa of 1954, and Baladevaprasād Miśra for the Moradabad Uḍḍīśa of 1898. The Bombay trade catalogue’s Uḍḍīśatantra entry gives its ṭīkākāra as a Tripāṭhī, described on the line as Moradabad-resident. And the catalogue has Baladevaprasād Miśra as the commentator on its Yogaratnamālā.

Note what that does and does not establish. Baladevaprasād Miśra is attested twice, in two independent documents, and that is a real coincidence of names. The Tripāṭhī is not: the handbook’s Tripāṭhī is a Kalyan-Bombay man of 1954 and the catalogue’s is a Moradabad one, and a forename on the catalogue line cannot be read off the scan available. Whether they are one man, and whether the catalogue’s Moradabad Uḍḍīśa is the 1898 book under another editor, would be settled by a clean image of the catalogue’s Uḍḍīśatantra entry. Nothing here should be read as identifying them.

Bombay and Kalyan at one end. Banaras, Moradabad and Delhi at the other. Competing imprints, overlapping editors, the same five or six titles in circulation. That is a trade, and a small one, and the same handful of men are producing the Hindi commentaries across it.

Jvālāprasād Miśra, who was not a hired hand

Which brings up a name that is easy to use badly.

Jvālāprasād Miśra appears on roughly fourteen titles across the whole Veṅkaṭeśvar catalogue, well beyond the tantra-mantra run. A count like that invites a filing: a commercial actor, a staff writer, a man who wrote whatever the house needed. That is not what the record shows, and the record is one search away.

In 1915 the Vaiyākaraṇa-siddhānta-kaumudī, the standard early-modern digest of Pāṇinian grammar, was published with a Hindī commentary called the Sañjīvanī by Pandit Jvālāprasād Miśra. The archive.org copy names Kṣemarāja Śrīkṛṣṇadās on the imprint, which is Khemraj Shrikrishnadas, the same publishing family whose catalogue this chapter has been reading. The attribution here is taken from the digitised item’s own title and creator fields; a title page was not examined, and a reader wanting to cite the edition should check one.

Hold the two facts together. The man who wrote the Hindī ṭīkā on the Kāmaratna also wrote the Hindī ṭīkā on the Siddhānta-kaumudī. Pāṇinian grammar at one end of his working life and the tantra-mantra section at the other, for the same house, in the same language, for the same reason: a Hindī reader who wanted what was inside a Sanskrit book and could not read one.

That is a career, and it is evidenced, and it is a different thing from a hired pen. The people who made the modern Śābara corpus available were working Hindī ṭīkākāras of the Banaras and Bombay presses, trained in Sanskrit and writing for people who were not. Pandit Baladevaprasād Miśra, the other house commentator, is attested independently twice, once in the catalogue and once in Goudriaan’s note. These men have names, output and a documented range, and a function is not a description of them.

The corpus as the public receives it is substantially their work. They should be described as scholars who worked for a commercial press, because that is what the evidence says they were.

What R. C. Hazra was doing in Dacca

And here the chapter turns, because the Indian scholarship on this press says something the trade catalogue cannot.

In 1940, at Dacca, R. C. Hazra published Studies in the Purāṇic Records on Hindu Rites and Customs. It is one of the most exacting works of Purāṇic scholarship produced in the subcontinent in that century, and its method is collation: reading printed recensions against each other, chapter division by chapter division, reading by reading.

Open the abbreviations at the front of it and the list of short forms reaches its V entries. Venk. = Venkatesvara Press (Bombay). It stands in the same list as Vanga. = Vangavasi Press (Calcutta). The abbreviations begin at p. v and both entries stand on p. vii. A citation sending a reader to folio xix cannot be followed, because the Dacca 1940 front matter does not reach it.

Inside the book, the South Indian recension of the Padma Purāṇa is recorded as published by the Ānandāśrama and by the Venkatesvara Press, and Hazra then collates the Venkatesvara and Ānandāśrama khaṇḍa divisions against each other, and collates Venkatesvara and Vaṅgavāsī readings word by word for the Kūrma parallels. In the bibliography the Nāradīya Purāṇa is entered as published by Kṣemarāja Śrīkṛṣṇadāsa, Venkatesvara Press, Bombay.

Read those entries slowly, because they invert the chapter.

The firm this chapter has been describing as a commercial house shelving tantra-mantra between card tricks and fireworks is, in the apparatus of the most demanding Indian Purāṇa scholar of his generation, a textual witness. Abbreviated. Cited by khaṇḍa. Collated against the Ānandāśrama, which was the scholarly standard. The same proprietor, Kṣemarāja Śrīkṛṣṇadāsa, appears in Hazra’s bibliography and in the Veṅkaṭeśvar catalogue’s own pages.

The bazaar press was not the opposite of scholarship. It was where the vulgate came from. When an Indian Sanskritist in 1940 needed a printed Padma or a printed Nāradīya to collate, he reached for a Bombay steam-press edition, and he said so in his abbreviations, and nobody thought it needed defending.

That is the sentence that changes the tone of everything above it. The tantra-mantra run is not slumming. It is one department of a house whose Purāṇa list was serious enough to be cited in Dacca, run by a family whose Hindī commentators were also editing Pāṇini. A treatise that describes this press only as a shop has not read the Indian scholarship that used it.

What is shown and what is withheld

One structural point, and it belongs here rather than in a note, because this chapter is the place where a reader is most likely to feel the absence.

This chapter exhibits the genre’s advertising copy. It gives you the titles, the ascriptions, the count of plates, the promise of saral bhāṣā, the neighbours on the shelf. It gives you the form of the thing precisely: what these books looked like, what they cost, who wrote the commentaries, what a buyer was told he was getting.

It does not give you a working mantra, a vidhi, a material, a timing, or the operative content of a yantra, and it will not.

That is a position, and not a shortfall in the research. The catalogue copy, the distributions in chapters ten to twelve and the lexicographers’ glosses in chapter two are how this treatise exhibits the genre, and they exhibit it at the level of form. Function is withheld. Chapter twenty is the reason, and any reader who wants the reason before the evidence can read chapter twenty first. A book about a corpus of efficacious formulae can describe a market in them without becoming a distributor in that market, and this chapter is the demonstration that the two can be told apart.

Research notes: what did not survive

Four things this research expected to support the chapter did not hold. Reporting them is more useful than dropping them, and none of them belongs above the line.

The Lucknow hypothesis, demoted. The research began with the obvious answer, which was Naval Kishore. Munshi Naval Kishore’s press at Lucknow was the largest vernacular publishing house in nineteenth-century North India, and if a class of Hindi occult manuals became a mass commodity in the north, that is where a researcher looks first. The Heidelberg bibliography of the Naval Kishore Press, hosted by the university library at biblio.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/navalkishore and described by its compilers as carrying approximately three thousand six hundred bibliographic entries, was searched by subject for tantra, jyotiṣ, ṭoṭkā and jantar. All four returned zero.

Those four zeros will not carry an argument, and nothing here is built on them. Two reasons, and the second is the one that matters. First, they are not reproducible: the date of the run was not recorded, no result page was archived, and on 17 August 2026 the resource could not be reached by an automated tool at all, being disallowed by robots.txt and returning a bot challenge to a direct request. Second, and worse, the instrument cannot detect the thing. The Heidelberg resource is a provenance database built on holdings. A press’s cheapest and most ephemeral output is exactly what libraries fail to keep, so zero hits for ṭoṭkā is the expected result whether or not the press printed any. A negative from an instrument that is blind to the class of object is not evidence about that class of object. What would actually close it: the quarterly returns of books registered in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh under the colonial book-registration regime, where an ephemeral pamphlet with a price and a print run is recorded whether or not any library later shelved it.

There is magic in the Naval Kishore list, and it is a different word. The subject tag in the Heidelberg catalogue is the German Magie, and the book it sits on is Jādū prakāś, published 1913, by Munshi Ghulam Nabi, in Urdu. A companion title in the same catalogue gives its own game away in its subtitle: Jādū prakāś yaʿnī jādū ke tamāśe kī tīsrī kitāb, the third book of the magic show. Around it sit Islamicate geomancy and tilism, the enchanted-palace fantasy fiction that was one of the most successful genres Urdu commercial printing ever produced. That much was re-checked from a saved result page and held. An English-language search for “magic” collapses the conjuror’s tamāśā and the ṭoṭkā pamphlet into one category; Urdu and Hindi do not. It is a real observation about vocabulary. It is not a finding about what the press did or did not print, and no comparison between the two lists is drawn anywhere in this chapter.

An archive item that can no longer be opened. Ulrike Stark’s An Empire of Books is the standard history of the Naval Kishore Press. There is an item on archive.org titled for it, AnEmpireOfBooksUlrikeStark, uploaded by an account posting Sanskrit works, made public on 28 February 2016, running to some 877 megabytes. An inspection made in this research reported the payload to be Goudriaan and Gupta’s Hindu Tantric and Śākta Literature, a different book by different authors on a different subject from a different publisher. That report can no longer be checked by anybody. The date of the inspection was not recorded. On 17 August 2026 the item’s details page and its metadata endpoint both returned 404 and every download and reader endpoint failed. The item is still in the site’s search index and it is not retrievable. It is set down here as a cautionary shape rather than as a finding: a mis-titled upload produces a citation that looks perfectly respectable, carries a page number, and is undetectable from the citation itself. No page-level claim is made from Stark anywhere in this chapter, so nothing else here moves.

The cheapest fix in the chapter, unmade. Shobna Nijhawan reviewed Stark’s book in South Asia Research in 2012. Access was restricted and the review’s substance could not be read. A few pages by an Indian scholar in a peer-reviewed journal would establish what Stark’s long book covers, without opening Stark, and would settle whether the Lucknow question is open at all. That is one library card, and it is the single highest-value outstanding item in this chapter. The volume, issue, pages and doi are in the sources.

Two nulls that are not findings. Francesca Orsini’s Print and Pleasure, on popular print in Hindi and Urdu, was the natural place to expect occult and mantra manuals to be treated, and nothing this research could reach indicated that it covers them. The volume’s table of contents and index were never opened. Nobody should cite this chapter for what Orsini does or does not cover. Likewise, Akshaya Mukul’s history of the Gita Press stands behind a tempting argument: that a great Hindi religious publisher’s refusal to print occult material would be powerful negative evidence about the moral economy of vernacular publishing. It is a good argument, and its premise has never been supported here. Mukul’s book was not opened either. The premise is untested rather than refuted.

The frame, named and unread. Projit Bihari Mukharji’s “Magic of Business: Occult Forces in the Bazaar Economy,” in Rethinking Markets in Modern India, Cambridge University Press 2020, treats the occult bazaar directly and treats printed grimoires as a commercial genre. Retrieval returned a publisher’s landing page rather than the chapter, so it is cited as the frame and not at page level. It stays cited, because a search for Indian book-history scholarship on this press’s occult list produced nothing that replaces it: the Print Areas and Moveable Type volumes, Anindita Ghosh, A. R. Venkatachalapathy and Vasudha Dalmia were checked and none of them treats this house’s tantra-mantra department. Goudriaan and Gupta stay for the same reason, at the level of bibliography: there is no Indian catalogue of the printed Uḍḍīśa editions, and their footnote is where the editions are listed. What Indian scholarship supplies here is Hazra, and it supplies it from a direction nobody was looking in.

What this chapter can prove

Assemble it honestly.

The Śābara corpus as a mass phenomenon in modern India is a product of the steam press. What this chapter can put a finger on is one trade document, read closely, and one footnote from Wiesbaden that independently attests the same press and one of the same commentators. That is a numbered tantra-mantra section shelved between conjuring and fireworks, five titles with their ascriptions and their promise of Hindī, five of five and no claim about the rest of the section, a count of plates, a small stable of Hindī ṭīkākāras working across competing houses, a dated imprint from the same press in Śaka 1841, and a Purāṇa scholar in Dacca in 1940 citing that press in his apparatus.

Weigh that against the four words somebody might reach for to describe it: hard, dated, commercial and reproducible. Three of the four do not survive inspection. The catalogue is an optical reading of a poorly inked page whose entry boundaries are not always legible, so it is not hard. The chapter twice refuses to date the catalogue, so it is not dated. The Heidelberg zeros cannot be re-run, the archive item is gone, Orsini and Mukul were never opened and Mukharji returned a landing page, so the chapter as a whole is not reproducible. Commercial holds.

What is left is smaller than the claim and it is real. It is a citable, reproducible, public primary document with numbered entries anybody can go and check, plus a corroborating footnote, plus an Indian scholar’s apparatus that tells us how the press was regarded by the people best placed to judge it. That is a good chapter. It is not the strongest chapter in a book of twenty-one, and it does not claim to be.

That does not make the corpus inauthentic. Nothing here touches the question of whether the older material behind these titles is old, and chapters three through six showed that some of it is very old indeed. What it makes the corpus is legible. Everywhere else this treatise has been reading legends, catalogues of manuscripts and the silences of ethnographers. Here it is reading an invoice.

And the logic on that invoice does not stop in 1898, or in 1918, or in 1954. The next chapter follows the same circuit into the present, where the shelf is a feed, the ṭīkākāra is a channel, and the price of the Aghorītantra is whatever the platform will bear.

The press was never the enemy of the tradition.

It was its distributor.