The Press

A press came ashore at Goa in 1556 because a mission had failed. The machine had been packed for Abyssinia, and when that errand collapsed the crates were unloaded on the Konkan coast and carried to the College of St Paul. It printed Christian books for Christian readers.

That is where the strange arithmetic begins. The instrument that would one day put a Hindu scripture into the hands of a village reader had arrived. It would sit in India for almost two and a half centuries before it printed a single Hindu scripture in the script that scripture was written in. One question runs under this whole chapter. A printing press reached India in 1556, so why did it take nearly two hundred and fifty years before a Hindu text was printed in its own letters, and what changed once it finally was?

The first impressions

The Jesuit press at Goa belongs to 1556, and the books it produced were tools of conversion. The earliest printing in India was the Church talking to itself and to those it hoped to bring in.

The first book printed in India in a native Indian script came a little later and a little south. In 1578, at Quilon, which is the town now called Kollam, the Jesuit Henrique Henriques saw through the press a Tamil catechism, the Doctrina Christam, often called the Thambiran Vanakkam (the worship of the Lord). It was printed on 20 October 1578 in cast Tamil type. Here a careful distinction matters, and the record forces it. A Tamil catechism in romanized form, Tamil sounds spelled in Roman letters, had already been printed in Lisbon in 1554. So the 1578 Quilon book is not the first Tamil printing anywhere. It is the first book printed in India in a native Indian script, with letters an Indian eye would recognize as its own.

Notice who is doing all of this. Missionaries. The press in India was, for a very long stretch, an instrument of the foreign Church and later of the colonial state. The languages of the country were being printed. The faith of the country was not.

The script that carried most of that faith was still waiting.

The weight of the voice

To understand the delay you have to take seriously a position that can look, from outside, like mere stubbornness. It was not. It was a theology.

The oldest layer of Hindu scripture, the Veda, was never primarily a written thing. It was a sounded thing, transmitted guru to disciple by living voice, guarded by elaborate techniques of memorization that preserved every accent and pause. The earlier chapters of this volume traced that long oral discipline and the slow, reluctant move of sacred speech onto leaf and bark. See the manuscript chapter for how the physical book itself was treated as a sacred object, and reading it as something close to a ritual act. ( Leaf and Bark )

Against that background, the printed book looked like a problem. A press makes thousands of identical copies and sells them. To many orthodox Brahmins, committing the Veda to a printed, purchasable commodity was a degradation of the knowledge and a threat to the gatekeeping that had always governed who received it. The historian Anindita Ghosh, in her study of early colonial print, “An Uncertain ‘Coming of the Book’” (Book History 6, 2003), reads this resistance as part of why the printed book had an uneasy reception in India and did not simply sweep the manuscript away. The fear was not of technology as such. It was of the book becoming a profane object, knowledge stripped of its proper channel and laid out for purchase.

That is one half of the answer. The other half had nothing to do with the soul and everything to do with the foundry.

A thousand shapes of one letter

Movable type, the system Gutenberg made famous, depends on a small, closed set of pieces. The Latin alphabet asks for a few dozen sorts, plus punctuation. A compositor reaches into a known number of compartments.

The Devanagari script does not behave like that. Devanagari, the script in which Sanskrit is most often written and printed today, is the bar-topped script also used for Hindi and Marathi, introduced earlier in this volume in the chapter on scripts. ( The Branching Hand ) Its difficulty for a type foundry lies in the conjunct consonant, the samyuktakshara, the fused cluster a scribe writes when two or more consonants meet with no vowel between them. The two letters do not sit side by side. They merge into a single new shape. There are over a thousand of these combined forms in use.

Each distinct shape a press wants to print cleanly is, in principle, another piece of type that has to be designed, engraved as a steel punch, and cast. The concrete proof sits in the first generation of Devanagari printing itself. When William Carey’s A Grammar of the Sungskrit Language was produced in Devanagari in 1804, the type for it required, by Camillo Formigatti’s account, on the order of seven hundred separate punches. Seven hundred hand-cut steel shapes to print one grammar. So the press could not simply be pointed at Sanskrit. The script had to be re-engineered into metal first, and that was the labour of years.

Hold this delay against a fact from Europe, because the order of events is telling. In 1785, Charles Wilkins published in London his Bhagvat-geeta, the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita and the first direct rendering of a Sanskrit text into a European language. It was printed in romanized form, the Sanskrit and its English carried in Latin letters. There was a printed Gita in London before there was printed Sanskrit scripture in Devanagari anywhere in India. Europe read the Gita on a press. ( What Is the Bhagavad Gita? ) India’s own sacred script was still uncast.

The foundry that would finally cast it stood in a Danish enclave on the Hooghly, not in a temple town.

Serampore and the goldsmith

William Carey, an English Baptist, landed at Calcutta on 11 November 1793. The East India Company was hostile to missionaries on its territory, so Carey and his colleagues took shelter in Serampore, the town the Bengalis call Srirampur, then held by Denmark and beyond the Company’s reach. With Joshua Marshman and William Ward he formed what came to be called the Serampore Trio.

The Serampore mission press began operations on 10 January 1800 and ran until 1837. The complete Bengali New Testament was finished on 7 February 1801, and over the following decades the press produced Bible translations and other works in dozens of tongues. The mission’s own accounting claims something near two hundred and twelve thousand printed items in roughly forty languages between 1800 and 1832.

It is here, around 1804, that Sanskrit in Devanagari best enters the printed record, and here that honesty requires a flag. The phrase “the first printed Sanskrit text” is genuinely fuzzy. The safe statement is that the earliest Sanskrit printing in Devanagari clusters around 1804. Carey’s Sanskrit grammar carries that date. The Hitopadesha (beneficial instruction, the fable collection) is often described as the first Sanskrit work to be printed, in late 1804. The Serampore Ramayana in the original Sanskrit followed in 1806. Treat any single one as “the first” with caution. Treat the cluster, around 1804, as solid.

And now the name the older story tends to drop. The Western typographic feat rested on an Indian craftsman. Panchanan Karmakar was a Bengali goldsmith and punchcutter who had already cut the first Bengali type, used for Nathaniel Halhed’s Bengali grammar in 1778. Carey brought him to Serampore, where Karmakar built the type foundry in 1800 and cut Devanagari among other scripts. The hands that turned the bar-topped letters into steel were not European. The mission supplied the will and the money. The skill that made it physical was local.

Even so, this was scholarship and mission work, expensive and elite. The book that reached the ordinary devotee came by a different road, and from stone rather than steel.

Stone, and the flood

Lithography reached India in the 1820s, at Benares around 1824 and at Bombay around 1827. Lithography is planographic printing, printing from a flat stone rather than from raised type, in which an image drawn in greasy ink on a smooth limestone surface is inked and pressed to paper. It was cheaper than movable type. It had one further property that mattered enormously in India.

A lithographic stone could reproduce a copyist’s handwriting directly. A calligrapher transcribed the text by hand, that transcription went onto the stone, and the press printed the look of the scribe’s own pen. No font had to be cut. The thousand conjuncts that tormented the type foundry were simply written out, as they always had been, and copied. The same process worked for any script. So lithography did to mass religious printing what movable type had struggled for decades to do, and it did so without throwing the scribes out of work. Copyists and calligraphers stayed employed, now feeding stones instead of patrons.

The result was a flood of cheap religious print across the nineteenth century, as the Puranas, the epics, and the panchang, the Hindu almanac that fixes festival dates and auspicious times, reached audiences a manuscript never could. O. P. Shcheglova’s survey “Lithography ii. In India” (Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2009) traces this spread of stone printing. Ulrike Stark’s An Empire of Books (2007) follows its commercial peak in the Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow, founded in 1858, the largest Indian-owned publisher of the century. The page had become ordinary. It had become affordable. Hindu texts were now printed in volume, by Indian houses, for Indian readers.

What was still missing was a press that made scripture its single mission and drove the price toward nothing.

Gorakhpur

That press opened on 29 April 1923, in Gorakhpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Its founder was Jayadayal Goyandka, a merchant, later joined by Hanuman Prasad Poddar, known to his readers as Bhaiji. They called it the Gita Press. In 1926 came its flagship, the Hindi devotional monthly Kalyan (welfare, or the highest good).

The Gita Press did one thing with relentless focus. It made Hindu scripture cheap and made it everywhere. By recent counts it has printed well over a hundred million copies each of the Bhagavad Gita and of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, the Hindi retelling of the Rama story, and hundreds of millions of books in all. Akshaya Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015) is the standard account of the house, its commercial method, and the particular vision of Hinduism it carried into so many homes. The price was kept low on purpose. The reach was the point.

So the printed scripture most Hindus actually read today is a twentieth-century object. Not the Jesuit press of 1556, not Serampore around 1804, but Gorakhpur from 1923 forward.

The press had finally married the word.

What the page did to the word

Step back and the payoff comes into view. Print did two things to texts that for centuries had lived only in memory and in copied leaves.

First, it tended to fix and standardize them. A manuscript culture produces variation as a matter of course, every copyist a small source of change, so that a text exists as a family of differing versions. A printed edition, run off in thousands of identical impressions, can freeze one version and broadcast it. That single broadcast version becomes the vulgate, the common, widely accepted printed text that most people now read and assume to be simply the text. Here a scholarly caution is owed. The thesis that print brought fixity, argued most influentially by Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), is itself contested. Adrian Johns, in The Nature of the Book (1998), replied that fixity was never automatic, that it was a negotiated achievement won by particular practices and institutions. Name the debate. Do not assert the fixity as a law.

Second, print democratized access. Knowledge that had been gated by lineage, by literacy, by the cost and fragility of manuscripts, became something a person could buy for small coin and own. The same movement stripped the book of some of its old sacred aura, which is precisely what the orthodox had feared. The thing the tradition guarded as ritual the market turned into a commodity, and the commodity reached millions.

One last line to hold for the next chapter. The popular printed vulgate is not the same as the scholarly critical edition. The vulgate is the version that spread. The critical edition is a deliberate scholarly reconstruction that weighs many manuscripts against one another to recover an earlier form, and that enterprise, the great Pune Mahabharata among its monuments, is the subject of the chapter that follows. ( The Search for the Original )

The press gave India a fixed page and a mass readership.

It could not, by itself, tell anyone which of the old words were original.