MANUSCRIPTS BEFORE THE AGE OF PRINT

MANUSCRIPTS BEFORE THE AGE OF PRINT

Let us see when printing began in India and how ideas and information were written before the age of print.

India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages. Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or on handmade paper. Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated. They would be either pressed between wooden covers or sewn together to ensure preservation. Manuscripts continued to be produced till well after the introduction of print, down to the late nineteenth century.

Fig. 14 – Pages from the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva, eighteenth century. This is a palm-leaf handwritten manuscript in an accordion format

Fig. 15 – Pages from the Diwan of Hafiz, 1824.

(Hafiz was a fourteenth-century poet whose collected works are known as Diwan. Notice the beautiful calligraphy and the elaborate illustration and design. Manuscripts like this continued to be produced for the rich even after the coming of the letterpress.)

Manuscripts, however, were highly expensive and fragile. They had to be handled carefully, and they could not be read easily as the script was written in different styles. So manuscripts were not widely used in everyday life. Even though pre-colonial Bengal had developed an extensive network of village primary schools, students very often did not read texts. They only learnt to write. Teachers dictated portions of texts from memory and students wrote them down. Many thus became literate without ever actually reading any kinds of texts

Fig. 16 – Pages from the Rigveda.

Handwritten manuscripts continued to be produced in India till much after the coming of print. This manuscript was produced in the eighteenth century in the Malayalam script.

Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK

PRINT COMES TO INDIA

PRINT COMES TO INDIA

The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century. Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts. By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in the Konkani and in Kanara languages. Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin, and in 1713 the first Malayalam book was printed by them. By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts, many of them translations of older works.

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.

From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine that described itself as ‘a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none’. So it was private English enterprise, proud of its independence from colonial influence, that began English printing in India. Hickey published a lot of advertisements, including those that related to the import and sale of slaves. But he also published a lot of gossip about the Company’s senior officials in India. Enraged by this, Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted Hickey, and encouraged the publication of officially sanctioned newspapers that could counter the flow of information that damaged the image of the colonial government. By the close of the eighteenth century, a number of newspapers and journals appeared in print. There were Indians, too, who began to publish Indian newspapers. The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy.

More to know

As late as 1768, a William Bolts affixed a notice on a public building in Calcutta:

‘To the Public: Mr. Bolts takes this method of informing the public that the want of a printing press in this city being of a great disadvantage in business ... he is going to give the best encouragement to any ... persons who are versed in the business of printing.’

Bolts, however, left for England soon after and nothing came of the promise.

Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK