The history of the book in India is a history largely untold.”
So begins An Empire of Books, Ulrike Stark’s fascinating book on early print culture in India. Her focus is the Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow (1858), one of the most successful publishers in 19th century North India, and the largest Indian owned printing press in the subcontinent at that time. I had begun to wonder why — ever since the publication of Print Areas: Book History in India (by Swapan Chakravorty and Abhijit Gupta) in 2004 — no one had been sufficiently interested to explore book history in India, and was excited and grateful for Ulrike Stark’s interest in Indian book production, and for her fine, intrepid scholarship. It could not have been easy to research and write this book — we all know how difficult it is to find early primary and archival sources. An Empire of Books (Permanent Black) is invaluable to anyone interested in India’s early intellectual and literary history, and is curious, even in the slightest bit, about the history of the book in India.
We know of several books on the history of books in the West, but in South Asia book history is just beginning. Though we easily recognise that print culture contributed to India’s modernity, scholars and journalists have focused more on Indian newspaper and periodical press history than the story of the how the book came to India.
What we need next is something like a national book history — if such a thing is possible at all, since in India there won’t be one history of the book, but many histories — the history of the book in each regional language. In particular, Stark (who teaches at the department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, University of Chicago) looks at how commercial book publishing happened. Her aim is to “shed light on the social, cultural, and material aspects of book production… and to investigate the impact of the commercial book trade on the diffusion of knowledge, and on the processes of intellectual formation, modernization, and cultural renaissance in North India.”
Intriguing aspect
A more intriguing aspect of the book is one that Ulrike Stark herself celebrates — that pioneer publishers such as Naval Kishore were “not just savvy businessmen but men deeply engaged in the intellectual and literary life of their time”. That they did not publish for profit alone. That book printing and publishing in 19th century India was a “venture as much entrepreneurial as intellectual”. They were not just “early industrialists but intellectual path-breakers”; publishing for them was “a vocation, not a business.” Stark names the great icons of early Indian publishing: Fardunji Sorabji Marzban in Bombay, Munshi Harsukh Rai in Lahore, Maulvi Abdul Rahman Khan in Kanpur and Mustafa Khan and Munshi Naval Kishore in Lucknow. They had “a sense of the publisher’s cultural mission in society”. They published to revitalise India’s literary heritage and to contribute to “Indian modernity through the diffusion of education and knowledge.”
These early print houses become vibrant meeting places for intellectuals and writers. It is this “dual nature of the publishing house as modern capitalist enterprise and an important site of scholarly pursuits that the book seeks to explore.” In a very interesting footnote, Stark calls our attention to how “virtually nothing is known about female participation in the early North Indian publishing trade, perhaps the sole exception being that of Mallika, the cultured young Bengali protégé and companion of Bharatendu Harishchandra”, who goes on to set up a small publishing house and bookshop for her.
The full title of Stark’s book is An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Munshi Naval Kishore (1836-95), says Stark, is the book’s central character. In his lifetime he published 5,000 titles, of which 2,000 were in Urdu. “To narrate his life,” she notes, “is to narrate the story of an Indian Hindu who participated in the revival of Hindu traditions while acting as one of the foremost promoters of Islamic learning and preservers of Arabic and Indo Persian literary heritage in the subcontinent…He embodied the synthesis of Indo-Muslim and Hindu learned traditions in an exemplary fashion — most poignantly captured in Khvaja Abbas Ahmad’s succinct characterisation of him as a “Muslim pundit and Hindu maulvi.”
Move to print culture
He published literary works, cheap novels, religious tracts, medical and astrological manuals, song books, legal forms and almanacs. Using the Naval Kishore Press, Stark looks at the transition from oral and manuscript culture to print culture. She is quick to warn the reader that this is not the focus or the concern of the book; neither are readership and reading practices in India.
Early in the book she notes that we often forget that India had had a rich and long tradition of manuscript culture. But manuscripts were becoming hard to come by for many reasons. “The step from the rare and costly manuscripts,” she tells us, “to the mass produced printed book — costing barely one tenth of the manuscript, if not less, and available through a rapidly expanding network of distribution sites and agents — was indeed revolutionary.”
Elsewhere, Stark observes that “the history of public libraries in India remains unwritten”. There were hardly any public libraries that people could use, she informs us. The few early circulating libraries were for Europeans and a few rich, educated Indians. Again, in a fascinating footnote she tells of the first ever full fledged public library in India which was “set up in Calcutta in 1818, when the private holdings of the college library of Fort William was made available to the general public. For the first time a collection of 8341 printed books and almost 3000 manuscripts was made accessible not only to Europeans but to literary men in general in India.” From the introduction of print to India in 1556 to the first book in an Indian language — Doctrina Christam, 1557 — a Tamil translation of a Portuguese catechism to early instances of Indian literature by Indian publishing houses such as the Naval Kishore Press is a long, dramatic journey for the book in India to make, and Ulrike Stark has told this story by immersing herself in the ferment of 19th century India’s intellectual and literary world, and evoking its book-obsessed world with clarity, devotion and absorbing scholarship.
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