The missionary, the government and the commercial printers

Though the earliest history of printing on the Indian subcontinent is not a direct concern of this study, a cursory survey of the key events and early trajectories of its development may supply the necessary historical context for the slow and regionally diversified rise of regional and communal print cultures. And the latter can be made fuller sense of only against the background of the former. In a simplified typology, we may see the uneven development of print cultures across different regions of the Indian subcontinent with the help of three broad categories of printing enterprises: the missionary, the government and the commercial printers. For most of the formative period of the colonial era on the Indian subcontinent, the three represented three different concepts of the power of print, the concepts that influenced one another and sometimes overlapped, while shaping the unique history of Indian print cultures developing against the background of a struggle over at first trade, and later, of colonial domination of the resources of the vast areas of the subcontinent. The three developed three ultimately different cultures of print, with three different kinds of expectations towards the demand on printed matter on the part of their prospective readers. For the missionary—and in this case, I mean Protestant missionaries who dominated the second phase of print development—it was the inherent power of the word of the Lord, believed to inevitably work on everyone who chanced only to be exposed to its inner truth through intelligible, printed text. It implied a sponsored or semi-commercially organized circulation. Its maps arose out of trajectories drawn by the travelling preachers. Its objects were taken for the embodied word of God and printing itself as the work of such embodying, which resulted in the ceremonial act of bringing about the printed word of the Lord. As we shall see, the same act of printing was a totally different thing in the eyes of those who decided to have their Vedas printed.