Increasing volume of recent scholarship focused on regionally differentiated print cultures, especially Bengal, Maharashtra, and South India, tends to belie the simplistic subsuming of all the diverse phenomena of the rise of print in India towards the mid-1800s under one label. A good number of printing enterprises of the earlier stage of these developments remained hybrid in terms of social composition, resting on collaboration between foreign missionaries, Company administration officers, and Indians of a variety of social provenance. Such was the case of the Company's printing press in Calcutta at the very beginning and later on when its operation was handed over to a local printer. Furthermore, the Serampore Press of William Carey, which started around 1800, soon, after its first heroic years, entered a complex relationship of service and commission work, at first for the Bengal Government, Fort William College, and later other institutions, such as the Calcutta Bible Society. In Bombay, the American Mission Society came to accept orders from outside towards 1830 and trained indigenous printers, who later began to establish their own enterprises. Many of the early government and missionary printing enterprises benefitted from the collaboration of the local craftsmen, who brought within their respective orbits of operation their experiences, knowledge, and patterns of work, often inherited from the regional manuscript cultures they were brought up in. This collaborative spirit resulted not only in recreating European patterns of print production and consumption, but also gave rise to a number of innovative forms and practices, that continued and creatively reappropriated regional traditions of writing and reading, specific to particular spaces, communities, religious traditions, and literary genres.

Printing revolution and social change

Several studies that appeared in the last two decades bring often contradictory images of the allegedly ‘revolutionary’ change brought to South Asia by print and its growing use in the middle of the 19th century. Furthermore, the picture of the relationship between the cultural order of the former medium of the manuscript and the new one of print happens to look different, depending on the region under investigation.