Print Culture and the Modern World

This is the first and only chapter of Section III, Everyday Life, Culture and Politics, of India and the Contemporary World – II. NCERT follows print from its beginnings in East Asia to Europe, where Gutenberg’s press set off a ‘print revolution’ that touched religion, science and politics, and then to India, where manuscripts, missionaries, reformers, women writers, critics of caste and nationalist editors made print their own — while the colonial state tried to control it.

• Links within this book: jess301 (The Rise of Nationalism in Europe — the French Revolution, the Grimm brothers and censorship of the press in nineteenth-century Europe); jess302 (Nationalism in India — the Rowlatt Act, Gandhi, and how songs, prints and folklore built a sense of nation); jess303 (The Making of a Global World — the silk routes that carried paper westwards); jess304 (The Age of Industrialisation — calendars, labels and Ravi Varma–style prints used to sell goods).
• Live pages to pair with: lesy207 (Mass Media and Communications — Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’, the early Indian press, the Vernacular Press Act, Amrita Bazar Patrika; we do not repeat that material here); kehs105 (Changing Cultural Traditions — Renaissance humanism, the printed Bible and the Reformation, the Council of Trent); lehs302 (Rebels and the Raj — 1857, after which press policy hardened); lehs303 (Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement — Gandhi’s journals and the national movement); lesy202 (Cultural Change — Rammohun Roy, Phule, Pandita Ramabai and the reform movements); lesy105 (caste and gender exclusion); keps202 (freedom of the press under Article 19(1)(a)).
• UPSC: GS1 covers modern Indian history, the social reform movements and world history. Prelims has asked who repealed the Vernacular Press Act (2005), which measures belong to Lord Lytton (1992) and who published the Vital-Vidhvansak, the first monthly addressed to ‘untouchable’ readers (2020); related questions on early newspapers sit on lesy207. Mains GS1 asked how the nineteenth-century Indian Renaissance was linked to the emergence of national identity (2019) — print is the hinge of that answer.

• East Asia first: woodblock hand printing in China (NCERT: from 594) for the civil-service exams, then merchants, fiction and women writers; Japan from about 768–770; the Diamond Sutra (868) is the oldest dated printed book; Korea’s Tripitaka Koreana (about 80,000 blocks) and Jikji (1377, metal type).
• Gutenberg: olive-press model plus goldsmith’s moulds → movable metal type; Bible (about 180 copies, by about 1455); 250 sheets an hour; presses across Europe 1450–1550; 20 million → about 200 million copies.
• The print revolution: cheaper books, a new reading public, oral and print cultures blended; Luther (1517) and the Reformation; fear of dissent — Erasmus, Menocchio, the Inquisition and the Index (1559; NCERT 1558).
• Reading mania: literacy 60–80% in parts of Europe by 1800; chapbooks, Bibliothèque bleue, almanacs, periodicals; Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine; Mercier’s ‘Tremble, tyrants’; three arguments linking print and the French Revolution, with NCERT’s caution.
• India: manuscripts on palm leaf and paper; press in Goa (mid-1500s); Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780); Sambad Kaumudi (1821) vs Samachar Chandrika; ulama and Deoband fatwas; vernacular religious texts; novels, Ravi Varma prints, cartoons.
• New readers and writers: Rashsundari Debi’s Amar Jiban (1876), Tarabai Shinde, Pandita Ramabai, Begum Rokeya; Battala; Phule’s Gulamgiri (1873; NCERT 1871), Ambedkar, Periyar, Kashibaba. Censorship: 1835 freedoms; after 1857 control; Vernacular Press Act, 1878; Tilak jailed 1908; wartime Defence of India laws.

The earliest print technology was developed in China, Japan and Korea, and it was a system of hand printing. NCERT says that from AD 594 Chinese books were printed by rubbing paper — also a Chinese invention — against the inked surface of carved woodblocks (but see the trap box on this date). Because the thin, porous paper could be printed only on one side, the traditional Chinese ‘accordion book’ was folded and stitched at the side. Skilled craftsmen could reproduce the beauty of calligraphy with remarkable accuracy.

For a long time the imperial state was China’s main printer. Its huge bureaucracy recruited officials through civil-service examinations, and textbooks for these exams were printed in vast numbers under state sponsorship; from the sixteenth century, more candidates meant more print. By the seventeenth century, as urban culture bloomed, uses of print diversified: merchants used print to collect trade information, reading became a leisure activity, and readers wanted fiction, poetry, autobiographies, anthologies and romantic plays. Rich women began to read, and many published their own poetry and plays — wives of scholar-officials among them — while courtesans wrote about their lives. In the late nineteenth century Western mechanical presses arrived as Western powers set up outposts; Shanghai became the hub of a new print culture serving Western-style schools, and hand printing gradually gave way to mechanical printing.

Japan. Buddhist missionaries from China brought hand printing to Japan around AD 768–770. The Diamond Sutra, printed in AD 868, is the oldest dated printed book (NCERT calls it the ‘oldest Chinese book’; it has six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations). Pictures were printed on textiles, playing cards and paper money. In medieval Japan poets and prose writers were regularly published and books were cheap and plentiful. In late-eighteenth-century Edo (later Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings showed an elegant urban world of artists, courtesans and teahouse gatherings, and libraries and bookshops were packed with hand-printed books on women, music, arithmetic, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, etiquette, cooking and famous places.

Korea appears in two boxes. The Tripitaka Koreana, a collection of Buddhist scriptures, was carved on about 80,000 woodblocks in the mid-thirteenth century and entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2007. The Jikji, printed in the late fourteenth century, is among the world’s oldest surviving books printed with movable metal type; it sets out essential features of Zen Buddhism and names about 150 monks of India, China and Korea. Only its second volume survives, in the National Library of France; it entered the Memory of the World Register in 2001.

For centuries silk and spices from China reached Europe along the silk routes; in the eleventh century, NCERT says, Chinese paper came the same way, making possible manuscripts written by scribes. In 1295 the explorer Marco Polo returned to Italy after years in China, and NCERT says he brought back knowledge of woodblock printing (see the trap box). Italians began producing books with woodblocks and the technology spread. Luxury editions were still handwritten on costly vellum for aristocrats and rich monastic libraries, which scoffed at printed books as cheap and vulgar; merchants and students in university towns bought the cheaper printed copies.

As demand grew, booksellers exported books across Europe and book fairs were held. Hand copying was reorganised too: scribes were now employed by booksellers as well as patrons — more than 50 might work for one bookseller. But copying was expensive, slow and laborious, and manuscripts were fragile and awkward to carry or read, so they circulated little. By the early fifteenth century woodblocks were widely used in Europe to print textiles, playing cards and religious pictures with short texts. Europe needed a still quicker, cheaper way to reproduce texts.

Gutenberg and the printing press. Johann Gutenberg, a merchant’s son, grew up on a large estate where he saw wine and olive presses; he learnt to polish stones, became a master goldsmith and learnt to make lead moulds for trinkets. He adapted what he knew: the olive press became the model for the printing press, and moulds were used to cast metal type for the letters of the alphabet. NCERT says the breakthrough began at Strasbourg in the 1430s and that he perfected the system by 1448. The first major book he printed was the Bible: about 180 copies, which took three years — fast by the standards of the time.

The new technology did not at once displace hand work. Early printed books looked like manuscripts: metal letters imitated ornamental handwriting, borders were illuminated by hand, illustrations were painted, and in books for the rich space was left blank so that each buyer could choose a design and a school of painters. Between 1450 and 1550 presses were set up in most countries of Europe, often by German printers who travelled for work. About 20 million printed copies flooded European markets in the second half of the fifteenth century, and about 200 million in the sixteenth. NCERT calls this shift from hand printing to mechanical printing the print revolution.

NCERT stresses that the print revolution was not just a new way of making books: it changed people’s relationship to information, knowledge and authority. Printing cut the cost, time and labour of each book, so books reached an ever-growing readership and a new culture of reading emerged. Before, reading was for elites; common people lived in an oral culture — they heard sacred texts read out, ballads recited and folk tales told, collectively. Now a reading public replaced the hearing public. But literacy stayed low in most European countries until the twentieth century, so printers published popular ballads and folk tales, profusely illustrated, which were sung and recited at village gatherings and in town taverns. Oral culture entered print, printed material was transmitted orally, and the hearing and reading publics intermingled.

Religious debates and the fear of print. Print allowed even those who disagreed with established authorities to circulate their ideas and persuade others. Not everyone welcomed it: religious authorities, monarchs and many writers and artists feared that without control over what was printed and read, rebellious and irreligious thoughts would spread and ‘valuable’ literature would lose its authority. In 1517 the reformer Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses criticising practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church and challenging it to debate; NCERT says a printed copy was posted on a church door in Wittenberg. His writings were reproduced in vast numbers and widely read, leading to a division in the Church and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. NCERT says his translation of the New Testament sold 5,000 copies in a few weeks, with a second edition within three months; Luther called printing ‘the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one’. Several scholars, NCERT notes, think print created a new intellectual atmosphere that helped spread Reformation ideas.

Print and dissent. Print and popular religious literature encouraged individual interpretations of faith even among little-educated working people. In sixteenth-century Italy, Menocchio, a miller, read the books available locally, reinterpreted the Bible and formed a view of God and Creation that enraged the Church. When the Roman Church began its Inquisition against heretical ideas, Menocchio was hauled up twice and finally executed. Troubled by such popular readings, the Church imposed severe controls on publishers and booksellers and began to maintain an Index of Prohibited Books (NCERT: from 1558).

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries literacy rose across Europe: churches of different denominations set up village schools, carrying literacy to peasants and artisans, and by the end of the eighteenth century literacy in some parts of Europe was 60 to 80 per cent. A virtual reading mania followed. Booksellers sent pedlars round villages with little books: almanacs or ritual calendars, ballads and folk tales, and entertainment. In England, penny chapbooks were carried by chapmen and sold for a penny, so even the poor could buy them; in France, the Bibliothèque bleue were cheap small books on poor paper in blue covers; there were short romances and longer ‘histories’. From the early eighteenth century the periodical press combined news of wars, trade and distant places with entertainment. Scientific texts, maps and diagrams were widely printed; Isaac Newton’s discoveries reached a wide circle of readers, and the writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau carried ideas of science, reason and rationality into popular literature.

‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!’ By the mid-eighteenth century many believed books could spread progress and enlightenment, free society from despotism and herald an age of reason. The French novelist Louis-Sébastien Mercier called the printing press the most powerful engine of progress and said public opinion would sweep despotism away; his heroes are transformed by reading, and he warned tyrants to tremble before the writer.

Print culture and the French Revolution. Many historians, NCERT says, argue that print created the conditions for the French Revolution, usually in three ways. First, print popularised Enlightenment thinkers who criticised tradition, superstition and despotism, demanded that everything be judged by reason, and attacked the sacred authority of the Church and the despotic power of the state — readers of Voltaire and Rousseau saw the world with questioning, critical eyes. Second, print created a culture of dialogue and debate in which a public aware of the power of reason re-evaluated all values, norms and institutions, and new ideas of social revolution arose. Third, by the 1780s an outpouring of literature, cartoons and caricatures mocked royalty and its morality, showing a monarchy absorbed in pleasure while the people suffered; circulating underground, it bred hostility to the monarchy. NCERT then adds a caution: people did not read just one kind of literature — they also read royal and Church propaganda, accepted some ideas and rejected others, and interpreted things their own way. Print did not directly shape minds, but it opened up the possibility of thinking differently.

The nineteenth century saw vast leaps in mass literacy in Europe. As primary education became compulsory from the late nineteenth century, children became an important readership and school textbooks became critical for publishers; a children’s press devoted to children’s literature was set up in France in 1857, publishing new works and old fairy and folk tales. The Grimm brothers in Germany spent years collecting folk tales from peasants and published a collection in 1812 — after editing out whatever seemed unsuitable for children or vulgar to the elite. Print thus recorded old tales but also changed them.

Women became important as readers and writers: penny magazines and manuals on proper behaviour and housekeeping were aimed at them, and when novels appeared women were seen as key readers. Some of the best-known novelists were women — Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot — whose writing helped define a new type of woman with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think. Lending libraries, existing since the seventeenth century, became instruments for educating white-collar workers, artisans and the lower middle class in nineteenth-century England. As the working day was gradually shortened from the mid-nineteenth century, self-educated workers wrote political tracts and autobiographies in large numbers.

Further innovations. By the late eighteenth century presses were made of metal. By the mid-nineteenth century Richard M. Hoe of New York had perfected the power-driven cylindrical press, printing 8,000 sheets an hour — ideal for newspapers. In the late nineteenth century came the offset press, which NCERT says could print up to six colours at a time; from the early twentieth century, electric presses; then better paper feeding and plates, automatic paper reels and photoelectric colour-register controls. Publishers kept inventing ways to sell: nineteenth-century periodicals serialised novels, shaping how novels were written; in the 1920s England had cheap Shilling Series; the dust cover spread; and in the Great Depression of the 1930s publishers brought out cheap paperbacks to sustain sales.

Manuscripts before print. India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and many vernacular languages, copied on palm leaves or handmade paper, sometimes beautifully illustrated, and pressed between wooden covers or sewn together. They continued to be made until the late nineteenth century, well after print arrived. But they were expensive and fragile, had to be handled carefully, and were hard to read because scripts were written in different styles, so they were little used in everyday life. NCERT notes that pre-colonial Bengal had an extensive network of village primary schools, yet pupils often did not read texts: teachers dictated from memory and pupils wrote it down, so many became literate without reading any texts.

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 tracts; by 1674 about 50 books had been printed in Konkani and Kanara. NCERT says Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin and the first Malayalam book in 1713, and that Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts by 1710 (see the trap box). The English-language press grew late, although the East India Company imported presses from the late seventeenth century.

From 1780 James Augustus Hicky edited the Bengal Gazette, a weekly that called itself ‘a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none’ — so private English enterprise, proud of its independence, began English printing in India. Hicky printed many advertisements, including some for the import and sale of slaves, and a lot of gossip about the Company’s senior officials. Enraged, Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted Hicky and encouraged officially sanctioned newspapers to counter damaging information. By the end of the eighteenth century many newspapers and journals were in print, and Indians began their own: the first was the weekly Bengal Gazette of Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy.

From the early nineteenth century there were intense debates on religious questions as different groups responded to changes in colonial society: some criticised existing practices and campaigned for reform; others countered the reformers. These debates were conducted in public and in print. Tracts and newspapers not only spread new ideas but shaped the debate, let a wider public take part, and produced new ideas from the clash of opinions.

In Bengal there were fierce controversies between social and religious reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy over widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry. To reach more people, arguments were printed in the everyday spoken language. Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821, and the Hindu orthodoxy commissioned the Samachar Chandrika to oppose his views. From 1822 two Persian newspapers appeared, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, and in the same year the Gujarati Bombay Samachar.

In north India the ulama were deeply anxious about the collapse of Muslim dynasties and feared that colonial rulers would encourage conversion and change Muslim personal law. To counter this, they used cheap lithographic presses, published Persian and Urdu translations of the scriptures, and printed religious newspapers and tracts. The Deoband seminary (NCERT: founded 1867) published thousands upon thousands of fatwas telling Muslim readers how to conduct their daily lives and explaining Islamic doctrine. Throughout the century many Muslim sects and seminaries appeared, each with its own interpretation and keen to enlarge its following; Urdu print let them carry on these battles in public.

Among Hindus, too, print encouraged reading religious texts, especially in the vernaculars. The first printed edition of Tulsidas’s sixteenth-century Ramcharitmanas came out from Calcutta in 1810; by the mid-nineteenth century cheap lithographic editions flooded north Indian markets; from the 1880s the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published numerous religious texts in Indian languages. Printed and portable, they could be read by the faithful anywhere — and read aloud to large groups of non-literate men and women. Religious texts thus reached a very wide circle, encouraging discussion and controversy within and among religions. Print also connected communities: newspapers carried news from one place to another, creating pan-Indian identities.

As more people could read, they wanted to see their own lives, emotions and relationships in print. The novel, developed in Europe, met this need and soon took distinctively Indian forms; lyrics, short stories and essays on social and political matters also emphasised human lives and intimate feelings. By the late nineteenth century a new visual culture took shape: painters such as Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation; poor wood engravers set up shop near letterpresses; cheap prints and calendars from the bazaar decorated even poor homes and workplaces and shaped popular ideas of modernity and tradition, religion and politics. By the 1870s caricatures and cartoons in journals commented on social and political issues — some mocking educated Indians’ love of Western tastes and clothes, others expressing fear of social change; there were imperial caricatures lampooning nationalists and nationalist cartoons attacking imperial rule.

Women and print. Women’s lives and feelings were written about vividly, and women’s reading increased enormously in middle-class homes. Liberal husbands and fathers educated women at home and sent them to the women’s schools set up in cities after the mid-nineteenth century; journals carried women’s writing, argued for women’s education and offered syllabuses for home schooling. Not all families were liberal: NCERT reports that conservative Hindus believed a literate girl would be widowed, and Muslims feared educated women would be corrupted by Urdu romances. Some women defied the bans. A girl in a conservative north Indian Muslim family secretly learnt to read and write Urdu because she wanted a language of her own rather than only the Arabic Quran she did not understand. In East Bengal, Rashsundari Debi, a young wife in an orthodox household, learnt to read secretly in her kitchen and later wrote Amar Jiban, published in 1876 — NCERT calls it the first full-length autobiography published in Bengali.

From the 1860s a few Bengali women such as Kailashbashini Debi wrote about how women were confined at home, kept ignorant, made to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly. In the 1880s, in present-day Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows. A woman in a Tamil novel said that more than half her life’s happiness came from books. Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi print developed early; Hindi printing began seriously only from the 1870s, and much of it soon addressed women’s education. Early-twentieth-century women’s journals, written for and sometimes edited by women, discussed education, widowhood, widow remarriage and the national movement, and offered household and fashion lessons, stories and serialised novels. In Punjab, Ram Chaddha’s fast-selling Istri Dharm Vichar taught women to be obedient wives, and the Khalsa Tract Society published cheap booklets with a similar message, often as dialogues on the qualities of a good woman. In Calcutta, a whole area — Battala — printed popular books: cheap religious tracts and scriptures as well as literature considered obscene and scandalous, by the late nineteenth century richly illustrated with woodcuts and coloured lithographs; pedlars took them to homes, where women read them at leisure.

Print and the poor. Very cheap small books were sold at crossroads in nineteenth-century Madras towns to poor people travelling to market. Public libraries were set up from the early twentieth century, mostly in cities and towns and sometimes in prosperous villages; for rich local patrons, founding a library brought prestige. From the late nineteenth century caste discrimination was written about in many tracts and essays. Jyotiba Phule, a pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of caste in Gulamgiri (NCERT: 1871; usually 1873). In the twentieth century B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) in Madras wrote powerfully on caste and were read all over India; local protest movements and sects produced journals and tracts criticising ancient scriptures and imagining a just future. Factory workers were too overworked and too little educated to write much, but Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote and published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 on the links between caste and class exploitation; another Kanpur millworker’s poems, written as Sudarshan Chakr between 1935 and 1955, were collected as Sacchi Kavitayan. By the 1930s Bangalore cotton millworkers set up libraries, following Bombay workers; social reformers sponsored them to curb drinking, spread literacy and sometimes the nationalist message.

The same print market carried opposite messages — Rashsundari Debi’s quiet rebellion and Begum Rokeya’s case for education beside Ram Chaddha’s manual of wifely obedience; Phule’s attack on caste beside the scriptures it criticised. NCERT presents them side by side, and so should an answer.

Before 1798, NCERT says, the colonial state under the East India Company was not much concerned with censorship; oddly, its early measures were aimed at Englishmen in India who criticised Company misrule, because the Company feared its critics in England would use such attacks against its trade monopoly. By the 1820s the Calcutta Supreme Court passed regulations to control press freedom, and the Company encouraged newspapers that celebrated British rule. In 1835, faced with urgent petitions by editors of English and vernacular newspapers, Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise the press laws, and Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial official, framed new rules that restored the earlier freedoms.

After the revolt of 1857, attitudes changed: enraged Englishmen demanded a clampdown on the ‘native’ press, and as vernacular newspapers became assertively nationalist the government debated stringent controls. In 1878 the Vernacular Press Act, modelled on the Irish Press Laws, gave the government extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press. From then on it tracked vernacular newspapers in every province; if a report was judged seditious, the paper was warned, and if the warning was ignored the press could be seized and the printing machinery confiscated.

Despite repression, nationalist newspapers grew in every part of India, reporting colonial misrule and encouraging nationalist activity. Attempts to throttle criticism provoked militant protest, which led to more persecution and more protest. NCERT says that when Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907, Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote about them with great sympathy in his Kesari, which led to his imprisonment in 1908 and protests all over India (see the trap box).

The chapter’s side questions in order. Short outlines follow.

‘Write in brief’ (three questions with several parts), ‘Discuss’ (four questions) and a Project, page 128. One premise is disputed — see the note after the answers.

Numbers

One-liners

• The earliest printing was woodblock hand printing in China, Japan and Korea.
• The Diamond Sutra of 868 is the oldest dated printed book.
• Korea printed with movable metal type (the Jikji, 1377) before Gutenberg.
• Gutenberg modelled his press on the olive press and cast metal type in moulds.
• Early printed books imitated manuscripts and were decorated by hand.
• Print created a reading public, but oral and reading cultures blended.
• Luther’s printed Ninety-Five Theses (1517) helped start the Protestant Reformation.
• The Catholic Church answered with the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books.
• Erasmus feared a glut of worthless and seditious books.
• Mercier believed the printing press would sweep despotism away.
• NCERT: print did not shape minds directly, but opened the possibility of thinking differently.
• The first press in India came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries.
• Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) was India’s first newspaper; Warren Hastings persecuted him.
• Rammohun Roy’s Sambad Kaumudi (1821) was opposed by the orthodox Samachar Chandrika.
• The Deoband seminary published thousands of fatwas to guide Muslim readers.
• Rashsundari Debi learnt to read secretly and wrote Amar Jiban (1876).
• Phule’s Gulamgiri attacked the injustices of caste.
• The Vernacular Press Act (1878) was modelled on the Irish Press Laws.
• Tilak was imprisoned in 1908 for articles in Kesari.

Traps to avoid

• The Index of Prohibited Books dates from 1559, not NCERT’s 1558.
• Gulamgiri was published in 1873, not NCERT’s 1871; Phule was from the Mali community, not a Maratha.
• The Diamond Sutra is a Chinese printed scroll, not a Japanese book.
• Gutenberg did not invent printing; Korea had movable metal type earlier.
• Marco Polo bringing woodblock printing to Europe is a tradition, not established fact.
• Sambad Kaumudi was Rammohun’s; Samachar Chandrika was the orthodox reply.
• The Vernacular Press Act covered Indian-language papers only; Lytton passed it, Ripon repealed it.
• The 1907 deportees were Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh; Tilak was jailed in 1908 for Kesari articles.
• Deoband was founded in 1866 by most accounts (NCERT: 1867).
• The 1835 Press Act is usually called Metcalfe’s Act.
• Fig. 8’s engraving is dated 1639 and Fig. 10’s woodcut is usually dated 1499 — NCERT calls both sixteenth-century.
• The Penny Magazine ran until 1845, not 1835.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Asked so far: who repealed the Vernacular Press Act — Lord Ripon (2005); which measures belong to Lord Lytton — the Arms Act, the Vernacular Press Act and the removal of import duties on cotton goods, not the Rowlatt Act (1992); who published the Vital-Vidhvansak, the first monthly aimed at ‘untouchable’ readers — Gopal Baba Walangkar (2020). Related questions on other pages: the order in which mass media came to India and who started Shome Prakash (lesy207); the Rowlatt Act (jess302, lehs303).
• Likely static facts: Diamond Sutra 868, Jikji, Gutenberg, Luther 1517, the Index, Hicky 1780, Sambad Kaumudi 1821 vs Samachar Chandrika, Deoband, Amar Jiban, Gulamgiri, Tarabai Shinde, Pandita Ramabai, Begum Rokeya, the Vernacular Press Act and its repeal, Metcalfe’s 1835 Act. Use the trap list — NCERT’s dates for the Index, Gulamgiri, Deoband and the 1835 Act differ from standard references, and newspaper–founder pairs are easily swapped.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 2019: ‘Examine the linkages between the nineteenth century’s Indian Renaissance and the emergence of national identity.’ Frame with this chapter: reform debates conducted in print in everyday language (Rammohun’s Sambad Kaumudi, orthodox replies, Deoband’s fatwas, vernacular scriptures) created a reading public; newspapers carried news across regions and saw themselves as an Opposition (Source D), creating pan-Indian identities; women’s and caste writing widened the public; repression (1878, 1908) turned press freedom into a national cause (Gandhi, 1922). Add Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ and Chatterjee’s ‘inner domain’, attributed, and note limits — the public was largely urban, upper-caste and male at first.
• Also useful for GS1 questions on the women’s question and social reform (lesy202, lesy105 hold those questions), on Phule’s writings (2025) and on the French Revolution’s legacy (jess301): use Rashsundari Debi, Tarabai Shinde, Pandita Ramabai, Begum Rokeya and Gulamgiri as evidence, and Darnton–Chartier for print and revolution. For world history, the Reformation–print link (Eisenstein, Scribner, Pettegree) makes a strong illustration.

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