Popular printing and intellectual property in colonial Bengal

The coming of print and the consequent socialization of the book in colonial India have been the focus of much scholarly attention in recent years. At the same time, scholars have become more and more persuaded that the history of print in the region cannot be studied without reference to the pre-existing history of manuscripts and scribal practices. Indeed, the early histories of printing in colonial India repeatedly throw up examples where the protocols of the manuscript book directly act upon and influence the new protocols of writing and reading which were brought into play by the coming of the printed book. From the time of the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, India has had an intimate relationship with the form of the book known as the pothi, in settings as diverse as the court, the university, the monastery and the household. Owing to the relatively cheap cost of producing a palm-leaf or bark manuscript, book production in India was never the sole preserve of the church or the court, in contrast to the Western world where the vellum or parchment that was used in manuscript production was an expensive and scarce resource. It needed the invention of first paper, and then printing with movable metal type, to partially break the stranglehold of the church and the court on the written word. In south Asia, by contrast, the pothi continued to be a viable currency of knowledge well into the 19th century, at a time when the initial fascination and awe with the technology of printing had given way to enthusiastic acceptance. By and large, the pothi survived in enclaves – such as in the seminaries of Brahminical learning or tols in places like Bhatpara, Nabadwip and Mayapur – but continued to leave its traces on the newer genres of print which were then coming into being. In this article I wish to examine one such example of interface – that of the popular book trade in early and mid-19th-century Calcutta, encompassed by the metonymic term ‘Battala’ (lit. ‘under the banyan tree’).

In talking about the notion of the ‘popular’ in the 19th century, one has to be careful to distinguish between the colonial book and the book produced by indigenous enterprise. By the colonial book I refer to publications by government or missionary initiative, in most major Indian languages, and occasionally English. Such publications were funded by subventions and, with very few exceptions, not circulated by way of trade. This pattern held true for nearly two-and-a-half centuries, from the coming of the printed book to Goa in 1556 till the founding of the Mission Press in Serampore near Calcutta in 1800. During this period, printing was confined to the coast and the vast hinterland of south Asia was entirely unaffected by it, so much so that historians speak of a ‘non-history’ of printing up to 1800, without any take-up by indigenous powers and communities. According to Graham Shaw, only 19 works were produced in the 16th century, 40 in the 17th, 454 in the first half of the 18th, and 1258 in the second half of the 18th (Shaw 2007: 131).

Many reasons have been suggested for this: elsewhere I (Gupta 2010: 342) have argued that the early Jesuit missionaries in Goa made no attempt to socialize the book, and did not find any use for it outside the church. In the 18th century, the Danish Lutheran missionary Ziegenbalg had to toil might and main to persuade his parent body, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, into sending him a printing press. These are not ideal conditions for a nascent print culture. Such conditions began to be available only after the British consolidated its hold over much of India after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and set up three presidencies at Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. The administrative needs of the new regime necessitated the mobilization of print on a scale not seen before. Of the three presidency cities, the rise of print was most dramatic in Calcutta, where as many as 40 printers set up shop by 1800. While presses in Madras remained pretty much under government control, Calcutta saw a large number of European private entrepreneurs open printing-shops. Books and periodicals were not their chief source of revenue – stationeries, legal and mercantile forms, handbills, and the ubiquitous almanac formed the staple of their survival.

In 1800, the legendary Mission Press was set up by the Baptist William Carey and his associates in Danish-controlled Serampore, some 40 km from Calcutta. Among others, this establishment was instrumental in training the first generation of Indian print-house personnel. In the summer of 1800 when the Gospel of St Mathew in Bengali was run off the press, there were as many as eight Indians working in the press: one type-maker, one Brahmin compositor (who soon left), four pressmen, one folder and one binder. None of them were named, save the smith-turned-typemaker Panchanan Karmakar who, along with his apprentice Manohar, oversaw the type foundry and cut font in at least a dozen languages. Shortly before the fire that damaged the press in 1812, the press had grown to such an extent that Carey’s associate William Ward was able to report:

As you enter, you see your cousin in a small room, dressed in a white jacket, reading or writing, and looking over the office, which is more than 170 ft. long. There you find Indians translating the scriptures into the different tongues and correcting the proof-sheets … Mussulmans and Christian Indians are busy composing, correcting, distributing. Next are four men throwing off the scripture sheets in different languages, others folding the sheets and delivering them to the large store-room, and six Mussulmans do the binding. Beyond the office are varied type-casters besides a group of men making ink, and in a spacious open-walled round place, our paper-mill, for we manufacture our own paper. (Carey 1925: 283)

Unfortunately, none of the workers are named in the records left by the missionaries, but we do know that one of them must have been Gangakishore Bhattacharya, considered as the first-ever Bengali printer, publisher, bookseller and newspaper editor. Born in the village of Bahara, not far from Serampore, Gangakishore worked as a compositor in the Mission Press before moving to Calcutta sometime in the 1810s, with the hope of becoming a publisher. At that time, there were only three presses in Calcutta which printed books in Bengali: the Ferris press, the Hindustanee Press (founded in 1802 by John Borthwick Gilchrist of the Fort William College) and the Sanskrit Press of Baburam, later owned by Lallulal, also part of the faculty of Fort William College. Both the Hindustanee and Sanskrit Press printed books for the college list and were not commercial establishments. But among Bengalis, it was Gangakishore who first conceived the idea of becoming an entrepreneur of print. In 1820, the periodical Friend of India commented:

The first Hindoo who established a press in Calcutta was Babooram, a native of Hindoostan … he was followed by Gunga Kishore, formerly employed at the Serampore Press, who appears to have been the first who conceived the idea of printing works in the current language as a means of acquiring wealth. To ascertain the pulse of the Hindoo public, he printed several works at the press of a European, for which having obtained a ready sale, he established an office of his own, and opened a book shop. For more than six years, he continued to print in Calcutta various works in the Bengalee language, but having disagreed with his coadjutor, he has now removed his press back to his native village. (‘Native Press’ 1820: 123)

The periodical added that he then appointed agents in chief towns and villages in Bengal, ‘from whom his books were purchased with great avidity’.

The press which Gangakishore ran along with his coadjutor was called the Bangal Gejeti Press and was founded sometime in the summer of 1818. But what is significant for the purpose of this article is the location of the press. In an advertisement appearing on 12 May 1818, Gangakishore’s coadjutor Haraccandra Ghose informed the public that he ‘has established a BENGALEE PRINTING PRESS, at No. 45 Chorebagaun Street, where he intends to publish a WEEKLY BENGALEE GAZETTE’ (Ahmed 1965: 84n). No. 45 Chorebagaun Street was located to the north of the city, in a densely populated quarter where most of the indigenous businesses were clustered. Until the founding of this press, all European-run print shops in the city were located in the so-called White Town, between Fort William by the river and the administrative district, with suitably European-sounding addresses such as Mission Row, Camac Street, Tank Square, Circular Road, Mangoe Lane, Vansittart Row, Old Court House Street and so on. But following Gangakishore's lead, Bengali-run presses began to come up in the native business district, sporadically in the ’20s and the ’30s, and then in a steady flow from the ’40s. In 1825, the Friend of India published a list of 31 books published by native presses between 1821 and 1825 and estimated that nearly 30,000 volumes had been sent into circulation (‘Native Press’ 1820: 148–9). Most of these volumes were accounted for by the Serampore Press and the Calcutta School-Book Society set up in 1817 with the aim of publishing pedagogical literature. But presses such as the Mahendralal Press, the Bangala Press and the Samacar Candrika press had started operations in north Calcutta, the last named distinguishing itself in book as well as periodical publication.

The case of the Samacar Candrika Press, located at 26 Kolutollah Street – and its proprietor Bhabanicharan Banyopadhyay – is particularly instructive. There is much scholarship on the anti-reformist newspaper Samacar candrika started by Bhabanicharan, and his role in constructing the Bengali babu in Kalikata kamalalay, but very little about the pioneering role he played in shaping the protocols of the indigenous book trade. Bhabanicharan’s oeuvre was a curious mixture of the sacred and profane: on the one hand, he published such sacred Hindu texts as a chapter of the Padmapurana in 1824, a three-volume Srimadbhagabat in 1830, and Manusamhita in 1833; on the other, he produced a steady stream of somewhat risqué urban sketches such as Kalikata kamalalay, Dutibilas, Nabababubilas and Nababibibilas. These early prose and verse sketches are, at one level, a vade mecum for the unwary traveller to the big bad city, but at another level indicate a coming to terms with the new livelihoods and lifestyles simultaneously offered and commanded by the city. As Dipesh Chakravorty writes: ‘Prenationalist upper class Hindus who worked for and with the British … possessed a distinctly defined pragmatism that helped them to accommodate some important changes to lifestyle that British rule brought about’ (Chakrabarty 2001: 218–19). In the case of Bhabanicharan, such pragmatism shaded into canniness when he put out advertisements that his edition of the Gita was printed by Brahman compositors and that the holy water from the Ganges was used to purify the ink. Like Gangakishore, Bhabanicharan keenly felt the need to socialize the book, not as an object of fascination and dread but one which could be familiarized with use. This needed to take place at three levels: production, distribution and consumption. Swapan Chakraborty points out how the venture capital for many of Bhabanicharan’s imprints was raised by subscriptions, or borne by the author himself, as in the case of Asam burunji by Haliram Dhekiyal Phukan, who then gave away copies gratis (Chakravorty 2004: 206–7). This practice of free distribution of sacred books recalled the older practice of gifting manuscripts to selected recipients, and may be considered as an example of the protocols of the manuscript book being applied to the printed book. The traces of the manuscript book could also be seen in the design and layout: sacred books would occasionally be printed in the horizontal puthi format while their copious title-pages recalled the pushpika or the post-colophon statement of the manuscripts. Such uneasy compromises between the old patterns of patronage and philanthropy and the newly emerging model of the book as a commodity – with the attendant concepts of the individual author and the reading public – mark the evolution of the printed book in this period.

But it was not enough to invoke the values of the manuscript book: the printed book had to validate itself in more substantial ways. This is where Bhabanicharan’s sketches assume significance: he saw the need for cheap and easily accessible reading matter, preferably with illustrations, and planted the seeds of what would later come to be known as Battala writing, after the banyan tree which gave the quarter its name. Such writing often transgressed the bounds of polite letters and was one aspect of the binary of religion and erotica which marked Bengali printing during this period. The contrast between the two genres could not be greater: while religious texts were got up at considerable expense, printed on good quality paper and sturdily bound, the production values of Battala printing were shoddy, to say the least. In 1825, the Friend of India, while praising the efflorescence of native printing, had this to say about the quality of printing and illustrations:

Many of these works have been accompanied with plates, which add an amazing value to them in the opinion of the majority of native readers and purchasers. Both the design and execution of the plates have been exclusively the efforts of native genius. … The plates cost in general a gold mohur, designing, engraving, and all; for, in the infancy of this art, as of many others, one man is obliged to act many parts. Thus, Mr Huree Hur Banerjee, who lives at Jorasanka, performs all the requisite offices from the original outline to the full completion; but though with true eastern modesty, he styles himself in one corner of the plates, the best engraver in Calcutta, we doubt his ability when left to his own resources. The plates which he and others have executed from European designs, have been tolerably accurate … but when left to the native unassisted taste, their productions are miserable in the extreme. (‘State of the Native Press’ 1825: 137)

Despite such shortcomings, indigenous printing flourished. For long, scholars have struggled to put a figure on the exact number of presses active in Calcutta – the bench-mark figure in this regard is the 46 presses named by the indefatigable Rev. James Long for the year 1853–4 (Long 1855a: 89). For the period earlier than 1853–4 there are no figures, other than three incomplete lists in the periodical Samacar Darpan in 1825, 1826 and 1831, which provide a list of 21 presses. However, from a bibliographical database recently compiled we have for the period 1801–67 (Gupta 2009), it may be possible to arrive at a more complete picture.

As may be seen from Table 1, the spike in the number of printing presses took place in 1851–60, the decade during which the Rev. Long carried out his three censuses of books in print. During the year 1833–4, Long was able to count 46 presses in operation. Most of these presses were clustered within a bottle-shaped area bounded by the river Hugly on the west and the Circular Road on the east, with the bottleneck at Chitpur-Bagbazar and its base along Bowbazar Street. Within these areas, however, there were considerable local variations: while Battlala in the south stood for cheap and unsuitable printing, Jorasanko and College Street in the south stood for respectability.

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Table 1.

Bengali printing presses in Calcutta, 1801–1867

	Indian presses		European presses
	New presses	Old presses still active	New presses	Old presses still active	Total
1801−1810	1		1		2
1811−1820	2	2	3		7
1821−1830	9	2	3	1	15
1831−1840	25	4	2	4	35
1841−1850	29	12	2	3	46
1851−1860	57	22	5	5	99
					10 [tabulated by Long]
1861−1867	32	32	1	5	70
	155 + [10]		17		182
Presses outside Calcutta					32
Total					214

With the concentration of commercial printers in and around the Battala area, the question of literary property and profit-sharing began to assume significance. This becomes evident if we look at the distinctive title-pages of Battala publications. The key feature of most Battala title-pages seems to be para-textual excess, stemming primarily from an uncertainty about the nature of authority and proprietorship. This, in turn, is bound up with questions of patronage and power, as many of the titles of the period were funded by wealthy patrons, groups of subscribers or societies dedicated to the propagation of letters. In such conditions, the authorial signature on the title-page was by no means the only marker of textual ownership and the author often had to literally jostle for space with other claimants on the title page. An example of this could be the title page of Smriti darpan (Figure 1), where as many as five different names are mentioned.

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Figure 1.

Title-page of Smriti darpan (1858)

Top billing goes to one Bishwanath Mitra, who is designated as the compiler of the work. This is followed by a fulsome two-line paean to the name of Thakurdas Tarkachuramani, which roughly translates as ‘the famous benefactor of the nation, the very learned and chief among scholars’ and who is credited with having ‘corrected the errors’ in the work. This is followed by the name of the ‘borno-songshodhok’ or the ‘proof-reader’ of the work, Harinarayan Tarkasiddhanta. A half-rule is then used to separate this trinity of authors from the name of the printer, the name of the press and the date of publication. A full-rule then divides the page into the typical double-decker structure of mid-19th-century Bengali printing, in which the bottom half of the page is used to direct the reader to the address of the bookseller. In this particular instance two addresses are furnished, and a price of Re 1 for every ‘swakharkari’ – literally meaning the signatory – but referring here to the subscriber. As is well known, printing by subscription was common during this period, especially for books of a religious nature: it was supposed that a part-share in the financing of a religious book would buy some kind of posthumous insurance for the devout subscriber. The prominently signposted names on the title-page of this particular work also call one’s attention to the impeccable high-caste credentials of the purifiers, with their names doubly dignified by the appropriate honorific. In contrast, note the less exalted appellations of the compiler and the printer, who are lower in the caste hierarchy. Thus it is possible to see how a carefully calibrated pattern of entitlement and privilege emerges from the seemingly chaotic excess of the title-page. But at the same time, Chakravorty alerts us to the fact that ‘it was not enough for the publisher to target a caste … one could not match castes and professions by the old hierarchical key, given the new economic opportunities that the city was creating daily’ (Chakravorty 2004: 205).

But publishing by subscription could sometimes go horribly wrong. This seems to have been the case with Padakalpalatika, whose title-page displays the usual bipartite structure. But the advertisement relates a pathetic tale of woe.

The type for the book had been set up in the previous month of Phalgun (mid-Feb. to mid-Mar) but the press had broken down several times. The book had been thus delayed and the printer was no longer willing to keep the type standing. In the meantime, eight signature-books had been prepared for the names of the subscribers but only three of those could now be found, namely 1, 5 and 7. These names were listed at the end of the book; other signatories are urged to buy the book nonetheless as the book is very cheap; they need not pay beforehand but may pay only on receipt of the book.

In effect, therefore, the publisher had lost the names of most of his subscribers and was now pathetically throwing himself on the good faith of his subscribers to make good his losses.

By the late 1840s, one can see the coming of market forces beginning to leave its impress upon the title-page. One can date this with some accuracy – the passing of Act XX of 1847 gave copyright protection to books printed in British India. This act was passed largely at the behest of Ramgopal Ghosh of the British India Association, and followed on from a copyright act passed in English parliament in 1842. The first instance that I have been able to find of a Bengali book carrying a copyright notice was a book printed in 1851 in Serampore, an erstwhile Danish colony not far from Calcutta. The book was a manual on police procedure by John Marshman, titled Darogader karmmapradarshak grantha, and printed by John Cashman at the Serampore Press. The copyright notice was printed on the verso of the title-page, in the following words: ‘Registered in the Office of the Secretary to the Government of India under the Provisions of Act XX of 1847’.

But it was Battala which took to the idea of copyright with gusto, often changing the wording of the act to novel and sometimes irreverent effect. In 1853, Muhammad Naaser of the Hanifi Press published a book called Bhabalav pustak, a collection of songs and rhymes which styled itself a ‘puthi’ or manuscript. One of the staple genres of the Battala trade were works in a Bengali heavily inflected by Persian and Arabic, and designated ‘Mussulmani-Bengali’ by the Rev. Long. Such works, though printed, adhered faithfully to the distinctive layout and typography of the manuscript, and used the title-page to provide descriptive metadata about the making of the book. In the present instance, Muhammad Naaser provided a leisurely account of the printing of the book before adding: ‘Be it hereby known that I have produced this book after much labour and much expenditure. I hereby register the book under the act of the English year 1847. If anyone else were to print this book, they would be considered felons by law and have to compensate us for it.’

While this was the general formula for such notices in most title-pages, one or two obviously felt that legal deterrents were not enough. On the title-page of Harimohan Karmakar’s Oth chu(n)ri tor biye – published in 1863 and all of 10 pages long – the publisher Qazi Safiuddin warns the would-be pirate in the following words: ‘Be it hereby known that if any person were to steal my name and that of the poet, and print the book in secrecy, then we will be certain that there are dark deeds in his past, and that he is not born of one father. Before buying, please verify my seal’. A rather more legalistic version of the same may be seen in Bipinbihari Sharmasarkar’s Prem ratnakar published in 1862, whose back cover features the following ‘Chetan patra’ or ‘Warning Note’ by the author:

Be it hereby known that I have registered the book Prem ratnakar from the Home Department of the Nawab Bahadur Governor-General, in accordance with the act of 20 October, 1847. If any person prints this book without my permission, he will be liable for penalties under the law. And those who buy the book without noting my signature and seal will likewise be guilty of theft.

The final title-page which I will be quote is that of Yusuf juleikhar puthi, printed in Calcutta from the Kaderia Press in 1874 (Figure 2). The curiously-shaped typography of the title-page was a distinctive feature of many works of the ‘Mussulmani-Bengali’ genre, such as the diamond-shaped typography of Azim-al-din’s Jamal-naamar puthi of 1859. In the 1874 work, the printer Muhammad Kamel asserts halfway through the title-page:OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Title-page of Yusuf juleikhar puthi (1874)

… I have registered the book in my own name with the registry book of the Supreme Government, in accordance with Act XX of 1847. Be it hereby known that if any person prints this book without my permission, then he will liable for penalties under the law. And further, any copy of the book without my muhar (seal) and dastakhat (signature) should be regarded as stolen goods and should not be purchased by anyone. … I have composed and created this book with great labour.

There are two features of note in the above declaration. First, the printer’s use of not one but three different forms of ownership: first, the seal and the signature; second, the copyright act of 1847; and third, the registry book of the Supreme Government. In the period before the passage of the copyright act, one of the ways to claim some kind of intellectual property was to print a seal of some description. The pioneer in this regard was the College of Fort William, all of whose publications bore the triangular seal of the college on the verso of the title-page. This soon morphed into the title-page colophon, with the Calcutta School-Book Society (est. 1817) showing the way. Its distinctive device was much imitated, sometimes to the point of trademark theft (Figure 3). Battala preferred to stick with the Islamic muhar, which was often printed as a smudge of black from a badly carved woodblock. There were some interesting variations within this as well – the Rev. Long reports that the title-page of Shah name sindhu, or ‘History of Persian Kings’, published in 1847, bears the portrait of its translator Bisheshwar Dutt, ‘with his paita and puthi’ (Long 1855b: 31), that is, with his scared thread and manuscript book, markers respectively of his high caste and learning. The last is a remarkable instance of the symbol of the manuscript book being used as a kind of imprimatur for the printed book, a benediction by the old technology upon the new.

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Figure 3a. Colophon of Calcutta School-Book Society, Figure 3b. Colophon of Sudhanidhi Press, Figure 3c. Colophon of Tamohar Press

The third form of copyright protection which was deployed by Mahammad Kamel was the Press and Registration Act of 1867 (Act XXV). The act made it compulsory for all printers and publishers to register every publication in British India for a sum of 2 rupees. Any unregistered publication was deemed to be outside the law and its publisher or printer could be punished with a two-year jail sentence and a 5000 rupee fine. While the chief impulse behind the act was an early form of literary surveillance, the register also served as an additional layer of copyright protection. In the case of Jamal-naamar puthi, the printer’s canny recourse to three forms of ownership indicates a sophisticated grasp of the way in which the practices of the manuscript book were continuing to inflect the socialization of the printed book. The deploying of the muhar and the dastakhat was an acknowledgement of more traditional practices of reading and the need to display visible signs of ownership. The invoking of the copyright act of 1847 asserted a more legalistic form of ownership, and one which could be used as an instrument to warn would-be pirates. Finally, the entry into the copyright register brought these two impulses together, by providing for both a visible sign and a legal guarantee, by literally inscribing the book into the realm of imperial discourse.

These examples signal a clear divide between two categories of printed books, both in form and praxis. The book produced by the missionaries and the government took its cues largely unchanged from the European printed book, such as the terse vocabulary and minimalistic layout of the title-page. The indigenously produced book, on the other hand, reflected a divided commitment to the values of the manuscript and the printed book, with the title-page acting as a space of intense negotiation between the various personnel associated with the making of the book. These were also very public spaces, where the mutual relationships between the personnel – such as that between the patron and the author, which had traditionally been located in the realm of the private sphere – were now being laid bare for public scrutiny. Eventually, these traces would begin to disappear even as newer forms of authorial anxieties and preoccupations manifested themselves in the material forms of the book. From the 1860s onwards, for example, the use of epigraphs on title-pages – acting as extensions of the authorial signature – would signal a new self-assertion on the part of the author. Many of these epigraphs would also serve as direct addresses to the readers and buyers, further proof that the rules of the marketplace were becoming more entrenched.