Battala
Topic: Print Culture and the Modern World · NCERT: Class 10, Ch 5 "Print Culture and the Modern World"
Meaning
Battala was an area of Calcutta where a whole quarter was given over to printing cheap popular books in the nineteenth century. It printed religious tracts and scriptures. It also printed popular literature that people called "obscene" or scandalous. The books had many pictures, made with woodcuts (pictures carved on wood blocks) and coloured lithographs (pictures printed from flat stone). Battala mattered because it brought cheap reading to ordinary people, including women at home.
Example
Pedlars (travelling sellers) carried Battala books from house to house in nineteenth-century Calcutta. This let women read these books in their leisure time.
Don't confuse with
- Bibliotheque Bleue: cheap small books with blue covers sold in France. It was a European form, not the Calcutta book market.