New forms of publication and visual culture

Detail

Why new forms appeared

• By the late 19th century a large Indian reading public existed. Readers no longer wanted only translations or religious texts. They wanted to see their own lives in print.
• Print answered this demand in two ways:
• New written forms — the novel, lyrics, short stories, essays.
• New picture forms — cheap prints, calendars, cartoons.

The novel takes Indian shape

• The novel came from Europe but did not stay European. It took distinctively Indian forms.
• Indian novels wrote about Indian social life, caste, family, village and town. Readers could recognise the people in the story.
• Other new forms followed the novel:
• Lyrics (short emotional poems).
• Short stories.

• Political and social essays.

• What was common to all of them: they stressed human lives and intimate feelings — ordinary people and their inner emotions, not kings and gods alone.

• In Assam, Lakshminath Bezbaruah became the doyen (the most respected leading figure) of modern Assamese literature. He wrote Burhi Aair Sadhu — a collection of Assamese folk tales told as "grandmother's stories".
• Bezbaruah lived 1868–1938 and founded the literary monthly Jonaki ("Moonlight") in 1889; Jonaki brought 19th-century Romanticism into Assamese writing, and later 20th-century Assamese writers kept to its ideals. [2]
• The Ministry of Culture granted classical language status to Assamese in October 2024. [3]
• His house at Sivasagar, Assam is documented as a heritage site by the IGNCA. [4]
• His poem Asom Sangeet and his work Bharat Uddhar are held on the Indian Culture Portal (Ministry of Culture). [5]

A new visual culture

• By the end of the 19th century a new visual culture was taking shape. Printing made pictures cheap and repeatable for the first time.
• Raja Ravi Varma produced images from Hindu mythology — scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata — designed for mass circulation, not just for palace walls.
• Ravi Varma (1848–1906) mixed Hindu mythological subjects with European realism and naturalism — that is, he painted gods with the shading, perspective and lifelike bodies used in European oil painting. [6]
• In 1894 he set up a lithographic press to mass-produce his paintings as oleographs. An oleograph is a print made to look like an oil painting (chromolithography with an oil-paint-like surface). He used German technology so the prints could be sold cheaply. [6]
• About seven years later money trouble forced him to sell the press and the copyrights of many works to a German printing technician, who spread the images further through calendars and matchboxes. [6]
• His Lakshmi and Saraswati images became among the most recognised pictures in Indian homes. [6]
• The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) marked his 172nd birth anniversary with a virtual tour. [7]
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, holds Ravi Varma-associated devotional prints of Lakshmi and Saraswati printed at Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, and ran the exhibition Household Gods: Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930. [8][9]

Cheap prints, calendars and the bazaar

• Poor wood engravers set up shop near the letterpresses. They cut the picture blocks that went into books and journals.
• Presses began printing cheap prints and calendars that were sold in the bazaar.
• These were cheap enough that even the poor could buy them and put them on cottage walls or in workplaces.
• Effect: these bazaar prints shaped popular ideas about modernity and tradition, religion and politics. A picture reached people who could not read at all.
• Lithography (drawing on stone, then printing from it) also changed how Indian books looked — it let script, decoration and image sit on the same page, which movable type could not easily do. [10]

Caricatures and cartoons from the 1870s

• From the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers. They commented on social and political matters.
• Three kinds of targets:
• Some ridiculed educated Indians for their taste for Western clothes, manners and habits — mocking imitation of the West.
• Some feared that Western tastes would wipe out traditional culture.
• Imperial cartoons lampooned nationalists — the British-side press, e.g. the Indian Charivari, made fun of nationalist leaders.

• Nationalist cartoons attacked imperial rule — they criticised the British and their Indian supporters.

• Cartoons worked because they needed no literacy in English and little reading — the joke was in the drawing.

Battala: Calcutta's cheap print quarter

• Battala was a quarter in central Calcutta. It was the home of cheap popular printing.
• What Battala printed:
• Cheap religious tracts — devotional texts for ordinary households.

• Popular literature called 'obscene' by critics — bawdy and scandalous tales.

• How it looked: the books were profusely illustrated with woodcuts (picture cut into a wood block) and coloured lithographs (picture drawn on stone and printed in colour).

• How it travelled: pedlars carried Battala books into homes. So books came to the house rather than the reader going to a shop.
• Result for women: women could read these books in their leisure time at home, without going out. This quietly widened women's reading.
• Britannica records that woodcut is the oldest relief printing technique, cut on a plank so the raised surface takes the ink — the cheap method that made Battala illustration possible. [11]
• Bengali printed books of the 19th century survive in the National Library, Calcutta Author Catalogue of Printed Books in Bengali Language (digitised on the Indian Culture Portal). [12]

Prelims Hooks

• Raja Ravi Varma set up his lithographic press in 1894 to make oleographs for mass sale. [6]
• Ravi Varma's dates: 1848–1906. [6]
• An oleograph is a print made to look like an oil painting. [6]
• Ravi Varma sold his press and copyrights to a German printing technician about seven years after starting it; images then spread via calendars and matchboxes. [6]
• Caricatures and cartoons began appearing in Indian journals and newspapers from the 1870s.
• The Indian Charivari was an imperial paper whose cartoons lampooned nationalists.
• Battala — quarter of central Calcutta printing cheap religious tracts and 'obscene' literature, illustrated with woodcuts and coloured lithographs.
• Pedlars carried Battala books into homes, so women read them in leisure hours.
• Lakshminath Bezbaruah — doyen of modern Assamese literature; wrote Burhi Aair Sadhu; founded Jonaki in 1889; lived 1868–1938. [2]
• Assamese was granted classical language status in October 2024 by the Ministry of Culture. [3]
• The novel, plus lyrics, short stories and political/social essays, were the new print forms stressing human lives and intimate feelings.

Mains Points

• Print created a market, and the market reshaped the content. Publishers printed what sold — Indian-themed novels, short stories and bazaar prints. So the reading public's taste, not only official or missionary policy, decided what Indian print looked like by 1900. Link this to GS-I questions on the rise of an Indian middle class.
• Visual print reached beyond the literate. Ravi Varma oleographs, bazaar calendars and cartoons carried ideas about gods, nation and "modern" behaviour to people who could not read. This is a strong argument that print culture widened political awareness faster than literacy figures suggest — useful in answers on the growth of nationalism.
• Print standardised religion and gave nationalism a common image-bank. Mass-produced pictures of Lakshmi, Saraswati and epic scenes made one version of a deity familiar across regions [6], while cartoons built a shared visual language of anti-colonial criticism. Both cut across region and language — a base for imagined national community.
• Print opened a back door for women readers. Battala books, carried into the home by pedlars, let women read without public exposure. But the same cheap press was attacked as 'obscene', which fed demands for censorship and moral policing of what women read. Use this as a two-sided point on print and women's agency.