Organizer: Farina Mir, University of Michigan

Chair: Francesca Orsini, University of Cambridge, UK

Despite the availability of print technology in India from the 16th century, print as a medium for disseminating texts did not flourish there until the nineteenth century. During that century, printed texts of various genres and in a variety of vernacular languages circulated in scores. This panel will explore the conditions for the rise of a vibrant print culture(s) in India at this time, focusing on the many paradoxes that surround this phenomenon. It will engage, principally, with the following questions: how do we explain such plentiful and varied production of printed material when literacy itself was extremely limited? In a world in which most entertainment was aural and visual, how did printed texts - especially narratives, among the most popular genres of the era - lure audiences to them? What pleasures did the printed text offer its audience? The panel is also concerned with broader theoretical/historical questions around print culture and its supposed effects. If, as Benedict Anderson has argued, print created "print-vernaculars," how do we explain the multi-lingualism of 19th-century publishing? What stake did the colonial state have in promoting publishing in India? To what extent was the multi-lingualism of Indian publishing promoted by the policies of the colonial state? The panelists will address these questions through an analysis of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi publishing. By drawing on these different 19th-century vernacular publishing traditions, the panelists aim to consider the connections between print and pleasure in India.

Jennifer Dubrow, University of Chicago

Fasana-e Azad (The Tale of Azad), published between 1878 and 1885 as a serialized supplement to the newspaper, Avadh Akhbar, represented an array of literary traditions. Influenced equally by novels like The Pickwick Papers and Don Quixote, as well as the great epic romances (dastan) of Persian and Urdu, Fasana-e Azad followed the adventures of a typical dastan hero through the streets of contemporary Lucknow and eventually to the battlefields of the Turko-Russian War. This combination of traditional storytelling and contemporary news marked a major innovation in Urdu narrative fiction and was a significant source of pleasure for readers, as evidenced by their letters to the author and newspaper editor, Ratan Nath Sarshar. In this paper, I will examine the manifold ways in which Sarshar aimed to create pleasure—and sell newspapers—in Fasana-e Azad, focusing specifically on his use of serialization and suspense, his representations of everyday life and language, and his claims to writing the first Urdu "novel." Rather than label Fasana-e Azad according to contemporary standards, I will consider readers’ tastes of the late 1870s, including how they responded to categories like "novel," "dastan" and "fasana," as well as the newspaper in general. For these readers, I suggest that the experience of print was not as important as Fasana’s location in contemporary time and space. This allowed them to not only "live" the news but also to inhabit and interact with literature in perhaps an entirely new way.

Farina Mir, University of Michigan

This paper seeks to explain the popularity of Punjabi printed texts in late-nineteenth century India. That Punjabi texts were published in scores annually from the 1870s onward is something of a conundrum given the colonial state’s active attempts to suppress the language. Although it was the spoken language in British Punjab, Punjabi was not chosen by the colonial state as the province’s official vernacular (Urdu was chosen instead), and was therefore not the principle language of administration or education in the province. A direct outcome of this decision was that Punjabi literature did not receive the state patronage that was in many ways critical to the development of other vernacular traditions – Urdu in particular – in the nineteenth century. Despite its marginal official position, however, there was a vibrant Punjabi publishing industry in the late-nineteenth century. I will seek to explain this popularity by exploring the history of Punjabi literary production and performance. In particular, I will examine the interconnections between Punjab’s literary traditions and social and religious practices such as sa’ma (ritual musical performances at Sufi shrines). I will argue that the popularity of Punjabi literature is best understood as rooted in more than simple entertainment. Integral to understanding its popularity is locating its role in social and religious practices that an array of people – i.e., from different classes, castes, and religions – participated in.

Francesca Orsini, University of Cambridge, UK

This paper will explore the range of texts coming under the name ‘qissas’ in Hindi and Urdu in the nineteenth century. Qissas are mostly associated with tales of chivalry and wonder, yet in the nineteenth-century print world they came to include also narratives about humbler, more familiar characters (e.g. Qissa barhai-o sunar, Qissa-e sipahizada). The paper will focus on these latter texts, pushing inquiry into an area that hasn't received careful scholarly attention as yet. Further, rather than positing a sharp difference between "traditional" qissas and "modern" novels, texts like Qissa aurat mard (1882) suggest that the qissas did offer ground for substantial innovation, in this case a gender critique of stereotypes about women. Evidence about qissas being read aloud will be explored to see how these printed texts were consumed in a society with limited literacy. The paper in fact will take qissas as evidence of the paradox of a vibrant north Indian publishing business in an environment where literacy was limited and divided according to vocation into multiple linguistic repertoires.

Ulrike Stark, University of Chicago

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rapid commercialization of print and, with it, the rise of the mass-produced and inexpensive book in the modern regional languages of India. This paper is concerned with a category of works newly classified as 'erotic', 'immoral', 'obscene' and 'lascivious' by both European and Indian observers. While colonial concerns about the alleged immoral character of various popular genres of oriental literature had been raised for some time, it was not until the 1850s, when mass production allowed for their widespread distribution, that the colonial government felt compelled to react to the perceived 'obscenity threat' with the Obscene Books and Pictures Act (1856). Focusing on the North-Western Provinces and the Punjab, the paper examines the extent to which colonial obscenity laws affected Indian printer-publishers. What titles and genres were singled out for their alleged 'obscenity'? What was the practice of censorship and how did individual colonial officials deal with publishers who had infringed the law? How does the reaction of the book trade to moral censorship fit into the larger picture of new puritanical tendencies among the educated middle class and the 'moral panic' described by Charu Gupta and others?