Imperial Print in Colonial Calcutta (1780-1820)

The emergence of print culture in colonial Bengal, in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, under the East India Company, is largely an untold story. Calcutta would become the capital of the British empire, and the realm of print culture played an important role in maintaining and perpetuating British rights to this colonial territory. The history of how this realm of print culture evolved in Calcutta is central to this book. Ships that sailed from England carried books; printing presses were brought all the way from Europe and with the help of Indians, a realm of imperial print emerged. How do we understand this engagement between the colonizer and the colonized? It would be a more meaningful discussion if we understood power as operating in a more sophisticated manner rather than simply being imposed upon others in a binary fashion. Those Britishers who traveled to India were people who were part and parcel of the Juggernaut of empire making and they were blood and flesh people and not necessarily heinously mean or cruel. The intellectual brahminical elite allowed themselves to be participants in this process, only because they were involved in a new epistemic shift; the tradeoff must have been fair. It is rather simplistic to construe the natives as being overpowered or incapable of resistance of any sort. The realm of early nineteenth century print culture in Calcutta was a heterogeneous one, where natives and colonizers engaged with print in a heteroglossic manner. The sheer fascination with the new-ness of the social and technological aspects of print culture might have been, after all, irresistible.