Class 10th Easy Notes History Ch 6 PRINT CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD

Headings Of Textbook

• The First Printed Books
• Print Comes to Europe
• The Print Revolution and Its Impact
• The Reading Mania
• The Nineteenth Century
• India and the World of Print
• Religious Reform and Public Debates
• New Forms of Publication
• Print and Censorship

The First Printed Books

• Earliest print technology developed in China and Korea.
• Books were printed by rubbing paper.
• China possessed an enormous bureaucratic system which recruited its personnel through government officials examinations.
• In 16th century, the number of examination candidates went up and that increased the volume of print.
• In 17th century, as urban culture bloomed in China, the uses of print diversified.
• Print was not used just by scholar officials.
• Reading increasingly became a leisure activity.
• Rich women began to read, and lots of women began publishing their poetry and plays.
• Western printing techniques and mechanical presses were imported within the late 19th century.
• The hub of the new print culture was Shanghai.

1.1  Print In Japan

• Around AD 768-770, Buddhist missionaries from China brings hand-printing technology into Japan.
• In AD 868, Buddhist Diamond Sutra, The oldest Japanese book was printed, It contains six sheets of text and beautiful woodcut illustrations.
• In medieval Japan, books were cheap and abundant, because poets and prose writers were regularly published. So that everyone can buy easily.
• Libraries and bookstores were full of hand-printed material of varied type of books on women, flower arrangements, proper etiquette, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, cooking and famous places.

 Print Comes To Europe

• Silk and spices from China flowed into Europe through the silk route, for centuries.
• In the eleventh century, Chinese paper reached Europe via a similar route.
• In 1295, Marco Polo, returned to Italy after exploration in China.
• Marco Polo brought this knowledge back with him. Now Italians began producing books with woodblocks, and shortly the technology spread to other parts of Europe.
• Luxury editions were still handwritten on very expensive vellum ( made with animal skin ).
• Merchants and students within the university towns bought the cheaper printed copies.
• Scribes or skilled hand writers were no longer solely employed by wealthy or influential patrons but increasingly by booksellers as well.
• Copying was an expensive, laborious and time-consuming business.
• In Europe, wood blocks were being used widely by the early 15th century, to print textiles, playing cards, and religious pictures with simple, brief texts.
• There was clearly an excellent need for even quicker and cheaper reproduction of texts.
• At Strasbourg, Germany, where Johann Gutenberg developed the first-known press within the 1430s

2.1  Gutenberg And The Printing Press

• He learnt the art of polishing stones, became a master goldsmith, and also acquired the expertise to make lead molds used for creating trinkets.
• Molds were used for mintage the metal types for the letters of the alphabet.
• Gutenberg perfected the system by 1448. The first printed book was the Bible.
• About 180 copies were printed and it took 3 yrs to produce them.
• In the hundred years between 1450 and 1550, printing presses were found out in most countries of Europe.
• The last half of the 15th century, 20 million copies of printed books were flooding the markets of Europe. The number went up within the 16th century to about 200 million copies.
• This movement from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the print revolution.

The Print Revolution And Its Impact

• What was the print revolution?It was not just a development, but was a whole new way of producing books, it modified the lives of people, changing their relationship to information and knowledge, and with institutions and authorities. It influenced popular perceptions and opened new ways of observing things.

3.1  A New Reading Public

• With the press , a replacement reading public emerged. Printing reduced the cost of books
• Books flooded the market, reaching bent an ever-growing readership.
• Access to books created a replacement culture of reading. Earlier, reading was restricted to the elites.
• Knowledge had been transferred orally, they heard sacred texts read out, recite ballads, and  narrate folk tales.
• But the transition was not so simple. Books might be read only by the literate, and therefore the rates of literacy in most European countries were very low till the 20th century.
• Printers began publishing popular ballads and folk tales, and such books would had been profusely illustrated with pictures. These were sung and recited at gatherings in villages and in taverns in towns.

3.2  Religious Debates And The Fear Of Print

• Print created the possibility of wide circulation of ideas, and introduced a brand new world of debate and discussion.
• Even those that disagreed with established authorities could now print and circulate their ideas.
• It was feared that if there was no control over what was printed and skim then rebellious and irreligious thoughts might spread.
• The religious reformer Martin Luther wrote Ninety Five Theses in 1517, criticizing many of the practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church.
• It challenged the Church to debate his ideas.
• Luther’s writings were immediately reproduced in wide numbers and read widely.
• Luther said, ‘Printing is the ultimate gift of God and therefore the greatest one.’

3.3  Print And Dissent

• Print and popular religious literature stimulated many distinctive individual interpretations of religion even among little-educated working people.
• In the 16th century, a miller in Italy, Menocchio, began to read books that were available in his region.
• He reinterpreted the message of the Bible, and formulated a view of God and Creation, that enraged the Catholic Church.
• When the Catholic Church began its interrogation to repress dissident ideas, Menocchio was captured twice and finally executed.
• The Catholic Church distressed, by such impacts of famous readings and questionings of faith, that's why Church imposed severe controls over publishers and booksellers and started to keep up an Index of Prohibited Books from 1558.

The Reading Mania

• Through the 17th and 18th centuries literacy rates went up in most parts of Europe.
• By the end of the 18th century, in some parts of Europe literacy rates were as high as 60 to 80%.
• Booksellers employed peddlers who roamed around villages, carrying little books purchasable.
• There were almanacs or ritual calendars, along side ballads and folktales. But other sorts of reading matter, largely for entertainment, began to succeed in ordinary readers also.
• In England, penny chapbooks were carried by petty peddlers referred to as chapmen, and sold for a penny, in order that even the poor could buy them.
• The periodical press developed from the first 18th century, combining information about current affairs with entertainment.
• Newspapers and journals carried information about wars and trade, also as news of developments in other places.
• Similarly, the ideas of scientists and philosophers now became more accessible to the folk.
• When scientists like Newton began to publish their discoveries, they might influence a far wider circle of scientifically minded readers.
• The writings of thinkers like Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau were also widely printed and read. Their ideas about reason, rationality and science,  found their way into popular literature.

4.1  ‘Tremble, Therefore, Tyrants Of The World!’

• Many believed that books could change the globe, liberate society from despotism and tyranny.
• A novelist in 18th century Louise-Sebastian Mercier in France, declared ‘The press is that the foremost powerful engine of progress and public opinion is that the force which can sweep despotism away.

4.2  Print Culture And The French Revolution

• Three kinds of arguments are usually suggests.
• First: print popularized the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. Collectively, their writings provided a critical commentary on superstition, tradition and despotism.
• They attacked the sacred authority of the Church and therefore the despotic power of the state, thus eroding the legitimacy of a social order supported tradition.
• The writings of François-Marie Arouet known as Voltaire and Rousseau were read widely and other people who read these books saw the world through new eyes, eyes that were questioning, critical and rational.
• Second: print created a brand new culture of dialogue and debate.
• All values, norms and institutions were re-evaluated and discussed by a public that had become attentive to the ability of reason, and recognized the necessity to question existing ideas and beliefs.
• Within this public culture, modern ideas of social revolution came into being.
• Third: by the 1780s there was an outpouring of literature that mocked the royalty and criticized their morality.
• In the process, it raised questions on the prevailing social order. Cartoons and caricatures usually suggested that the monarchy stayed absorbed only in erotic joy while the folk suffered immense hardship.
• This literature circulated underground and led to the expansion of hostile sentiments against the monarchy.
• But we must remember that folks didn't read only one quite literature.
• They read the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau, on the other hand they were also exposed to monarchical and Church propaganda.
• They interpreted things their own way. Print didn't directly shape their minds, but it did open up the likelihood of thinking differently.

The Nineteenth Century

5.1  Children, Women And Workers

• As primary education became compulsory from the late 19th century, children became a crucial category of readers.
• Production of school textbooks became important for the publishing industry.
• A children’s press, was established in France in 1857.
• In Germany, The Grimm Brothers spent years assembling traditional folk tales gathered from peasants.
• What they collected was edited before the stories were published during a collection in 1812. In this way, old tales were not only recorded by print but were also changed them.
• Women became important as readers also as writers. Penny magazines were especially meant for ladies , as were manuals teaching proper behavior and housekeeping.
• When novels began to be written within the 19th century, women were seen as important readers. a number of the best-known novelists were women: Austen , the Bronte sisters, George Eliot. Their writings became important in defining a brand new kind of woman, an individual with will, strength of personality, determination and had the power to think.
• In the 19th century, lending libraries in England became tools for educating white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people.

5.2  Further Innovations

• Through the 19th century, there have been a series of further innovations in printing technology.
• The press came to be made out of metal, by the late 18th century.
• By the mid-19th century, Richard M. Hoe of New York had improved the power-driven cylindrical press. This printing press was capable of printing 8,000 sheets per hour.
• In the late 19th century, the offset press was developed which could print up to 6 colors at a time.
• From the turn of the 20th century, electrically operated presses speeding up printing operations.
• 19th century journals serialized valuable novels, this gave birth to a particular way of writing novels.
• With the onset of the great Depression within the 1930's, publishers feared a decline in book purchases. To sustain buying, they brought out cheap paperback editions.

India And The World Of Print

6.1  Manuscripts Before The Age Of Print

• India had a old and rich tradition of manuscripts that were handwritten in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, as well as in various local languages.
• Manuscripts were copied on handmade paper or on palm leaves.
• They would be either pressed between wooden covers or sewn together to make sure preservation.
• Manuscripts, however, were highly expensive and fragile. They would had been to be handled carefully because they were fragile, and they could not be read easily as the script was written in different styles.
• So manuscripts weren't widely utilized in lifestyle.

6.2  Print Comes To India

• The press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries within the mid- 16th century.
• By 1674, about 50 books had been printed within the Konkani and in Kanara languages
• First Tamil book was printed by the priest of Roman Catholic, in 1579, at Cochin, and the first Malayalam book was also printed by them in 1713.
• Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts, by 1710, many of them were translations of older works.
• James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, from 1780,  a weekly magazine that represent itself as ‘a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none’.
• Hickey published tons of advertisements, including people who associated with the import and sale of slaves. But he also published tons of gossip about the Company’s senior officials in India.
• Governor-General Warren Hastings enraged by this, and started to oppress Hickey, and encouraged the publication of officially authorized newspapers that would had been counter the flow of data that could damaged the image of the colonial government.
• The first to seem was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya.

Religious Reform And Public Debates

• From the early 19th century, there had been intense debates around religious issues.
• Printed tracts and newspapers not only spread the new ideas, but they shaped the character of the talk.
• This was a time of intense controversies between religious and social reformers and therefore the Hindu orthodoxy over matters like Brahmanical priesthood, widow immolation, monotheism and idolatry.
• Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821 and therefore the Hindu orthodoxy commission started the Samaachaar Chandrika, to oppose his opinions.
• From 1822, two Persian newspapers were published, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akbar. within the same year, a Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay Samachar, made its appearance.
• In northern India, the ulama were intensively worried about the collapse of Muslim dynasties.
• They were afraid that colonial rulers would promote conversion, change the Muslim personal laws.
• The Deoband academy was founded in 1867,  afterward they published thousands of fatwas telling Muslim followers the right way to conduct themselves in their daily livelihood, and explaining the way and true meanings of Islamic principles.
• A 16th-century text came out from Calcutta, in 1810, this was the first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas.
• From the 1880's, Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay and the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow published numerous religious texts in many local languages.
• Print didn't only encourage the publication of conflicting opinions amongst communities, but it also joins communities and other people in several parts of India. Newspapers conveyed news from one place to a different , creating pan-Indian identities.

New Forms Of Publication

• As more and more people could now read, they wanted to examine their own lives, experiences, emotions and relationships reflected in what they read.
• The novel, a literary firm which had developed in Europe, ideally catered to the present need.
• For readers, it opened new worlds of experience, and gave a vivid sense of the range of human lives.
• Other new literary forms also entered the planet of reading – lyrics, short stories, essays about social and political matters.
• With the fixing of an increasing number of printing presses, visual images might be easily reproduced in multiple copies.
• Raja Ravi Verma, among the most famous artist of that time, produced images for mass circulation.
• Cheap prints and calendars, easily available within the bazaar, might be bought even by the poor to embellish the walls of their homes or places of labor.
• By the 1870s, cartoons and caricatures were being published in journals, magazines and newspapers, commenting on social and political issues.
• There were imperial caricatures lampooning nationalists, also as nationalist cartoons criticizing imperial rule.

8.1  Women And Print

• Lives and feelings of girls began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways
• Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and sent them to colleges in mid 19th century.
• Muslims feared that educated women will be corrupt by reading Urdu romance, and Conservative Hindus believed that a literate women will be widow.
• In East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, Rashsundari Debi she wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban which was published in 1876.
• From the 1860s, a couple of Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women.
• In present-day Maharashtra, Pandita Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde  wrote with passionate anger about the oppressed lives of upper-caste Hindu women, particularly widows, in 1880s.
• Hindi printing began seriously only from the 1870's, While Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi print culture had developed early. 
• In the early 20th century, journals, written for women and sometimes also edited by them, became extremely famous. They discussed issues like women’s education, widowhood, widow remarriage and therefore the national movement.
• Istri Dharma Vichar was the fast selling book, that was published by Ram Chaddha, to indicate women the way to be dutiful wife.

8.2  Print And Therefore The Poor People

• In 19th-century very inexpensive small books were delivered to markets, and sold at crossroads, let poor people travelling to markets to buy for them.
• Public libraries were found out from the early 20th century, expanding the access to books.
• Jyotiba Phule, also known as the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his book Gulamgiri (1871).
• In the 20th century, B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V . Ramaswamy Naicker in Madras, better referred to as Periyar, wrote powerfully on caste and their writings were read by people everywhere India.
• In 1938 Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal wrote and published by Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, to point out the links between caste and class exploitation.
• The poems of Sudarshan Chakra, who was another mill worker, were brought together and published as a collection called Sacchi Kavitayen in between 1935 and 1955.

Print And Censorship

• Before 1798, the colonial regions under the East India Company wasn't too uneasy with censorship.
• Its early measures to regulate printed matter were directed against Englishmen in India, who were criticizing of Company misrule and hated the actions of particular Company officers.
• The Company was worried that such criticisms could be utilized by its critics in England to attack its trade monopoly in India.
• By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court passed few regulations to manage press freedom and therefore the Company began supporting publication of newspapers, that celebrate British colonial rule.
• Governor-General Bentinck, faced urgent petition by editors of English and local language newspapers, agreed to re-amend press laws in 1835. Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial official, formulated new rules that restored the sooner freedoms.
• As vernacular newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government started debating measures of rigid control.
• In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on Irish Press Laws
• From now on the govt kept regular track of the vernacular newspapers published in several provinces.
• When a report was judged as rebellious, the newspaper was warned, and if the warning was neglected, the press was liable to be seized and the printing machinery confiscated
• In spite of oppressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India. They reported on colonial misrule and support nationalist activities. 
• When Punjab revolutionaries were exile in 1907, Balgangadhar Tilak wrote with great sympathy about them in his Kesari. This led to his imprisonment in 1908, provoking in turn widespread protests all around India.

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