A Well-Told Tale of the Book
Venkatachalapathy has
Abhijit Gupta
B
ook history is now sufficiently
established in south Asian academia
as to not require any special
pleading. Over the past two decades,
there have been some excellent studies
of the history of the book in the region.
Unlike book history projects in the
west, a national book history project is
inconceivable in south Asia because
of the large number of languages and
dialects and the uneven history of print.
The first two centuries of print in India,
beginning with the accidental arrival of
a press in Goa in 1556, have often been
described as a “non-history” of printing
owing to its stop-start nature while
creeping along the coastal regions of India
without quite being able to penetrate
into the hinterland.
During this so-called non-history,
Tamil became the first Indian language
to be printed in Indic characters in 1577,
in Goa (there had been a previous Tamil
volume printed from Lisbon in 1554, but
in Roman script). This was followed by
the establishment of Danish Lutheran
missionary Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg’s
famed press in Tranquebar, which,
among others, printed the New Testa-
ment in Tamil exactly three centuries
ago, in 1714. This was the first full trans-
lation of the New Testament in any south
Asian language.
Despite being quicker off the mark
than any other Indian language, the his-
tory of Tamil printing has been one of
false starts and aborted attempts,
though, according to Graham Shaw, as
many as 338 imprints were issued from
Tranquebar during the 18th century.
Among the false starts, Venkatachala-
pathy, the author of the book under review,
also counts the Vepery Press of Fabricius
and the press established in Thanjavur
by Serfoji II. The establishment of the
College of Fort St George in 1812 provid-
ed an impetus to printing, but it is not
till the end of the 19th century that the
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MAY 17, 2014
book reviewS
The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes
and Scribblers in Colonial Tamil Nadu by
A R Venkatachalapathy (Ranikhet: Permanent Black),
2012; xvii, pp 292, Rs 795 (hardback).
printed book was sufficiently socialised
in the world of Tamil letters. In contrast,
printing came to Bengal much later, in
the 1770s, but was almost immediately
able to generate a head of steam which
led to Calcutta and Serampore becom-
ing two of the most important centres of
printing in south and south-east Asia.
Why was this so? Venkatachalapathy ar-
gues that in the case of Tamil Nadu
“movable type had come into a society
suffused with a scribal culture” and the
longue durée of writing, literacy, and
scribal culture along with the “materiali-
ty of (the) palm-leaf book” stood in the
way of the codex form of the book. One
wonders whether a partial reason might
not be found in the very differing atti-
tudes towards print among the Jesuits
and the Lutherans, respectively. While
Ziegenbalg repeatedly petitioned his
parent body for a press as a means of
validating Christianity through a “supe-
rior” technology, Jesuits such as Beshci
and De Nobili seemed content to work
within the prevailing scribal culture.
Anecdote and Analysis
The current study begins from the peri-
od when the Tamil book “really takes
off”. Venkatachalapathy asks a number
of questions, which he seeks to answer
in the subsequent seven chapters. As
many who have worked in the field of
book history will attest, one of the key
challenges of the methodology is to de-
cide on a narrative strategy. Given the
very broad scope of the discipline (some
have even called it “interdisciplinarity
run riot”) there is every danger of sink-
ing into a quicksand of material and
vol xlIX no 20
archival excess.
dealt with this challenge admirably. The
key themes of his narrative are clearly
and lucidly explicated, and the wealth of
sources that he has drawn on is skilfully
marshalled. Thus, the opening narrative
strand concerns the role and persistence
of patronage in the world of Tamil let-
ters. As opposed to England where liter-
ary patronage suffered a dramatic and
decisive death in the mid-18th century,
patronage in Tamil Nadu lingered on till
the second half of the 19th century even
as the marketplace of books thrived else-
where. The case of Meenakshi Sundaram
Pillai is at the heart of this narrative. His
affiliation to the institutions of both the
traditional math and the modern college
mark him out as a transitional figure
whose career encompassed several para-
digms of knowledge production. We
thus find him situated in the worlds of
orality, script and print, more or less
simultaneously. Mixing anecdote and
analysis in equal measure, Venkatachala-
pathy is able to convey a vivid picture of
the world of Tamil patronage, and the
protocols – such as the arangettram or
the literary premiere – which sustained
it, and gradually withered away.
The transition from traditional forms
of patronage to other forms of subven-
tion and the marketplace is more
marked in the cases of Pillai’s disciple
U V Swaminatha Iyer and the great Tamil
poet Subramania Bharati. In the second
chapter of the book, Venkatachalapathy
traces the shift from the patron to the
public through an account of Bharati’s
meteoric but ill-starred literary career,
ending in penury and a premature
death. Bharati’s career shows how there
was no seamless transition from the re-
gime of patronage to that of the market-
place, and how his misplaced faith in the
munificence of a new reading public led
to the collapse of his grand design. An-
other heroic project, that of translating
the Mahabharata into Tamil by M V Ra-
manujachari, met with more success but
could only be executed at great financial
cost to the translator-publisher. What
therefore emerges from the opening two
chapters is a fairly lengthy period of
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BOOK REVIEW
transition, and one which does not
achieve fruition till after the first world
war. As Venkatachalapathy points out,
By then, the middle class had emerged more
or less fully, and now even entertained he-
gemonic aspirations. The novel...gave the
necessary breakthrough to distance publish-
ing from patronage and cement the writer’s
links with the middle class.
Rise of the Novel
The rise and domestication of the novel
is the subject of the third chapter. This is
a narrative which will be familiar to
many since the novel, as one of the “con-
spicuous cultural fruits of the colonial
encounter”, has emerged in a range of
languages all over India. There are cer-
tain themes that are common to the evo-
lution of the novel across India, such as
lack of respectability, sensationalism,
and the woman reader. But the novel is
also a site where the empire, as it were,
reads and writes back. Priya Joshi’s work,
for instance, unfolds the evolutionary
process by which this is made possible in
the Bengali novel. In this chapter, how-
ever, the Tamil novel arrives on the scene
as a fully-fledged entity, pouring off the
presses in a veritable deluge and flood-
ing the columns of periodicals. Though
Venkatachalapathy notes that the number
of registered novels under the Act xxv of
1867 leaps from 39 in 1891-1900 to 201 in
the following decade, he does not ex-
plain why this was so. What, for instance,
were the spaces where the novel was
consumed? Through what agencies did
the novel make its way to the female
reader? What incomes were derived
by author and publisher from novels?
Perhaps these questions have been
answered by Venkatachalapathy in his
Tamil monograph on novels, Novelum
Vasippum: Oru Varalattru Parvai, but it
would have been useful for the reader of
the current volume to have taken away
some idea of the economics of novel pro-
duction. Likewise, the phenomenon of
women as readers begs a number of
questions about the state of literacy of
women, classroom curricula for girls,
and periodicals that might have been
addressed to women readers.
The fourth chapter deals with the fig-
ures of the author, publisher and printer.
Here we encounter author-publishers
36
such as Bharati, who, in the absence of a
sufficiently evolved publishing industry,
had no option but to publish their own
works, a phenomenon which can also be
seen in Bengal. With the emergence of
publishers in the 1920s, the author no
longer had to worry about the source of
his venture capital, but this also meant
that publishers would call the shots.
Non-receipt of royalties seems to be a re-
curring complaint with authors of the
period, and the only authors who made
any kind of money were textbook writ-
ers. With the consolidation of colonial
modes and institutions of education all
over India, the textbook market became
– as it still is – the most lucrative publish-
ing sector. Venkatachalapathy offers a
wealth of evidence about the difficulties
of being a professional writer unless one
wrote for the textbook market. Publish-
ers, likewise, rarely moved outside the
comfort zone of educational publishing
though the rise of political movements
in the 1920s enlarged the sphere of
publishing somewhat. In this chapter,
Venkatachalapathy is able to provide a
detailed case study of one of the most
well-known publishing firms of the peri-
od, the South India Saiva Siddhanta
Works Publishing Society. This firm is
remarkable in the landscape of Indian
publishing in that it has been largely able
to preserve its archives. As far as printers
are concerned, we do have a sense of the
numbers in the early 20th century, but
lack of records about print-house per-
sonnel do not allow a quantifiable pic-
ture to emerge. Nevertheless, Venkata-
chalapathy has painstakingly excavated
references to print-house personnel from
memoirs, reports, government orders,
and archival sources, and a picture begins
to emerge of poor wages, insanitary con-
ditions, abused apprentices, and so on.
Gujili Publications
The fifth chapter of the book is devoted
to the world of chapbook and ephemera,
encapsulated by the term gujili litera-
ture, named after a market in the Park
Town area of Madras city. Much like its
counterpart in Calcutta, battala, gujili
was known for its commerce in chap-
books and ballads. Contemporary events,
usually of a sensational nature, were the
MAY 17, 2014
staple of gujili publications. This is one
of the most substantial chapters in the
book, providing a wealth of material on
gujili productions and paying close
attention to the distinctive paratextual
apparatus of this genre of print. It is
interesting to note how a notion of
proprietorship and entitlement emerges
through the practices of the gujili trade,
such as in the often monitory copyright
notices carried by the books. In one case,
we find the following verse in lieu of
a copyright notice – “If he has been
begotten/by a chaste woman and a sin-
gle man/he will not think of pirating my
book”. But what also emerges from the
robust and cheerful vulgarity of the
gujili productions is the notion of an
incipient public sphere and the creation
of a porous space where the popular and
elite intersect. At the same time, the
hawking of gujili books seems to have
achieved a different kind of interface be-
tween print and performance, as street-
singing chapmen would sell songbooks
standing under a lamp post.
The last two chapters of the book deal
with the processes of circulation and
consumption. In Chapter 6, Venkatacha-
lapathy deals with censorship – or the
lack of it – in colonial Tamil Nadu. While
providing a thorough account of the var-
ious acts and mechanisms instituted to
ensure bibliographic control, Venkatach-
alapathy argues that there were few
attempts to proscribe Tamil literature,
even after the Indian Press Act of 1910
and states that “the Madras Govern-
ment’s harvest of banned literature dur-
ing the Swadeshi period was meagre:
3 in 1910, 6 in 1911, 1 in 1912”. This was
in sharp contrast to northern and east-
ern India where increasing numbers of
publications were proscribed or stopped
from entering the country from overseas
locations. Venkatachalapathy mentions
but does not expand on the role of
princely states in providing a congenial
climate to proscribed literature – in this
context, one may mention Graham
Shaw’s forthcoming essay on censorship
in colonial India, which opens with the
case of the princely state of Pudukkottai
and the printing of a “highly seditious”
Tamil pamphlet in 1931 with a title taken
from a Bharati song.
vol xlIX no 20 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

History of Reading
In the final chapter, Venkatachalapathy
confronts the most challenging task of a
book historian – that of writing a history
of reading. Readers rarely leave records
and memorials of their reading and one
searches in vain for “unsung Menocc-
hios”, to use Venkatachalapathy’s pictur-
esque phrase. But Venkatachalapathy is
able to offer us fascinating snapshots of
the reading public, primarily gleaned
from the subscription records of the
periodical Ananda Bodhini. At the same
time, he draws our attention to remark-
able individual readers, such as Rajnaiken
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MAY 17, 2014
of Thanjavur. In this brilliant last section
of the book, Venkatachalapathy intro-
duces a fruitful dialectic between manu-
script and print, between vocalised and
silent readings, returning us to the
world of Pillai’s classroom in the first
chapter. Raising questions of meaning,
authenticity and authority in the class-
room, Venkatachalapathy shows with
great clarity how the protocols associat-
ed with the oral, manuscript and printed
texts engaged with each other. This is
succeeded by the coming of desultory or
leisurely reading, congruent with the
rise of the novel, and the subsequent
vol xlIX no 20
BOOK REVIEW
diffusion of reading into spaces as
diverse as the train, the teashop, and
the kitchen.
Venkatachalapathy ends the book with
a postscript on Tamil publishing today. It
is a signpost to the future, but we are left
with a vivid sense of the past, curated
with loving attention to detail and story-
telling. The Province of the Book is a
model of historical writing, and one
which truly illuminates the rich and
varied terrain of the Tamil book.
Abhijit Gupta (offog2@gmail.com) teaches at
Jadavpur University, Calcutta.
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