Book Production in British India, 1850-1900

Robert Darnton

Book History, Volume 5, 2002, pp. 239-262 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2002.0005

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/37376

Access provided at 3 Jul 2019 12:34 GMT from Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 239

Book Production in
British India, 1850–1900


Robert Darnton

The history of books as a Weld of study has spread across many disciplines,
from bibliography to comparative literature, history, graphic arts, and soci-
ology; but it has not expanded far beyond the Western world. Multivolume
national histories of the book have been published or are now being pre-
pared in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Britain (with separate histories
in Scotland and Wales), Ireland, Canada, the United States, and two West-
ern outposts in the PaciWc, Australia and New Zealand, but not in Egypt,
China, or India.
Why not India? It has a rich literature that extends further back in time
than that of any European country, and books have been printed on its
soil since 1556, nearly a century before Stephen Day cranked out the Bay
Psalm Book in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gifted scholars have studied
aspects of publishing and the book trade in India, but no one has been able
to get an overview of the subject, not for any lack of talent or resources
but because we have not yet acquired basic information about book produc-
tion. We haven’t the foggiest idea of how many books appeared in print at
any point in Indian history or of how they were distributed according to

Copyright 2002 by Robert Darnton.

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240 Book History

genre, language, and region. Statistics do not tell a story by themselves, of

course, but they can open the way to various narratives by revealing pat-
terns. When book history began to establish itself in Western Europe, it
relied heavily on quantiWcation. The sources were always imperfect: the
papers of the Stationers’ Company and library catalogues in the case of
Britain; the registers for permission to publish and the dépôt légal in
France; the catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs in Germany.
But however Xawed or distorted, the statistics provided enough material
for book historians to construct a general picture of literary culture, some-
thing comparable to the early maps of the New World, which showed the
contours of the continents, even though they did not correspond very well
to the actual landscape.
Does a comparable source exist for India? Not for the centuries before
1556, when the Portuguese set up the Wrst printing press on the subconti-
nent. Nor for the following three hundred years, when printing remained
conWned for the most part to missionary enclaves, imperialist administra-
tions, and occasional newspapers. But by 1858, when the British Raj began
to reconstitute itself as a modern, bureaucratic state, book publishing had
become an important industry, and the Indian Civil Service (ICS) began to
keep track of it. The paper trail in the archives of the ICS begins with occa-
sional “returns” about the output of books; then leads through quarterly
“catalogues,” which registered new publications; and Wnally takes the form
of annual “reports,” which quantiWed and analyzed book production in each
province. To be sure, state-generated material of this kind has a built-in bias.
It often reveals more about the British than the “natives” they observed. But
for all their tendentiousness, the papers of the ICS make it possible to catch
a Wrst glimpse of the overall outlines of literary culture under the British Raj.

The best example of an early return or general account of publishing and

the book trade was written in 1859 by James Long, a missionary and man
of letters who, as a founder of the Vernacular Literature Society in Cal-
cutta, promoted Bengali literature. With the backing of the lieutenant gov-
ernor and the director of public instruction in Bengal, Long attempted to
survey everything printed in Bengali between April 1857 and April 1858—
that is, to produce a general picture of vernacular literature during the year
of the sepoy “mutiny,” or revolt, of 1857. His return belonged to a general
attempt by the British to understand the country that they had conquered
and that had just risen against them by compiling data—fundamental
“facts,” as they put it, on everything from rainfall and wheat yields to
human beings and books. Long was a bookman. He inspected every Bengali
printing shop in Calcutta twice during his yearlong investigation. He bought
every book from 1857 that he could Wnd in the bookshops scattered through
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Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 241

the city’s “native quarters.” He tabulated prices and pressruns, followed

peddlers on their rounds, eavesdropped on oral readings, interviewed
authors, and scoured records for information about reading habits in the
past. In the end, he turned into an amateur ethnographer and became so
infected by his subject that he produced a panoramic view of Bengali liter-
ature in general, measured by statistics and colored by sympathetic read-
ings of the books themselves.1
Despite his sympathies, which placed him on the side of peasants ex-
ploited by British indigo planters, Long wrote as an agent of imperialism,
Anglo-Indian style—that is, the liberal variety, which extended from James
Mill to John Morley and which celebrated the printed word as a civilizing
force. Books, he insisted, could “break down ignorant prejudices” such as
the opposition to widow remarriage among “the old school of Hindus”
(vi). Instead of imposing censorship, as some had proposed, the British
should promote the freedom of the press and encourage the development
of Indian literature. Had they paid attention to Indian newspapers, he
claimed, they might have detected enough symptoms of unrest to have pre-
vented the mutiny. They needed information in order to maintain their
empire, and information came primarily through print.
Long contributed to this cause by amassing data on the production of
books. According to his calculations, the total output of works in Bengali
before 1820 came to only thirty titles, most of them on Hindu religion
and mythology. Only twenty-eight new books came out between 1822 and
1826, and this low level of production, always on the same subjects, con-
tinued until midcentury. A turning point came in 1852, when Wfty new
Bengali books were published, including new genres of “useful works.” By
1857, the year of his investigation, the publishing industry was booming:
forty-six presses existed in Calcutta, and they had turned out 322 new
works, including six newspapers and twelve periodicals, in the last twelve
months. Overall book production for the past half century, according to
Long’s estimate, came to about eighteen hundred titles. The quality of type
and paper had improved; printers had given up their ancient wooden
presses; the number of authors had increased; and an important literary
market had emerged, although the peasants remained mired in illiteracy:
“Not 3 per cent of the rural population of Bengal can read intelligently.
In Bombay, not 3 per cent can read at all.” By promoting education, the
British could relieve the suffering of the masses: “Government attention has
been drawn to ameliorating the social condition of the ryot [peasant]—but
mental enlightenment must be an accompaniment to it, to give him a manly
feeling to resist zamindar and planter oppression—to make him feel he is
a man by the quickening inXuences of education” (xii, xiv).
Long did not disguise the Victorian-liberal sentiments that he brought
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242 Book History

to his work, but he supported his opinions with a vast amount of research.
His return ran to sixty-four pages of text and eighty-three pages of appen-
dixes about book production, which he presented systematically with de-
tails about subjects, genres, printers, formats, typography, size, prices, and
pressruns. He apparently read or at least skimmed through the entire
corpus of Bengali printed material from 1857. Thanks to his command of
the language and his work as editor of the Vernacular Literature Society’s
monthly journal, he had acquired a remarkable knowledge of Bengali lit-
erature. His own tastes tended toward serious works, written in a style that
conveyed the Sanskrit origins of Bengali, but he gave a sympathetic read-
ing to popular genres, such as almanacs:

Almanacs circulate where few other Bengali books reach; just pre-
vious to the beginning of the Bengali year is a busy season with the
native almanac sellers of Calcutta; book-hawkers in numbers may
be seen issuing from the printing presses, freighted with the store of
almanacs which they carry far and wide, some of which they sell at
the low rate of 80 pages for one anna. The Bengali almanac is as
necessary for the Bengali as his hooka or his pan; without it he can-
not determine the auspicious days for marrying (22 in the year), for
Wrst feeding an infant with rice (27 days in the year), the feeding the
mother with rice in the Wfth month of gestation (12 days), for com-
mencing the building of a house, for boring the ears, putting the
chalk into the hands of a boy to teach him to write, when a jour-
ney is to be begun, or the calculating the duration and malignity of
a fever. (xx–xxi)

The Tract Society of Calcutta attempted to counter the effect of these

booklets by producing Christian almanacs, but their editions found few
takers, Long remarked, because they lacked prophecies.
He noted that history books also had little appeal—the result, he be-
lieved, of a conviction among Hindu readers that worldly affairs had little
importance in the great scheme of things. Nonetheless, the Bengali public
enjoyed sardonic commentaries on current events, particularly in the form
of drama. In the hinterland, jatra parties (itinerant troupes) toured from
village to village, performing plays based on Hindu mythology but seasoned
with bawdy episodes, irreverent songs, and asides about British planters and
rulers. In Calcutta, works with similar themes—some by pandit playwrights,
others improvised in the manner of slapstick or vaudeville—dominated rep-
ertories in the vibrant theater district. Calcutta’s printers turned out cheap
editions of the plays, and peddlers Xogged them throughout the province,
along with songbooks, another favorite genre, which supplemented the
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Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 243

dramas. Although much of this material offended his Victorian sensitivity,

Long discussed it at length and emphasized its popular appeal:

The Bengali songs do not inculcate the love of wine or, like the
Scotch, the love of war, but are devoted to Venus and the popular
deities; they are Wlthy and polluting. Of these the most known are
the Panchalis, which are sung at the festivals and sold in numerous
editions and by thousands, some on good paper, well got up [i.e.,
designed and printed], others on the refuse of old canvas bags. The
Panchalis are recitations of stories chieXy from the Hindu Shastras,
in meter, with music and singing; they relate to Vishnu and Shiva,
intermixed with pieces in the style of Anacreon. . . . The jatras are a
species of dramatic action, Wlthy, in the same style with the exhibi-
tion of Punch and Judy, or of the penny theatres in London, treat-
ing of licentiousness, or of Krishna. A mehtre with a broomstick in
his hand always cuts a Wgure in them. (xlviii)

Long himself attended performances by singers, both itinerant bards and

street poets, including one man who could improvise verses in Sanskrit on
any subject proposed to him. The songs included a good deal of comment
on political and social issues: “For instance, the appointment of indigo
planters as honorary magistrates excited strong feelings of indignation
among many of the ryots in certain districts; a common remark was, ‘Je
rakhak se bhakhak’—i.e. the man appointed our protector is become a
wolf” (xlix). Popular prints, run off in the tens of thousands and pasted on
walls, were usually conWned to religious themes, such as the exploits of the
gods. Long had nothing good to say about the category “erotic,” but noted
that it, too, appealed to a broad, popular public. He found little serious
Wction or works comparable to European novels, although he thought that
religious tales were sometimes “written in such a mode and style as to pro-
duce on the readers or hearers the agreeable effects of Wction” (xxvi). He
calculated that more than seven hundred authors had published books in
Bengali, and listed them all. None, he thought, could be considered a great
writer, although he admitted to some admiration for Bharut Chandra,
whose Shishubodh was “the most popular book in indigenous schools, but
replete with loose morals and mythology.” Chandra’s Videa Sundar, “a
most popular tale, clever but obscene,” had been reprinted recently in an
edition of 3,750 and had sold out in four months (31). Despite their regret-
table bawdiness, the Bengali writers promised to develop a rich literature
by adapting Sanskrit traditions to the interests of a growing reading pub-
lic. Their numbers alone indicated that “the Bengali mind has been roused
from the torpor of ages” (xv).
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244 Book History

In short, Bengali literature was beginning to Xourish, although most

Europeans had no inkling of its existence. To become acquainted with it,
they would have to cross over the line that divided British society from
the “native quarters” of Calcutta and venture into the teeming press rooms
and bookshops scattered everywhere, especially along Chitpoor Road,
“their Pater Noster Row.” Long explored this territory in detail and also
traced the human links that connected the producers in Calcutta to con-
sumers in the hinterland. Except in the rainy season, when they worked in
the Welds, two hundred peasant peddlers regularly stocked up in the print-
ing shops of the capital and fanned out through the countryside, carrying
their wares on their heads. By doubling the wholesale price, they often
made six to eight rupees a month; and their person-to-person salesmanship
made them ideal intermediaries in a distribution system aimed at listeners
as well as readers: “The natives Wnd the best advertisement for a Bengali
book is a living agent, who shows the book itself” (xiv).
Long paid a great deal of attention to reading as the Wnal stage in the
communication process. However biased in his view of “Orientals,” he had
a good ethnographic eye for the performative aspects of reading in an over-
whelmingly illiterate society:

With Orientals it is a common practice to be read to, and hence

numbers who cannot read themselves listen to those who can. Read-
ers (kathaks) are often hired to recite or chant certain works, and
most impressively do some of them execute this—one of them
recited lately to myself from memory any passages I selected from
the Ramayana, Raghuvansa, Mahabharata; the mode of reciting
them was most impressive; some of these men earn 500 rupees a
month. . . . We know a native who was for years employed by a rich
babu to read two hours daily to 40 or 50 females in his house. This
has been a practice from time immemorial in Bengal, where “read-
ings” as in all Eastern countries have been so popular, and where
intonation, gesture, etc. make a book listened to more telling than
when simply read. Women sometimes sit in a circle round a woman
who reads a book to them. Allowing them an average of 10 hearers
or readers to each book, we calculate that these 600,000 Bengali
books [Long’s estimate of the total number of copies produced in
1857] have 2,000,000 readers or hearers [presumably a slip for
6,000,000]. (xv)

Long’s “return” stands out as the most thorough and sympathetic

account of publishing and the book trade in the papers of the ICS. In fact,
Long felt so much sympathy for the ryots (Bengali peasants) exploited by
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Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 245

the zamindars (British planters) that he promoted a translation of Nil Dar-

pan, a Bengali melodrama about zamindar oppression, and found himself
accused of slander by the indigo planters. After a highly publicized and
grossly unfair trial in 1861, he was condemned to a month’s imprisonment
and a one-thousand-rupee Wne.2

The other agents of the ICS were far more circumspect, but there were a
great many of them—so many, in fact, that the government, once it was
convinced of the need to keep track of book production, enlisted them in
an early attempt at survey research. Adhering to the Press and Registration
of Books Act of 1867, the governor general ordered the ICS to keep a
record of every book that appeared in every province of the Raj. The
records, known somewhat misleadingly as catalogues, were compiled four
times a year by provincial librarians from memoranda submitted by local
ofWcials. Publishers were required to supply the ofWcials with three copies
of every book they produced and in return received payment for them at
the usual sales price. They also had to provide information on a standard
set of topics: the title of the work, its author, language, subject, place of
printing, names of printer and publisher, date of publication, number of
pages, size, format, pressrun, whether printed or lithographed (lithography
was a great stimulus to the production of much vernacular literature), and
price. By paying two rupees, publishers received a copyright; but if they
failed to register the book, it would be treated as illegal and they would be
punished by a Wne of up to Wve thousand rupees, imprisonment of up to
two years, or both.3
The catalogues could be helpful to the British in their attempt to keep
informed about the state of opinion among the peoples subject to their rule.
When read more than a hundred years later, they provide a fascinating
record of how the masters of the Raj talked about the “natives.” But they
also give the impression of a bureaucracy stuck in overdrive, churning out
paper as an end in itself. For Bengal alone, the catalogues for 1868–1903
Wll thirteen enormous registers, each crammed with more information than
anyone could possibly assimilate. For all of British India, they cover about
250,000 books, most of them accompanied by short reviews. In fact, the
catalogues contained so much detail that they threatened to drown their
readers in an ocean of information. Individual works could not be located,
because the entries followed the order in which the books were registered.
There was no index and no synthetic account of tendencies within a single
province, to say nothing of India as a whole.4 The ICS could not make
much use of the catalogues until it distilled their data into some form that
could be taken in by its ofWcials—that is, until it produced another round
of paperwork. The result was a series of annual reports like James Long’s,
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246 Book History

which reduced all the catalogue entries to a set of statistics and attempted
to deWne trends in a general essay.

The Wrst such reports, or the earliest that have survived in the papers of
the India OfWce, cover the Northwestern Provinces (roughly Uttar Pradesh
and Uttaranchal today) in 1869, 1870, and 1871. They were written by
M. Kempson, director of public instruction, and addressed to the lieutenant
governor. Kempson had none of the ethnographic curiosity and investiga-
tive thoroughness of Long; but he seems to have been well informed, and
he had plenty of opinions to share with his superiors. The catalogue for
the province in 1869 included 180 new books. Kempson divided them into
Wve subject categories—religion, education, “poetical,” professional, and
miscellaneous—and subdivided them into six languages, Urdu (57 books),
Hindi (55), and Persian (20) being the most important. In his essay, he
went over each category, pointing out tendencies and citing examples.
More than half the works were religious or educational, an indication, he
claimed, of “the very practical character of the book purchasers.” Like
Long, he remarked on the wide variety of popular literature—almanacs,
astrological tracts, love poetry, and romances turned out in large editions
(sometimes two thousand copies) and sold at low prices (three pie). Most
of this material fell into the catch-all category of “miscellaneous” and war-
ranted nothing but contempt, according to Kempson:

Among the other Hindi books, I regret to notice two editions of

an immoral publication, the Dilbahlan, published at two different
presses in Agra. . . . [It] is bazaar trash in the shape of ribald verses,
some of them grossly indecent. It is stuff of this kind which . . . poi-
sons the minds of youths in large towns. For one who reads, there
are hundreds who hear the libidinous suggestions and allusions. The
publishers are low Mahomedans, who eke out the proWts of their
presses by keeping up a supply of nastiness within the means of the
poorest of their Hindu fellow subjects. . . . Among miscellaneous
works in the Urdu language, I consider the tale Gul-o-Sanobar,
published by Newal Kishore, objectionable on moral grounds. . . .
The scope of the tale is thus harmless enough, but as usual in these
tales coarsely described. Love scenes interfere with the purity of the
romance and disenchant the reader.5

The disenchantment was peculiarly British. Repulsion at Indian depic-

tions of sex runs through all the catalogues and reports, along with wari-
ness about political ferment. Politics, however, did not Wgure in Kempson’s
report. He found no symptoms of discontent in the literature he surveyed,
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Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 247

although it was published only twelve years after the 1857 revolt, which
had burned a wide swath through his province. His report for 1870 showed
the same pattern within a larger output (209 new works): a dominance
of religious books, less ribaldry, but no increase in high-quality Wction:
“As yet the intellectual culture amounts to little else than patchwork clear-
ances in the jungle.”6 The report for 1871 indicated that production had
grown enormously (317 new works), but the increase fell mainly within
the traditional categories of religious and educational works, especially
schoolbooks for Muslims. In reply, the secretary to the lieutenant governor
agreed regretfully that “literary effort, both original and reproductive, is
still painfully small and indicative of the slumber of intellect in which the
nation is wrapped.”7
In order to shake the Indians out of such somnolence and to promote
a more European style of vernacular literature, the lieutenant governor
awarded prizes for the best works of Wction and nonWction. Kempson for-
warded manuscripts along with recommendations, in which he discussed
their style (preferably pure and simple) and substance (no sex; loyal senti-
ments). Mirat-ul-Arus, an Urdu novel by a deputy collector named Mahomed
Nuzeer Ahmud, won his approval. It was not a great work of art but “a
readable everyday book, intelligible to common folk and pure and practical
in tone. There is no pandering to the passions or appeal to the marvelous,
which appear to be the ordinary passports to popularity among Oriental
writers.”8 After “perusing” it himself, the lieutenant governor agreed:

It is true that as a tale there are obvious imperfections in it, judged

from a European point of view. The plan has not been laid out, as
a whole, with much artistic design. . . . But the sketches are those of
real life, and the inner history of an Indian home is portrayed true
to nature. . . . While it is thoroughly Mahometan in its tone and
spirit, the work is at the same time thoroughly loyal in its sentiments
towards the English government. The episode in which the domes-
tic life of our Queen and the approaching visit of Her Majesty’s son
are alluded to shows that some at least of the advantages of English
life and European habits can be fully appreciated by the author.9

As a prize, the author was to receive one thousand rupees and a watch, and
the lieutenant governor would contribute two thousand rupees toward
the book’s publication so that it could be set as a text for examinations in
schools.
The correspondence continued in this manner for several years. The
British dangled “timepieces” and rupees before the contestants while ex-
changing comments among themselves on the peculiarities of “the Oriental
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248 Book History

mind.”10 The Indians sent in Wction, travelogues, histories, even some pro-
tests against oppressive taxation, which the judges took in good humor, as
if to conWrm their sense of their own high-mindedness.11 Cultural policy, as
it began to take shape in the Northwestern Provinces, expressed a breath-
less sense of superiority on the part of the British. They followed Indian
literature carefully and attempted to direct it according to their own stan-
dards. But no amount of patronage could bridge the cultural distance that
separated them from the “natives.”

In the presidencies of Madras, Bombay, and especially Bengal, the literary

inquiries went much further, in both scale and sophistication. They con-
formed to a directive issued by the Home Department of the Government
of India on 26 April 1875, which required all ten provinces to furnish an
annual report that would indicate “in what direction vernacular literature
is spreading.”12 In order to do so, the provincial administrations were to
compile statistics from their catalogues and arrange them according to lan-
guages in Wfteen categories: biography, drama, Wction, history, language,
law, medicine, miscellaneous, poetry, politics, philosophy, religion, science
(mathematical), science (natural), and travel. A sixteenth category, art, was
added after 1890. The reports were discontinued after 1898, perhaps
because they involved such elaborate calculations, language by language,
genre by genre, province by province, four times a year, that they overtaxed
the capacity for paperwork of the seemingly inexhaustible ICS. But for a
quarter of a century, they provided an extraordinarily rich fund of infor-
mation about Indian literature, even though they had two obvious deWcien-
cies: they classiWed the books according to categories that made sense to
British civil servants rather than to Indians, and the soundness of their
statistics depended on the representativeness of the catalogues.
The ofWcials who prepared the reports did not raise questions about the
appropriateness of the categories, although they noted the impossibility, in
many cases, of deciding whether a particular book should be classiWed under
religion or philosophy or poetry.13 But they worried about the accuracy of
the catalogues as a measure of book production. Back in 1871, Kempson
had warned his superiors in the administration of the Northwestern Prov-
inces that he could not guarantee the catalogue’s completeness, although “it
is probable that no work of real literary value has escaped registration.”14
Could it be, however, that a great many ordinary books, especially cheap,
popular tracts with no literary pretensions, had escaped the government’s
notice, because they had never been registered? After Kempson raised
this possibility, the lieutenant governor’s ofWce asked him to investigate the
extent of noncompliance with the Registration of Books Act of 1867. He
sent back a reassuring report in 1872, which conWrmed the accuracy of the
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Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 249

catalogue as an “index of the public demand for books.”15 But questions

about the representativeness of the catalogues continued to dog the ICS as
it expanded its inquiries throughout the entire Raj after 1875.
This concern reappeared in the Wrst report from the Madras presidency,
a retrospective analysis of the catalogue for 1874: “No work of a seditious
tendency has been published during the year, that is, so far as I am aware;
for it may be that all publications are not brought up for registration,
though I have no reason to suppose that such is the case.”16 In 1878, the
report from the Bengal presidency noted that much cheap, popular Wc-
tion was never submitted for registration in the catalogue: so the Act of
1867 “is not working as it ought.”17 By 1898, the ICS had stopped paying
publishers for the deposit copies that they were required to submit upon
registering a book. The Madras report warned about a consequent drop in
the statistics of production;18 and the Bengal report noted the same ten-
dency, estimating the evasion rate at 25 percent.19
Just how representative the catalogues were remains a matter of conjec-
ture. They probably did not do justice to the inexpensive works considered
as “bazaar trash” by the ICS, and it is possible that as many as 25 percent
of those works never made it into the catalogues. But publishers had an
incentive to obtain copyright protection by registering their books, and
they could be punished heavily for failing to register them. Moreover, they
could publish works that challenged British authority without suffering
punishment. Strictly speaking, political censorship did not exist in British
India; and many books circulated freely, even though they had been de-
scribed as seditious in the catalogues. Unlike eighteenth-century France,
the nineteenth-century Raj never developed an important literary under-
ground. A few nationalist newspapers were produced from foreign enclaves
such as Pondicherry and Goa, but the British did not interfere with the free
trade in books until the outbreak of terrorism after the partition of Bengal
in 1905. On the whole, therefore, it seems safe to conclude that the cata-
logues give a fairly accurate picture of book production during the second
half of the nineteenth century.20
Of course, the picture varied from province to province; and the varia-
tions extended endlessly within each province, according to differences in
language, religion, and ethnicity. The annual reports tried to respect those
nuances by presenting the statistics that had been compiled from the cata-
logues in linguistic groups. For example, the report for the Madras presi-
dency in 1898 provided a series of statistical tables divided horizontally
into the sixteen generic categories and vertically into forty-one “classical”
and “vernacular” languages and combinations of languages, including Eng-
lish, Latin, German, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam,
Kanarese, Tulu, Konkani, Oriya, and Hindustani. The information is so
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250 Book History

dense that one can hardly see a pattern in it, to say nothing of contrasting
it with reports from earlier periods. Therefore, in order to make patterns
visible, Table 1 shows book production broken down by genre and region,
not language. (Publications in English represented a relatively small per-
centage of the total and were disproportionately numerous in only four
categories: law, medicine, natural science, and travel.) The statistics were
compiled from the reports for 1878 and 1898 from the presidencies of
Madras, Bombay, and Bengal and the Northwestern Provinces with Oudh.
Because those regions were the main centers of book production, the tables
provide a general view of the literary topography, though they do not cover
the entire terrain.21
Table 1, based on data compiled from the annual reports, should not be
taken as a photograph of literary culture. It expresses the attempt of British
ofWcials to reduce Indian book production to grids Wlled with numbers—a
way of conveying information that conformed to the rough-and-ready
empiricism of the ICS during the heyday of imperialism. Despite their arbi-
trary character, however, the statistics suggest some general tendencies in
Indian literature. The overwhelming predominance of religious works—the
dominant genre everywhere, except in Bombay—indicates the continuing
importance of ancient cultural currents in the new marketplace for books.
In India, unlike England, religion was so broad as to be nearly coextensive
with culture. It permeated many books in nonreligious categories such as
poetry, which drew heavily on themes from Hindu mythology. When a
book discussed those themes in a metaphysical manner, the British classi-
Wed it as philosophy; but that category was relatively weak, and it usually
included little more than Sanskrit treatises and polyglot texts, notably in
Bengal and the Northwestern Provinces. Religious books were especially
strong in the Madras presidency; secular ones did best in Bombay. But a
comparison of the two huge and heterogeneous categories, religion and mis-
cellaneous, indicates that religious works Xooded the market everywhere
and that the tide did not recede in 1898.
Moreover, the “miscellaneous” category included many popular tracts
with religious themes, such as episodes from the Puranas and astrological
predictions. It also contained so much other material that it could be taken
as the Indian equivalent of the vast sector of literature known in the West
(somewhat misleadingly) as popular culture. Like Londoners and Parisians,
Indians in Calcutta and Bombay consumed a heavy diet of cheap booklets
featuring crime stories, astrological advice, magic tricks, charms, sayings,
and accounts of monsters and marvels. Despite its similarity to the penny
dreadfuls and chapbooks of the West, this material, as James Long had
observed, was usually adapted to Hindu practices and had a non-European
Xavor. For example, Jauhar-i-Ajaibat, a miscellaneous tract in the 1898
 10chap10.qxd

Table 1. Indian book production in 1878 and 1898

Northwestern
10/1/02

Provinces
Bengal Bombay Madras and Oudh Total
1878 1898 1878 1898 1878 1898 1878 1898 1878 1898
Art 0 14 0 17 0 8 0 9 0 (0%) 48 (0.9%)
10:22 AM

Biography 5 17 6 21 5 16 3 18 19 (0.5%) 72 (1%)

Drama 120 48 9 30 17 29 12 18 158 (4%) 125 (2%)
Fiction 65 66 44 59 37 30 22 83 168 (4%) 238 (4%)
History 24 71 24 20 7 15 16 67 71 (2%) 173 (3%)
Language 244 291 56 62 114 184 91 211 505 (13%) 748 (14%)
Page 251

Law 43 42 28 15 35 47 44 17 150 (4%) 121 (2%)

Medicine 52 107 7 20 9 15 11 26 79 (2%) 168 (3%)
Miscellaneous 259 615 432 132 92 223 135 226 918 (24%) 1,196 (22%)
Poetry 158 182 131 224 86 95 84 283 459 (12%) 784 (15%)
Politics 3 0 0 1 2 7 1 0 6 (0.2%) 8 (0.1%)
Philosophy 5 32 24 22 1 2 6 26 36 (1%) 82 (1%)
Religion 397 584 98 76 397 364 182 287 1,074 (28%) 1,311 (25%)
Science
(mathematical) 46 66 13 18 16 21 20 43 95 (2%) 148 (3%)
Science
(natural) 64 36 35 21 6 29 2 3 107 (3%) 89 (2%)
Travel 1 3 1 4 0 6 0 5 2 (0%) 18 (0.3%)
Total 1,486 2,174 908 742 824 1,091 629 1,322 3,847 5,329
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 252

252 Book History

catalogue for the Northwestern Provinces and Oudh, contained “an account
of moving rocks, singing stones, speaking mountains, colored rivers, boil-
ing lakes, and other wonderful phenomena.”
More serious literature went under the categories poetry, Wction, and
drama. By 1898, the literary movement later known as the Bengal Renais-
sance had produced an important corpus of writing. The catalogues recorded
the publication of poems, essays, and novels by such major writers as Bankim
Chandra Chatterji and Rabindranath Tagore, but the reports did not men-
tion them at all. In discussing Bengali literature, the report for 1898 noted
nothing but mediocrity and concluded, “The man who is to infuse new life
and vigor into Bengali Wction by setting it free from its present frivolities
and conventionalities is yet to show himself.” By that time, Tagore had
published some of his most important work, including Manasi (1890),
and was well on his way to the Nobel Prize for literature, which he won in
1913. Fiction for the keepers of the catalogues in all the provinces meant
primarily novels, and the novel was on the rise. Statistically, however, the
curve did not point sharply upward. The Wgures under “Wction” for Madras
actually declined from 1878 to 1898. Those for Bengal remained Xat. Only
the Northwestern Provinces and Oudh showed a large increase, though
from a relatively small base: from twenty-two to eighty-three titles. Drama
Xourished especially in the theaters of Calcutta, which stimulated a brisk
trade in the printed texts of plays. They, too, declined from 1878 to 1898,
although they increased in the other provinces.
The other categories corresponded so much more to British rather than
Indian notions of literature that the statistics attached to them tended to
be trivial. “Travel,” for example, accounted for only two books in 1878,
both of them in English. Art and biography were unimportant sectors.
“History” included more books, although they tended to be in English. The
output of scientiWc works was much higher, in vernacular languages as
well as in English and in the life sciences as well as physics. But the Indi-
ans produced almost nothing that the British could recognize as politics.
Apparently, the ICS was looking for treatises in the style of John Locke
or John Stuart Mill and failed to Wnd them—or so it seems from a remark
in the report from Madras in 1898: “Politics as a science has never been
cultivated in India, and political activity is chieXy conWned to newspaper
articles in this presidency.” The Indians actually worked over political
issues extensively on the stage, but that kind of literature was classiWed
as drama. Law and medicine look fairly strong in the statistics, no doubt
because a new elite, which had been educated in British schools, was mov-
ing into those professions. Much of the literature in the professional sectors
was in English, although it included many collections of traditional remedies
against disease and an important number of Muslim legal works. Language
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 253

Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 253

was a large category, but it included almost nothing but dictionaries, gram-
mars, and school textbooks.

Such is the way Indian literature looks when reduced to statistical tables.
How did the British construe the numbers? Their attempts to understand the
data they collected can be followed in the narrative sections of the reports,
which show them looking for signs of sedition, as one would expect, but
also keeping an eye on intellectual trends and pronouncing literary judg-
ments from a perspective of self-conWdent superiority.
The earliest reports read like one long lament about backwardness, espe-
cially in the remoter provinces. In 1874, the report from Oudh stated Xatly
that almost no literature existed outside the traditional genres of religion
and poetry. The report from the Northwestern Provinces found little except
for school books. The reports from Mysore and Coorg noted nothing of
interest aside from booklets written for a regional variety of street theater;22
and the report from the Punjab concluded bluntly, “No literary work of
any importance has appeared during the year.”23 No one complained of
political agitation. The Madras report noted, “The column of Politics is
altogether bare this year, owing probably to the very quiet times in which
we live.”24 And the report from Bombay found nothing to deplore other
than two indecent Urdu prints: “The general tone of the publications under
review was unobjectionable as regards morality and loyalty.”25
Four years later, the same tone continued to prevail. The author of the
Bombay report wrote warmly about the Xourishing of Sanskrit scholarship
and the lack of interest in politics; and the Madras author noted approv-
ingly that half the books produced in his province concerned religion. He
detected signs of “intellectual progress” in the appearance of a new genre,
the novel, written in the vernacular according to a suitable English model:

Amongst the 37 works of Wction, those deserving of notice are the

two readable versions of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, Cymbeline
and Merchant of Venice in Tamil and Telugu respectively, and four
tales from the Sanskrit dramas and romances, all published by the
Madras School Book and Vernacular Literature Society. The rest are
mere reprints of old story books. But novel readers and those who
want some means to gauge the growth and tendencies of literary
activity in the Telugu country will be interested in a Telugu publi-
cation entitled Raja Sekhara, being a fair imitation of Goldsmith’s
Vicar of WakeWeld.26

The other provinces sounded equally calm, despite the terrible famine of
1876–78 in southern India. Only Bengal showed signs of discontent: songs
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 254

254 Book History

protesting against exploitation by the foreigners, poems lamenting the lost

glory of the Aryans, and plays satirizing the abuses of British rule. But the
Bengal report did not treat them as a serious threat, and the general tone
of the reports remained the same until the end of the century.
In 1898, the report from the Northwestern Provinces still deplored the
underdeveloped character of the local literature: no modern genres, no
reviews, no critical standards, no taste. Happily, there was also no politics.
The only ripples of modernity in this cultural backwater, as the British saw
it, took the form of a demand for detective novels and popular romances
instead of fantastic tales based on the Ramayana. Things also looked sleepy
in Madras, despite a few pamphlets about taxation and the Congress Party.
Indians were simply not interested in politics, even though public affairs re-
ceived a going over in their newspapers, according to the provincial report.
But the early stirrings of nationalism were picked up in the report from
Bombay, owing to the agitation that Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak spread
throughout the province from Poona by means of his journal Kesari. The
report noted several publications related to Tilak’s trial and conviction for
sedition in the wake of the plague crisis of 1897. One, a compilation of
documents that represented the trial as a mockery of justice, pretended that
its purpose was “to give the Marathi reading public an idea of the extent
of liberty of speech and writing enjoyed by the people of India under the
British Government, and how far political agitation can be carried on
without infringing the law.” The report let that pass without comment,
choosing instead to expatiate on a drama, Lokamata Vijaya or Triumph of
Public Opinion, which supported the government’s side in the Tilak case:
“The work is respectfully dedicated to the virtues of the English rulers of
India, such as generosity, evenness of mind, sense of justice, humanity, inde-
pendence, and others. . . . Liberty of thought is represented to have been
Wrst imperilled by the doings of discontent and sedition, but ultimately to
have triumphed by the favor of Her Majesty the Queen through the inter-
vention of the Grace of God.”27
The report of 1898 from Bengal, the other main site of early national-
ist agitation, stressed the literary qualities of the year’s harvest of books
and pronounced them to be as mediocre as in the past: “There was the
same lack of originality, the same absence of literary form, and the same
deWance of grammar and literary usage.” While devoting itself primarily
to the aesthetic drawbacks of the literature as a whole, it also picked
out “politically objectionable” themes in some poetry and protests against
“political servitude” in a few songs, along with a revival of interest in
Hinduism in all genres. “People’s political ideas are developing fast, and
simultaneously with the appreciation of the beneWts of British rule and
the manifestation of a sincere loyalty to the person of the Queen-Empress,
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 255

Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 255

there is a broad spirit of disaffection toward the ruling class, which Wnds
expression in poetry, drama, Wction, and other departments of Bengali
literature, especially the Bengali journals, which is both unfortunate and
undesirable.”28
In short, the reports contained plenty of political signals, but there was
no urgency about them. Nationalism seemed to be on the rise, but it was a
minor theme amid the myriad currents in what had now become a huge
stream of books. The “natives” might be restive, but when they took to
their books they continued to play happily with their stock of religious
myths, while experimenting from time to time with Western genres and
working off steam with an occasional satire or burst of patriotic lyricism.

If one puts aside the commentary of the ICS in order to take a Wnal look
at the statistics, is it possible to form a general picture covering the entire
subcontinent? Compressing the statistics from the four regions, the pro-
portions of the different sectors of book production for 1878 and 1898
appear in the right-hand columns of Table 1. The large statistical base
and the consistency across the years makes the pattern look convincing, but
somewhat disappointing, because it may reveal more about the viewpoint
of the British than the literature of the Indians. Favorite British genres such
as travel and biography hardly counted statistically and probably did not
take root in India before 1900. The sectors where indigenous literature Xour-
ished—those classiWed as religion, miscellaneous, and poetry—accounted
for two-thirds of Indian book production. But they covered such a broad
range of writing that the statistics do not reveal a great deal. Were it pos-
sible to measure variations within such catchall categories as religion and
miscellaneous, the statistics would serve as a guide to the literature experi-
enced across the whole spectrum of Indian society, from pandits studying
Sanskrit texts to peasants laughing at jatra performances.
“Language,” an important category in all the Indian statistics, included
mainly dictionaries and schoolbooks along with an admixture of philolog-
ical works. “Fiction” looks weak; but, as the regional statistics show, it was
relatively strong among books published in Indian languages as opposed
to English. If “drama” and “poetry” are added to “Wction,” the statistics
suggest the emergence of a rich and varied literary landscape.
Moreover, the weak showing of categories such as law, medicine, and
science does not indicate that those professions were underdeveloped in
India, because they account for roughly the same proportions in statistics
on book production in Britain at the same time. In fact, the British Wgures,
reported each year by the Publishers’ Circular, resemble the Indian at key
points, even though there they were classiWed in a somewhat different way.
The breakdown by subject for 1898 is in Table 2.29
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 256

256 Book History

Cross-cultural comparisons of this sort are so full of Xaws—incompati-

ble categories, disparate sources, heterogeneous institutions—that they can
never be conclusive. But in this case they suggest that book production in
India was less dissimilar than one might expect from the pattern that pre-
vailed in Britain. The professional sectors, law and medicine, were roughly
the same in proportion to the total output of titles, and so, too, were the
sectors connected with the study of language. Religion, the most important
category in India, also occupied a signiWcant place in Britain—even more
so in 1878, when “theology” accounted for 14 percent of the total and was
the second largest category after Wction (17 percent). By 1898, “Wction”
had grown to 32 percent of British book production, but the “miscella-
neous” category of Indian books in that year included a large number of
crime stories and popular novels; so the disparity in the production of
Wctional narratives is not as great as it appears. The biggest divergences
occurred in the sector of poetry (much more important in India) and polit-
ical and economic theory (much more important in Britain.) But there were
enough similarities to suggest that by the end of the nineteenth century
some afWnity had developed in the literary cultures of the two countries.

Table 2. Indian and British book production in 1898, by genre

India Britain
Number Number
of of
Titles Percent Titles Percent
Art 48 (0.9)
Biography 72 (1) (See history)
Drama 125 (2) (See poetry)
Fiction 238 (4) Fiction and juvenile 2402 (32)
History 173 (3) History and biography 743 (10)
Language 748 (14) Philological, educational, classical 990 (12)
Law 121 (2) Law 163 (2)
Medicine 168 (3) Medicine 196 (3)
Miscellaneous 1196 (22)
Poetry 784 (15) Poetry and drama 371 (5)
Politics 8 (0.1) Political and social economy,
trade, commerce 534 (7)
Philosophy 82 (1)
Religion 1311 (25) Theology 688 (9)
Science (math.) 148 (3) Arts, science, illustrated works 295 (4)
Science (natur.) 89 (2)
Travel 18 (0.3)
Belles lettres, essays, and
monographs 218 (3)
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 257

Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 257

Of course, the scale of book production—especially when considered in

relation to population and literacy—was quite different. But in this respect,
too, it would be misleading to treat Indian literature as if it had nothing
in common with the West. The totals in Table 1 provide a fairly reliable
measure of its overall size. In this bird’s-eye view, three peaks stand out:
Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras—that is, the three main cities and their
hinterlands, where British rule Wrst took root. Measured by the quantity
and the variety of books produced, the rest of the subcontinent looks Xat
in comparison. The Xattest area was the Central Provinces, which reported
only one new publication in 1878, probably because the local princes did
not cooperate with the survey and because local booksellers drew their
stock from publishers in the coastal cities. Remote provinces such as the
Punjab also produced few books; and those few tended to be concentrated
in a few genres, such as dictionaries, language instruction books, school
textbooks, and religious chapbooks. The only area that approached the
three presidencies in its output of books was the Northwestern Provinces
and Oudh, but it produced only 41 percent of the total in Bengal in 1878;
and Bengal also stood out far above Bombay and Madras.
Twenty years later, the picture had changed signiWcantly. Production in
the Northwestern Provinces and Oudh had doubled, while production in
Bengal had increased by 46 percent and in Madras by 32 percent. In the
Bombay presidency, production had decreased by 18 per cent, a conse-
quence of the waves of famine and plague in 1896–97. Those disasters
probably affected the output of books in other regions as well. The report
from the Bengal presidency said that, as a result of the plague, annual pro-
duction had dropped by 5 percent in comparison with the previous year.
Nonetheless, the overall output of books in those four regions had gone
up by 38 percent when compared with the level in 1878. The increase for
all of India probably went from an annual rate of about 4,000 titles in 1878
to 6,000 titles in 1898. Estimates of total production over long periods of
time involve a good deal of guesswork, but it seems likely that the number
of new books published during the last quarter of the century came close to
150,000 and that total production from 1850 to 1900 exceeded 200,000.
It is difWcult to interpret such large, round numbers; but to put them in
perspective, one can draw on statistics from Western Europe. In German-
speaking countries, where the publishing industry was most intensive, the
book fair catalogues of Leipzig and Frankfurt indicate that the annual out-
put of new works had reached a level of nearly 1,000 in 1700 and 4,000
in 1800. The catalogues probably underrepresent book production, as
Reinhard Wittmann has argued; but the more reliable statistics provided
for the second half of the nineteenth century by the annual Börsenblatt für
den deutschen Buchhandel show that production came to 9,053 titles in
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 258

258 Book History

1850.30 A comparable French source, the annual Bibliographie de la France,

shows an output of 7,363 titles in 1850.31
Comparisons are more effective for the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, when British Wgures from the Publishers’ Circular can be aligned
with those from the German countries and France (Table 3). To be sure,
India had a much larger population and a much lower literacy rate than
the countries of Western Europe; but these Wgures, crude as they are, sug-
gest that book production in India was beginning to attain European lev-
els in the late nineteenth century.
A Wnal comparison indicates the volume of Indian production relative to
one of the most studied and most glorious periods in French literature, the
eighteenth century. Robert Estivals, who has measured almost everything
susceptible of measurement in the book trade of the Old Regime, concludes
that book production in the 1770s came to about 700 new works a year.
As calculated in requests for permission to publish new works (privilèges
and permissions tacites), the total output from 1724 to 1787 was 31,816
titles—about 16 percent of the output in India during a comparable Wfty-
year period in the nineteenth century.32 To be sure, eighteenth-century France
differed in so many respects from nineteenth-century India—particularly
in population: France, 26 million in 1790; India, 279 million in 1890—that
any comparison can be misleading. But a country that produced six times
as many books as did France at the height of the Enlightenment should
be acknowledged as a fertile territory for writers and readers, despite the
assessment of the alien ofWcials who watched, counted, and generally de-
plored its annual harvest of books.
Not that the statistics point to a triumphalist conclusion. They do not
provide a measurement of quality, and they may seem completely out of
place when applied to literature. If there is anything to be gained by quan-
tiWcation in the study of culture, it comes down in the end to a matter of
perspective. Statistics can reveal conWgurations and proportions that escape
other kinds of observation. As casual observers, the British projected their
own prejudices onto the “natives” instead of entering sympathetically into
what anthropologists call “the native’s point of view.” But when they
collected statistics, the ofWcials of the ICS came up with results that went

Table 3 Comparative book production in 1875 and 1900

German
Countries France Britain India
1875 12,516 14,195 4,904 4,000?
1900 24,792 20,951 7,149 6,000?
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 259

Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 259

beyond their range of vision. Even then, after laborious compilation, they
failed to see what shows through their reports: the emergence of a vital lit-
erary culture. It was indigenous but not sui generis, Indian but not unre-
lated to similar developments in the West. And whatever its peculiarities in
the eyes of the English, it amounted to a great deal more than “patchwork
clearances in the jungle.”

A Note on Statistics

In addition to the difWculties emphasized in this essay—arbitrary categories

and endless variety in the linguistic patterns of book production—the sta-
tistics drawn from the papers of the Indian Civil Service present a problem
of extrapolation. The Wgures given in the quarterly catalogues do not tally
with those in the annual reports, which usually are much larger. Either the
reports cover data that were not included in the catalogues—those cata-
logues that are now preserved in the India OfWce Collections of the British
Library—or the compilers of the reports made frequent, sloppy errors. The
former possibility seems more likely to me. I have therefore amalgamated
statistics from the reports, a procedure that has the additional advantage
of respecting the integrity of a single run of documents. Professor Priya
Joshi has compiled statistics directly from the catalogues, a procedure that
eliminates mistakes that may have been made higher up in the bureaucracy
during the preparation of the reports. Her results differ in some respects
from mine. Because it is so important not only to come up with overall esti-
mates of book production but also to allow for inadequacies in the sources,
we thought it advisable to follow my Wndings with a summary of hers. She
has therefore kindly agreed to contribute the following essay, which pro-
vides a perspective on the more detailed discussion that appears in her
book In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in
India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

Notes
1. James Long, Returns Relating to the Publications in the Bengali Language in 1857,
to which is Added a List of the Native Presses, with the Books Printed at Each, Their Prince
and Character, with a Notice of the Past Condition and Future Prospects of the Vernacular
Press of Bengal, and the Statistics of the Bombay and Madras Vernacular Presses (Calcutta,
1859) in Oriental and India OfWce Collections, the British Library, V/23/97. All subsequent
references are to these papers unless indicated otherwise.
2. Trial of the Rev. James Long, for the Publication of the Nil Darpan, with Documents
Connected with Its OfWcial Circulation (London, 1861), India OfWce, W 977. On the Nil
Darpan affair, see also “Tracts. Indigo, 143” and related documents scattered through
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 260

260 Book History

V/23/95 in the archives of the India OfWce as well as The History of the Nil Darpan, with the
State Trial of J. Long . . . (Calcutta, 1861), British Library 5318.c.4. For information about
Long, see the article on him in the Indian Dictionary of National Biography, ed. S. P. Sen (Cal-
cutta: Institute of Historical Studies, 1972–), 2:416–17.
3. “An Act for the Regulation of Printing Presses and Newspapers, for the Preservation
of Copies of Books Printed in British India, and for the Registration of Such Books,” Act No.
XXV of 1867 in India OfWce, V/8/40. The act was often referred to in the papers of the ICS
as the “Press and Registration of Books Act.”
4. For an extensive discussion of the catalogues, see my essay “Literary Surveillance in
the British Raj: The Contradictions of Liberal Imperialism,” Book History 4 (2001): 133–76.
I would like to express again my gratitude to Graham W. Shaw, deputy director of the Ori-
ental and India OfWce Collections, the British Library, for putting the catalogues at my dis-
posal and helping my research in the summers of 1994 and 1995.
5. “Publications Registered at Curator’s OfWce, Allahabad During the Year 1869,”
V/23/129.
6. “Publications Received at Curator’s OfWce, Allahabad During the Year 1870,”
V/23/129.
7. C. A. Elliott to M. Kempson, 11 April 1872, in “Report on Registered Publications
During 1871,” V/23/130.
8. “Books Submitted to Government by Native Writers” (1869), V/23/129.
9. Ibid.
10. “Books Submitted by Native Authors” (1870), V/23/129.
11. In a report on “Ganj-I-Garib,” a manuscript history of the world in Urdu by Munaver
Ali, which had been submitted for a prize, Kempson remarked (ibid.): “The whole concludes
with a dolorous description of the burdensome nature of the English rule, especially in the
way of taxes. This would be disloyal, were it not true. The fact of the matter is that our Native
Agency is not to be trusted. Where money is concerned, it practices villainy and extortion
under the name of the English Government. . . . These petty details read strangely in a book
which professes to be a history of the world, and their insertion indicates very forcibly the
narrowness and selWshness of the ordinary native’s horizon. But what can be expected from
a man who has a few Persian books only for his stock of information and is probably in debt
to his Buniah, with several needy idle relatives to maintain, and who may be on bad terms
with the petty native ofWcials of the neighborhood, especially if they are Hindus? He sees noth-
ing of the times but what the village sees, and thinks this history. At the same time, there must
be considerable distress and hardship among the masses to make this man speak as he has
spoken in these pages. It is bold language to say, ‘There is none to listen to the grievances—
the door of complaint is closed.’ But it is evidently true to the experience of many, and the
writer deserves credit for his outspokeness.”
12. Quoted in the report from Oudh for 1874 in “Reports on Publications Issued and
Registered in the Several Provinces of British India During the Year 1874,” V/23/28. These
reports were written in 1875 but drew on the catalogues produced quarterly in each of the
ten provinces of British India during 1874. The entire series of reports covers the years
1874–98. Their pagination is not consecutive, but they are divided into short sections, each
of which contains a provincial report; so quotations are cited by report.
13. For example, the report for Madras in “Reports on Publications Issued and Regis-
tered in the Several Provinces of British India During the Year 1878,” V/23/34 noted “It is
not always easy to determine the claim of any publication to be strictly classed under this head
[religion] when the writers mix up both religion and philosophy so constantly.”
14. “Publications Received at Curator’s OfWce, Allahabad During the Year 1870,” V/23/129.
15. “Report on Registered Publications During 1871,” V/23/130.
10chap10.qxd 10/1/02 10:22 AM Page 261

Book Production in British India, 1850–1900 261

16. “Reports on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British
India During the Year 1874,” report on Madras, V/23/28.
17. “Reports on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British
India During the Year 1878,” report on Bengal, V/23/34.
18. “Reports on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British
India During the Year 1898,” report on Madras, V/23/76.
19. “Reports on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British
India During the Year 1898,” report on Bengal, V/23/76.
20. On the question of censorship and the repression after 1905, see Darnton, “Literary
Surveillance in the British Raj,” and Gerald Barrier, Banned: Controversial Literature and
Political Control in British India, 1907–1947 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974).
21. The archives also contain reports from the Punjab, Central Provinces, British Burma,
Mysore and Coorg, Assam, and Hyderabad. In each case, the statistics on book production
were quite small and would not signiWcantly alter the patterns in the following tables, which
were compiled from the reports for the four main provinces scattered through “Reports on
Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British India” for 1878 and
1898, V/23/34 and V/23/76.
22. “Reports on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British
India During the Year 1874,” report on Mysore and Coorg, V/23/28: “All the works classed
as dramatical are Yasha gana, or compositions adapted to the stage. These plays, consisting
more of singing and recitative than of acting, are not of a high order of merit, nor is their per-
formance patronized as a rule by the upper classes, but they are extremely popular in some
parts of the country. The stage is generally a temporary one erected in the street, the artists are
men and boys, and the performance invariably lasts all night from about 9 p.m. to daylight.”
23. Ibid., report from the Punjab, V/23/28.
24. Ibid., report from Madras, V/23/28.
25. Ibid., report from Bombay, V/23/28.
26. “Reports on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British
India During the Year 1878,” report from Madras, V/23/34. Most of the other reports—
except, as usual, the report from Bengal—consisted of only a few pages of statistics and com-
mentary. In fact, the Bombay report reached the same conclusion, almost word for word, as
the Bombay report from 1874. The ICS did not summarize the reports, nor did it produce a
general essay or statistics on the state of literature in India as a whole.
27. “Report on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British
India During the Year 1898,” report on Bombay, V/23/76.
28. Ibid., report on Bengal, V/23/76.
29. The Wgures from the Publishers’ Circular have been taken from the appendix in
Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1986), 218. The categories are somewhat different from those in the Indian reports, and some
subjects have been omitted, so the Wgures do not add up to 100 percent. See also Simon Eliot,
Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919 in Occasional Papers of the Bib-
liographical Society, no. 8 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1994), especially the statistics in
Table C4, p. 128.
30. Reinhard Wittmann, “Das Literarische Leben 1848 bis 1880,” in Wittmann, Buch-
markt und Lektüre im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zum literarischen Leben 1750–1880
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982), 116–17. The Wgures include Swiss and Austro-Hungarian books
published in German and sold in the Leipzig Book Fair. They have been broken down by sub-
ject and by year in a useful study by Ilsedore Rarisch, Industrialisierung und Literatur (Berlin:
Colloquium Verlag, 1976), 102–5. I would like to thank Reinhard Wittmann for his help in
sorting out this complicated question.
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262 Book History

31. For a compilation of the statistics in the Bibliographie de la France, see Frédéric
Barbier, “The Publishing Industry and Printed Output in Nineteenth-Century France,” in
Kenneth E. Carpenter, ed., Books and Society in History (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983),
207–13.
32. Robert Estivals, La statistique bibliographique de la France sous la monarchie au
XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1965), 304, 343.