Print Culture and the Modern World: Class 10 History · Chapter 5

Count the printed things you meet before school today. There is the date stamped on a milk packet, a calendar with festivals marked on it, the morning newspaper, a bus pass and the cover of this textbook. Print is so ordinary that we hardly notice it, and almost never ask where it came from.

Yet for most of human history there was no print at all. Books were copied by hand, and most people heard stories rather than read them. We start in East Asia, where printing began, cross to Europe, and end in India. Along the way we ask a bigger question: how did a new way of copying words change the way people thought, prayed, argued and were governed?

5.1 The First Printed Books

Open an old Chinese book and it may fold out like a concertina. That shape comes straight from the way it was printed. From AD 594, books in China were printed by hand from carved wooden blocks, a method also used in Japan and Korea. The printer inked the raised characters on a block, laid a sheet of paper over them and rubbed its back. Paper was itself a Chinese invention, and this paper was thin and absorbent: ink soaked through, so only one side of a sheet could carry print. The printed sheets were therefore folded and stitched together along one edge into an 'accordion book' (Fig. 5.1).

Skilled carvers could reproduce a master's calligraphy so faithfully that the printed page kept the beauty of fine handwriting.

Who kept China's printers busy? For centuries the answer was the government. China's officials were recruited through tough written examinations, and the imperial state sponsored enormous print runs of the textbooks that candidates had to master. From the sixteenth century more and more men sat these examinations, and printing grew with them.

By the 1600s, print had escaped the examination hall. In China's booming cities, merchants relied on printed material to gather trade information, and reading became a leisure activity. Popular titles included fiction, poetry, life stories, anthologies of great literature and romantic plays. Wealthy women read eagerly and many published poems and plays; women authors ranged from the wives of scholar-officials to courtesans writing about their own lives.

Machines came much later, in the late nineteenth century, along with the trading outposts of Western powers. Shanghai, with its Western-style schools, became the hub of this new print culture, and China slowly shifted from hand printing to mechanical printing.

5.1.1 Print in Japan

Printing reached Japan from China around AD 768–770, carried by Buddhist missionaries. The oldest printed book that bears a date is Chinese: the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of AD 868. It is made of six sheets of text with woodcut pictures. Japanese printers did not stop at books; they printed pictures on cloth, playing cards and paper money. By the medieval period, readers in Japan could easily buy the work of their poets and prose writers, because books were plentiful and cheap.

Printed pictures shaped city life too. In the late eighteenth century, Edo (today's Tokyo) bought illustrated albums of paintings that celebrated a stylish urban world of artists, courtesans and teahouse gatherings. Its libraries and bookshops were crammed with hand-printed books. They covered almost every subject: cookery and good manners, flower arranging and the tea ceremony, arithmetic, musical instruments, famous places to visit and books about women.

5.2 Print Comes to Europe

For centuries, caravans on the silk route had carried Chinese silk and spices westward. Around the eleventh century they brought something that mattered even more for books: Chinese paper. Paper made it far easier for Europe's scribes to produce handwritten books, or manuscripts.

In 1295 the Venetian explorer Marco Polo came home to Italy after many years in China, and he brought back knowledge of woodblock printing. Italians began to print books from woodblocks, and the method soon spread to other parts of Europe. Who bought these early printed books? Mostly merchants and students in university towns, who wanted texts they could afford. Nobles and wealthy monasteries kept ordering luxury copies written by hand on costly vellum, and sneered at printed books as cheap and vulgar.

Demand kept rising. Books were traded across borders, and book fairs became regular events in several towns. Booksellers even reorganised hand-copying: instead of serving only wealthy or powerful patrons, scribes now also worked for booksellers, and one bookseller might keep more than 50 of them busy. It was still not enough (see the comparison).

Europe needed a much quicker and cheaper way to copy long texts. The breakthrough came in the 1430s at Strasbourg (then a German-speaking city, now in France), where Johann Gutenberg built the first known printing press.

5.2.1 Gutenberg and the Printing Press

Gutenberg's invention was a clever mix of things he already knew. A merchant's son raised on a big agricultural estate, he had grown up around wine presses and olive presses. As a young man he learnt stone polishing, became a master goldsmith and gained skill in making lead moulds for casting trinkets. The olive press suggested the design of a printing press; the moulds suggested a way to cast metal letters.

By 1448 his system worked. His first book was the Bible: about 180 copies, which took three years to finish. That sounds slow today, but for its day it was remarkably quick.

The key idea was movable type. Gutenberg cast a separate metal piece for each letter of the Roman alphabet. A compositor arranged the pieces into words and lines; after printing they could be taken apart and reused for the next page. A woodblock, by contrast, had to be carved afresh by hand for every page. Turning the press's handle drove the platen down onto the paper and the inked type. The press could print about 250 sheets, on one side, every hour (Fig. 5.2). Movable type stayed the basic printing technology for the next 300 years.

Print did not kill off the old book arts at once. Look closely at an early printed book and it seems handwritten. The metal letters copy decorative scripts, and painted borders and pictures, added by hand, frame the text. Printers working for wealthy customers left blank spaces so that each owner could pick the decoration and the school of painters to supply it. Gutenberg's Bible itself was printed in black, with gaps where artists later added colour by hand to highlight holy words. As a result no two copies match exactly, which suited the elite: each owner could boast of a unique book. Fewer than 50 copies survive today.

Printing spread fast. Within a century of 1450, most European countries had presses of their own, many started by German printers who went abroad looking for work. Book output exploded. About 20 million printed copies reached Europe's markets in the second half of the fifteenth century; in the sixteenth century the figure was about 200 million, ten times as many. Historians call this move from hand printing to machine printing the print revolution.

5.3 The Print Revolution and Its Impact

Historians call these changes a revolution because print did far more than speed up book-making. It altered how ordinary people came by information and knowledge, how they viewed the Church, the state and other authorities, and what they believed. In short, it gave people new ways of seeing the world. Here are some of those changes.

5.3.1 A New Reading Public

The first change was price. Once a press was running, each extra copy cost little time or labour, so books became cheaper and far more plentiful, and the number of readers kept growing.

Picture a village tea stall where one person reads the newspaper aloud and a dozen others listen. For most of history, that was how most people met words. Reading was largely for the elite; everyone else lived in an oral culture, hearing sacred texts read out, ballads sung and folk tales told, and watching performances together. Knowledge passed by word of mouth, and people shared a story as a group rather than reading it alone and silently. Books were too scarce and costly for anything else. Print turned this hearing public into a reading public.

But there was a problem: most Europeans could not read, and literacy stayed low in most countries until the twentieth century. How do you sell books to people who cannot read them? Printers found a way. They printed what people already loved to hear, ballads and folk tales, with plenty of pictures. These booklets were sung and read aloud at village gatherings and in taverns, the inns where townspeople met to eat, drink and swap news. So oral culture found its way into print, while printed material spread by word of mouth. Listeners and readers mingled, and the boundary between a hearing public and a reading public blurred (Fig. 5.3).

5.3.2 Religious Debates and the Fear of Print

A printed pamphlet could reach thousands of people who would never hear its author speak. That opened up a new world of debate. Critics of the powerful could now publish their arguments, circulate them widely and try to change people's minds, or even stir them to act. This was true in many areas of life.

Who would be afraid of a book? Quite a few powerful people, it turned out, and even some who welcomed books in general. Monarchs and church leaders, along with many writers and artists, were uneasy about what easy access to print might do to ordinary minds. Without control over printing and reading, they warned, irreligious and rebellious ideas would spread and 'valuable' literature would lose its standing. This anxiety lay behind much of the criticism aimed at the new printed books.

Religion shows both sides of print most clearly. In 1517 a German monk and university teacher, Martin Luther, set out ninety-five objections to the way the Roman Catholic Church worked. Among them was its sale of 'indulgences' (pardons for sins). These Ninety-Five Theses went up in printed form on a church door in Wittenberg as a challenge to debate. Presses copied Luther's writings in vast numbers, readers everywhere took them up, and the quarrel split the Church: this was the start of the Protestant Reformation. Demand for Luther's own German New Testament was so great that 5,000 copies went in a few weeks, and a second edition was needed within three months.

Many scholars think print created a new intellectual climate in which the ideas behind the Reformation could spread fast (Fig. 5.4).

5.3.3 Print and Dissent

Popular religious books did something the Church had not expected: they encouraged ordinary people, even those with little education, to think about their faith for themselves. Take Menocchio, a sixteenth-century miller in Italy. He read the books available in his area and pieced together his own understanding of the Bible. His ideas about God and the creation of the world infuriated the Roman Catholic Church. The Church had set up an Inquisition to root out heretical beliefs; Menocchio was tried by it twice and finally executed.

Troubled by readers like Menocchio, the Church imposed strict controls on publishers and booksellers. From 1558 it kept an Index of Prohibited Books: a list of titles Catholics were forbidden to read.

5.4 The Reading Mania

Literacy in Europe kept climbing through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Village schools played a big part: churches of various denominations (branches of the same religion) opened them, and peasants and artisans learnt to read there. In some regions 60 to 80 per cent of people were literate by the close of the eighteenth century. The result was a hunger for books so strong that people spoke of a 'reading mania', and printers kept raising their output to feed it.

To reach these new readers, booksellers sent pedlars from village to village with little books to sell. Alongside almanacs, ballads and folk tales, they carried reading meant mainly for entertainment (Table 5.1). Books came in many sizes, for many purposes and interests.

Regular publications appeared too. From the early eighteenth century, newspapers and journals, known together as the periodical press, mixed reports on current affairs, wars, trade and distant places with entertainment.

Readers could now follow science and philosophy as well. Printers brought out collections of ancient and medieval scientific works, along with maps and diagrams. Once Isaac Newton's discoveries were in print, they reached a far wider circle of readers interested in science than any lecture hall could hold. Works by Voltaire, Rousseau and Thomas Paine were printed and read in large numbers, and their faith in science, reason and rational thought seeped into popular writing.

5.4.1 'Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!'

Today we often hear that education can transform a country. Many eighteenth-century Europeans said the same about books. By the middle of the century, a common belief held that books carried progress and enlightenment. They would make the world better, free society from tyranny and despotism, and bring a time when reason and intellect ruled.

The French novelist Louis-Sébastien Mercier (spelt 'Louise-Sebastien' in some books) was among the most confident. In his eyes the printing press was the strongest force for progress, and public opinion would sweep despotism away. Reading transforms the heroes of his novels: they devour books, get lost in the worlds books create and come out enlightened. Sure that print would destroy despotism, he issued a famous warning:

5.4.2 Print Culture and the French Revolution

Did print cause the French Revolution of 1789? Some historians go a long way towards saying yes: in their view, print culture prepared the conditions in which the Revolution broke out. They usually make three arguments (Fig. 5.5).

1. It spread Enlightenment ideas. Thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau questioned tradition, superstition and despotism, and insisted that reason, not custom, should be the test of everything. They challenged the Church's claim to sacred authority and the king's unlimited power, so an order resting on tradition began to look less legitimate. Their many readers learnt to look at the world in a questioning, critical and rational way.
2. It built a culture of debate. Having discovered the power of reason, readers began to discuss and re-evaluate every value, norm and institution. New ideas of social revolution grew out of this public conversation.
3. It made the monarchy a joke. In the 1780s a flood of writing ridiculed the royal family and questioned its morals. Cartoons and caricatures showed the king and nobles enjoying themselves while ordinary people suffered great hardship. This literature circulated underground and spread hostility to the monarchy.

Historians accept that print helps ideas travel, but they add a caution. French readers did not stick to a single kind of reading: alongside Voltaire and Rousseau, they read propaganda for the monarchy and the Church. Nor did readers simply believe whatever reached them. They took up some ideas, threw out others and made their own sense of things. So print did not programme people's thinking; what it did was make it possible for them to think otherwise.

5.5 The Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, mass literacy in Europe took huge leaps forward. Three large groups of new readers appeared: children, women and workers.

5.5.1 Children, Women and Workers

Children. Once the late nineteenth century made primary schooling compulsory, children turned into a major reading public, and school textbooks became essential to the publishing trade. France got a press devoted only to children's literature in 1857; it printed fresh stories and also old fairy and folk tales. In Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm spent years gathering traditional tales from peasants. Their 1812 collection left out whatever seemed unfit for children or crude to the elite. So print preserved village tales while also reshaping them.

Women. Women mattered to publishers as readers and also as writers. Penny magazines targeted them, as did manuals on good manners and housekeeping, and novelists counted on a large female readership. Several of the century's most famous novelists were women: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. Their heroines helped define a new kind of woman, one with will, a strong personality, determination and the power to think for herself.

Workers. Lending libraries dated back to the seventeenth century. In nineteenth-century England they became a way for clerks and other white-collar workers, craftsmen and the lower middle class to educate themselves. From the mid-nineteenth century working hours slowly came down, leaving workers some time to improve and express themselves. Some, self-taught, began writing political tracts and autobiographies of their own, in large numbers (Table 5.2).

5.5.2 Further Innovations

Printing machines kept getting faster. Metal replaced wood in presses by the late eighteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century a New York inventor, Richard M. Hoe, had perfected a power-driven cylindrical press. It could turn out 8,000 sheets an hour, which made it ideal for newspapers. The late nineteenth century brought the offset press, able to print as many as six colours in one run. From about 1900, electric presses sped things up further (Fig. 5.6).

A string of smaller improvements followed: better ways of feeding paper, better printing plates, automatic paper reels, and photoelectric controls that kept the colours exactly in line (the colour register). Added together, these changes transformed how printed pages looked.

Printers and publishers also kept inventing new ways to sell. Nineteenth-century magazines printed important novels in instalments, which encouraged a particular style of writing in episodes; Charles Dickens's early novels, for example, first appeared in monthly parts. In the 1920s, English publishers sold popular works in cheap series known as the Shilling Series. The dust cover, or book jacket, is a twentieth-century innovation. When the Great Depression of the 1930s threatened book sales, publishers brought out cheap paperback editions; the Penguin paperbacks launched in Britain in 1935 are a famous example.

5.6 India and the World of Print

How did India write, copy and read before print, and when did the printing press arrive? Let us find out.

5.6.1 Manuscripts Before the Age of Print

India's tradition of handwritten books is very old and very rich. Manuscripts survive in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian and in many regional languages, copied onto dried palm leaves or handmade paper, sometimes with beautiful illustrations. Pages were sewn together or pressed between wooden covers to keep them safe. Even after printing arrived, manuscripts kept being made, right up to the late nineteenth century.

Yet manuscripts never became part of everyday life. They cost a great deal, they were easily damaged and had to be handled with care, and the many different styles of script made them hard to read (Fig. 5.7). Village schools tell the same story. Pre-colonial Bengal had a dense network of primary schools, but pupils there often never read a text: the teacher recited passages from memory and the class wrote them down. Many people therefore learnt to write without ever reading a book.

5.6.2 Print Comes to India

India's first printing press arrived in Goa in 1556, brought by Portuguese missionaries. The Jesuit priests there learnt the local language, Konkani, and used the press for religious tracts; some 50 titles had appeared in Konkani and Kanara by 1674. Further south, Catholic priests produced the first Tamil book at Cochin in 1579, and the first Malayalam book followed in 1713. Dutch Protestant missionaries, meanwhile, had printed 32 Tamil texts by 1710, most of them translations of older writings (Print arrives in India).

English printing was a latecomer. The East India Company had been importing presses since the late seventeenth century, yet English printing took off only in 1780, and through private enterprise rather than the government. That year James Augustus Hickey (also spelt Hicky) began editing a weekly, the Bengal Gazette, which boasted of being free of colonial influence:

Hickey's paper ran a great many advertisements, some of them for the buying and selling of slaves, and it delighted in gossip about the Company's top officials. That gossip enraged the Governor-General, Warren Hastings. He hounded Hickey and backed newspapers with official approval, which could push back against reports that hurt the government's image. By 1800 several newspapers and journals were appearing, and Indians had started papers of their own. The earliest was a weekly, also called the Bengal Gazette, published by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, an associate of Rammohun Roy.

5.7 Religious Reform and Public Debates

Imagine an argument that, instead of happening in one courtyard, is fought out in newspapers read in dozens of towns. That is what print did to religious debate in nineteenth-century India. As colonial rule changed society, Indians of every faith asked what their traditions really taught. Reformers wanted to change customs; others defended them and answered the reformers point by point. Both sides argued in public, through printed tracts and newspapers. Print did not just carry these arguments: it changed their character, drew in a far larger audience who could now voice opinions, and let new ideas emerge from the clash (Fig. 5.8).

In Bengal the arguments centred on widow immolation (sati), monotheism (belief in one God), the power of Brahman priests and the worship of idols. As the debate grew, so did the number of tracts and newspapers, and to reach ordinary readers they were written in the everyday spoken language. From 1821 Rammohun Roy brought out the Sambad Kaumudi; to counter him, the orthodox camp commissioned a rival paper, the Samachar Chandrika. The year 1822 saw two Persian newspapers, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, and a Gujarati one, the Bombay Samachar, which is still published today.

Muslim scholars in north India faced their own crisis. The ulama watched the Muslim ruling dynasties collapse and worried that the new colonial rulers would push conversion and tamper with Muslim personal law. Their answer was print. Cheap lithographic presses let them issue Persian and Urdu translations of the scriptures, religious tracts and newspapers. The Deoband seminary, founded in 1866 (the textbook gives 1867), sent out an enormous number of fatwas: rulings that guided believers on everyday conduct and explained Islamic doctrine. As the century went on, rival Muslim sects and seminaries multiplied, each with its own reading of the faith and each eager to gain followers and answer its opponents. Urdu print gave them a public stage for these contests.

Hindu religious reading grew too, above all in the regional languages. Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in the sixteenth century; its first printed edition appeared in Calcutta in 1810. Within a few decades, cheap lithographed copies were flooding the markets of north India. From the 1880s two big presses, the Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow and Bombay's Shri Venkateshwar Press, poured out religious texts in regional languages. A printed book could go anywhere in a bag, be read whenever its owner wished, or be read aloud to a crowd of listeners who could not read. Sacred texts thus reached far more people than before, and so did the discussions, debates and controversies about them, both inside each religion and between religions.

Print divided, but it also connected. Newspapers carried news from one region to another, so people in distant parts of India began to feel part of a larger whole: the beginnings of pan-Indian identities.

5.8 New Forms of Publication

As reading spread, readers wanted books about people like themselves, with their experiences, feelings and relationships. The novel, which had taken shape in Europe, answered this need, and Indian writers soon made it their own, with new themes and styles. Novels let readers enter unfamiliar lives and showed how varied human experience could be.

Lyric poems, short stories and essays on social and political questions joined the novel. Each in its own way focused on people's lives and inner feelings, and on the social and political rules that shaped them.

Pictures, too, entered the age of mass copying by the late nineteenth century, creating a new visual culture. With presses multiplying, one image could be printed thousands of times. Raja Ravi Varma painted many scenes from mythology for exactly this purpose, and from 1894 his own lithographic press in Bombay printed them. Poor wood engravers opened workshops beside the letterpresses and took orders from print shops. In the bazaar, cheap prints and calendars cost so little that even poor families could hang them at home or at work. These images began to shape how ordinary people imagined religion and politics, tradition and modernity, society and culture (Fig. 5.9).

Cartoons arrived too. From the 1870s, journals and newspapers carried caricatures commenting on social and political life. Some laughed at educated Indians for aping Western dress and tastes; others voiced alarm at social change. Cartoons also became political weapons: imperial cartoonists mocked the nationalists, and nationalist cartoonists hit back at imperial rule.

5.8.1 Women and Print

Novels and reform debates turned women's lives into a public subject, written about with new vividness and feeling, and reading among women in middle-class homes rose sharply. Liberal fathers and husbands taught the women of the family at home. Once schools for girls opened in towns and cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, they sent them there. Journals printed women's own writing and argued the case for educating them; some even supplied a syllabus and suitable reading for lessons at home.

Not every family agreed. Some conservative Hindus held that a girl who could read would end up a widow, and some conservative Muslims worried that Urdu romances would lead educated women astray. Some women simply defied the ban. One girl from a conservative Muslim family in north India was expected to read only the Quran in Arabic, a language she did not understand. She insisted on learning a language she could call her own and secretly learnt to read and write Urdu. Rashsundari Debi, a young wife in a strictly orthodox household in East Bengal, taught herself to read in secret in her kitchen in the early nineteenth century. Decades later she wrote Amar Jiban (1876), the first full-length autobiography published in Bengali.

Since reform debates and novels had made women's lives a public topic, readers were also curious about what women themselves would say. From the 1860s a few Bengali women writers, among them Kailashbashini Debi, described the lives women led. They were locked indoors and kept ignorant, loaded with heavy housework and treated unfairly by the very family members they looked after. Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai, writing in the 1880s in present-day Maharashtra, angrily exposed the misery of upper-caste Hindu women, and of widows above all. A character in a Tamil novel of the period captures what books meant to women hemmed in by social rules. Her world is narrow, she says, yet reading has given her more than half the joy in her life.

Print in Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi had grown early; serious Hindi printing began only in the 1870s, and a large share of it soon went to educating women. In the early twentieth century, women's journals, some edited by women themselves, became hugely popular. Their pages debated the national movement, widow remarriage, the condition of widows and the schooling of girls. Some also gave tips on housekeeping and fashion, and entertained readers with short stories and novels in instalments.

Not all print for women aimed to set them free. Punjab saw a flood of similar popular writing in the early twentieth century. Ram Chaddha's Istri Dharm Vichar sold fast by teaching women to be obedient wives. The Khalsa Tract Society issued cheap booklets with the same message, many of them dialogues on the qualities of a 'good woman'.

Calcutta had a whole neighbourhood, Battala, given over to popular publishing. Its shops sold cheap religious tracts and scriptures side by side with books that respectable society called obscene and scandalous. Many Battala books were, by the late nineteenth century, crowded with woodcuts and coloured lithographs. Pedlars carried them from door to door, and women at home could read them in their free hours.

5.8.2 Print and the Poor People

Print found its way to poor readers as well. In the market towns of nineteenth-century Madras, tiny, very cheap books were sold at crossroads, where poor people heading to market could pick them up. Public libraries, which opened from the early twentieth century, made books easier to reach, though mostly in cities and towns and only sometimes in well-off villages. Wealthy local patrons often founded them, because a library brought its founder prestige.

Print also became a weapon against caste. From the late nineteenth century, tracts and essays attacked caste discrimination. Jyotiba Phule, who led protest movements of 'low castes' in Maharashtra, laid bare the injustice of the caste system in Gulamgiri ('Slavery'), published in 1873 (the textbook gives 1871). Twentieth-century critics of caste, notably B. R. Ambedkar from Maharashtra and E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) from Madras, wrote with great force, and readers across India took up their work. Local protest movements and sects added a stream of journals and tracts that questioned ancient scriptures and pictured a fairer future.

Factory workers rarely had the time or schooling to write about their own lives, but a few did. In 1938 Kashibaba, a millworker in Kanpur, published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal ('The Question of Small and Big'), linking caste exploitation to class exploitation. A second Kanpur millworker, using the pen name Sudarshan Chakr, composed poems between 1935 and 1955; they were later collected as Sacchi Kavitayan. By the 1930s, Bangalore's cotton millworkers, copying what Bombay's workers had done, had opened libraries for their own education. Social reformers funded these libraries, hoping to cut down heavy drinking, spread literacy and sometimes win workers over to nationalism.

5.9 Print and Censorship

Governments reveal how powerful they think print is by trying to control it. Until 1798, the Company's government in India paid little attention to censorship. Curiously, its first curbs were aimed not at Indians but at Englishmen in India who attacked Company misrule and loathed particular officers. The worry was that critics back in England would seize on such attacks to challenge the Company's trade monopoly in India.

Controls grew in the 1820s, when the Calcutta Supreme Court issued regulations restricting the press, while the Company promoted papers that sang the praises of British rule. Editors of both English and Indian-language papers petitioned urgently against the curbs, and in 1835 Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise the press laws. The new rules, drawn up by the liberal official Thomas Macaulay, brought back the freedoms of earlier years.

The revolt of 1857 hardened official attitudes. Angry Englishmen called for a crackdown on the 'native' press, and as Indian-language newspapers became boldly nationalist, the government weighed up strict controls. The result was the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, modelled on Ireland's press laws. It gave the government sweeping power to censor what Indian-language papers printed, from news reports to editorials. Officials now monitored vernacular newspapers in every province. A report judged seditious brought a warning; if the paper ignored it, the government could seize the press and confiscate the printing machinery (Fig. 5.10).

Repression did not silence the nationalist press. Across India, nationalist papers kept multiplying, exposing colonial misrule and encouraging nationalist activity. Every effort to throttle them provoked militant protest, which brought more persecution and then more protest. Revolutionaries from Punjab were deported in 1907, and a year later young revolutionaries in Bengal turned to bombs. Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote about them with great sympathy in his newspaper Kesari. In 1908 he was convicted of sedition and sentenced to six years in prison. His imprisonment set off protests all over India, including a strike by Bombay's mill workers.