Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements Subject: History Lesson: Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements Course Developers The advent of printing and its implications Reform and revival: Brahmo samj;prarthana samaj; Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha Movements Debates around gender Making of religious and linguistic identities Caste and colonialism: Sanskritising and anti-Bramanical treand Dr. Charu Gupta Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi Language Editor: Swapna Liddle Formating Editor: Ashutos Kumar Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements Table of contents Chapter 6: Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements 6.1: The advent of printing and its implications 6.2: Reform and revival: Brahmo Samaj; Prarthana Samaj; Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj 6.3: Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha movements 6.4: Debates around gender 6.5: Making of religious and linguistic identities 6.6: Caste and colonialism: Sanskritizing and anti-Brahmanical trends Summary Exercises Glossary Further readings Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements 6.1: The advent of printing and its implications Power of print Print, language and literature have been viewed as significant means for contests over power, propagation of dominant ideas, a means of registering protest, and for the fashioning of national, regional and community identities in the modern world, including India. Changing perceptions of communications lie at the heart of transformations in culture. Further, as argues Stuart Blackburn, print should not be viewed just as an autonomous technology that brings with it its own logic and power, but as a practice mediated by the socio-cultural contexts of its production, enabling forging of new literary practices which accompany it (Blackburn 2003). In the colonial period, missionaries, pundits, literary scholars, socio-religious reformers, and nationalists extensively made use of print and press to disseminate their ideas among the wider public. These also became critical means for arousing, training, mobilising and consolidating nationalist public opinion. A preliminary debate There has been some debate among scholars about the impact of print on Indian society. Influenced by the seminal work of Benedict Anderson, some have argued that print and new literary sensibilities displaced the manuscript, as well as the oral and popular culture. However, others have effectively shown that despite the unabated growth, and later dominance, of the print form across India in the 19th and 20th centuries, there appears to be a strong continuity between the age of manuscript and that of print, as they ran parallel to, and lived off, each other. Not only did print capitalism not do away with pre-print capitalism forms of exchange, in many important ways, through the interplay between them, they reinforced and appropriated each other. Moreover, printed texts could be transmitted in varied idioms - educational, oral and performed; read and staged - each offering different meanings. The hearing public and reading public intermingled. Print also stimulated new expressions of vernacular literature, and gave them a wider diffusion. Thus colonial India offered an arena where printed, oral and visual media criss-crossed, leaving their imprint on each other. In the debate around print in colonial India there has been a tendency to make a sharp distinction between big, ‘elite’ presses, books printed from there and their subject matter and the small, ‘popular’ presses. The former is seen as dealing with ‘serious’ issues and ‘high’ literature, centring around social reforms, nationalism and religious identities, while the latter published ‘low’ literature like novellas, farces, plays, social tracts, almanacs, soft pornography and drawings. Simultaneously, it is argued that as the national movement grew, there was a dominance of the former over the latter. These claims have been questioned by the work of scholars like Anindita Ghosh (Ghosh 2006) and Charu Gupta (Gupta 2001). Through their work on popular literature published in Bengal and United Provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh) respectively, they argue that while the educated middle classes attempted to standardize writing and publishing, reading practices and the market often led them to incorporate some popular elements into their work. The efforts to cleanse language and writing from the ‘speech contamination’ of the lower classes and women produced dissent from within the Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements educated milieu. Similarly, popular publishing and literature selectively appropriated certain values of elite literature. Also, there appears to have been a diversified readership and tremendous popularity of cheap illustrated booklets and sensational stories churned out by the popular presses. No simplistic distinctions between elite and popular taste, male and female, upper class and lower class, wealthy and poor, would satisfactorily explain the growth and dissemination of print in colonial India. Beginnings of printing in India The history of Indian press and printing began with the coming of the Europeans. The first presses, two of them, arrived in India in 1550, though nothing was published till 1557 when a Catechism, reputedly by St Francis Xavier, was printed and circulated. The Portuguese first brought a printing press to Goa in the sixteenth century, and then the English East India Company set up a printing press in Bombay in 1684. However, for about a century no newspapers were published in the Company’s territories, as they wished to withhold news of their malpractices. The firstnewspapers in India were started by those Europeans who had grievances against the Company and resigned from its service to express them. The first newspaper was published in 1780 by James Augustus Hicky, called The Bengal Gazette. However, like the Company itself, the press in this period worked in a no-man’s land. The circulation of the newspapers during the early period never exceeded a few hundreds. Value addition: interesting details Hickey and The Bengal Gazette When Hickey started The Bengal Gazette, he stated: ‘I have no particular passion for printing of newspapers; I have no propensity; I was not bred to a slavish life of hard work, yet I take pleasure in enslaving my body in order to purchase freedom for my mind and soul.’It was a weekly that described itself as ‘a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none’. His paper specialised in the exposure of the private lives of servants of the Company including the Governor-General Warren Hastings. Enraged by this, Hastings persecuted Hickey. But he continued his career of courageous but scurrilous journalism till he was reduced to poverty and distress. Source: Rau, M. Chalapathi. 1974. The Press. Delhi: National Book Trust, 10-11. Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements Figure 6.1.1:Hicky’s Bengal Gazette Source: http://www.bl.uk/images/content/hicky2.jpg Missionaries were among the first to extensively use print in various parts of India to spread Christianity. They published not only in English but also in the vernacular. In some ways, they transformed the Indian languages in a number of respects. Missionaries created the first interlingual dictionaries and grammars and began to make translations of texts from one language to another. Scripts were rationalized and systematized to allow for printing and easier reading. Indians and printing Soon however the Indians too realized the power of print. The Indian publishing now turned from European and Christian enterprise to a newliterary culture where Indians produced and printed texts for Indian audiences. This was aided by certain developments from the 19th century, especially after 1857. There was a rapid expansion of improved means of organization and communication, along with market production, coinciding with the development of public institutions, English education, libraries, growing publishing houses, presses, newspapers, books and print culture. The dynamic print public sphere Indians’ encounter with Europeans led to a fundamental shift in the way they viewed their language: no longer only aspatrimony, but as a thing to be measured, known and used. Print greatly aided the growth of vernacular languages. Various languages like Bengali, Marathi and Tamil used print extensively for new kinds of knowledge production, social organisation and political mobilization. Simultaneously, there was the emergence of a dynamic new middle class. Many pundits, munshis, lawyers and social reformers became publishers in their own right, leading to the emergence of new kinds of literature. Not coincidentally, such printers provided the means for the publication and propagation of an anti-missionary campaign in the early 19th century, involving perhaps the first public gatherings and protests. However, the world of print did not just reflect the simplistic duality of colonizer- colonized, but also indicated a wider and more complex set of conflicts within colonised society itself. Printing became a critical means also for establishing one’s caste, class and gender identities. In the 19th century, language and its written literature was more than anything else, object of immense debate, scrutiny, and surveillance among the Indians Cultural changes and social and religious