Subscription Publishing and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Indian Print Culture

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• Subscription Publishing and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Indian Print Culture
• Joshua Ehrlich (bio)

The humble request of several Natives of Bengal.—We humbly beseech any Gentlemen will be so good to us as to take the trouble of making a Bengal Grammar and Dictionary, in which, we hope to find all the common Bengal country words made into English.

—Calcutta Gazette (23 Apr. 1789)

Mr. Cooper takes this method of informing the Natives, at whose request the Card was inserted in the last Calcutta Gazette, that if they will take the trouble of calling at his Printing-office, they may see part of a Bengal and English Vocabulary; which is now going on; and which may be speedily published if properly supported by Subscriptions…

—Calcutta Chronicle (30 Apr. 1789)

In recent years, many historians and other scholars have taken an interest in the print culture of South Asia, "the first fully formed print culture to appear outside of Europe and North America."¹ Almost invariably, they have dated its emergence to the nineteenth century. Printing in India before 1800, according to the consensus, was "entirely the preserve of Europeans."² This consensus has derived from the apparent paucity of instances before 1800 of the press "being used by Indians for Indians."³ And it is true that, with vanishingly few exceptions, it was only in later years that Indians managed presses or contracted with them. As the above exchange hints, however, Indians did in fact take an active part in print culture in the late eighteenth century. They did so in two principal ways: as readers and as patrons.

Even on the basis of existing evidence, it would seem that Indian contacts with print in this period have been downplayed. It is well known, for instance, that some Indians contributed to periodicals, many read them, and an even greater number heard them read. The India hand Joseph Price claimed in 1783 that "newspapers are as much read in Asia as in London."⁴ [End Page 32] Around the same time, newspapers in Calcutta—and shortly afterward, in Madras and Bombay—began to carry items in local languages (figure 1).⁵ Many Indians first encountered print in the form of religious texts sent from Europe or produced in missionary enclaves.⁶ By one estimate, as many as 250,000 Indians were exposed to printed Tamil Bibles before 1800.⁷ Perhaps as many saw or handled the official documents with which Bengal, at least, was awash by the 1780s.⁸ Meanwhile, Indians were as extensively involved in the production of print as they were in the consumption of it. Most printing offices were "worked by natives."⁹ At least one newspaper was financed by them.¹⁰ A few productions were edited by Muslims.¹¹ A few others were edited and printed by Parsis.¹² Still, for all of this evidence, scholars of Indian print culture have written out the eighteenth century. This article uses a rich and untapped source on book reading and patronage to write it back in.

What is most striking about the exchange cited above between the "several Natives of Bengal" and the printer Joseph Cooper is its air of regularity. There was clearly nothing strange about Indians sponsoring a publication—nor about them doing so through subscription. Subscription publishing has been extensively treated by scholars of eighteenth-century Britain, Europe, and North America.¹³ Subscription lists have been exhaustively used by such scholars to reconstruct networks of readership and patronage.¹⁴ Yet neither the practice nor the attendant material has been much examined in other contexts.¹⁵ This study is the first to examine them at any length in the context of British India.¹⁶ It finds not only that subscription publishing was popular there but that it was so among Indians in particular (figure 2).¹⁷ Indian names, while less prevalent than European ones, appear on nearly half of the extant lists of subscribers to books published in India in the eighteenth century; overall, the article identifies 106 subscriptions by 102 Indians to 138 copies of twelve titles (see appendix).¹⁸ These numbers attest to the existence, by the late eighteenth century, of a community of...