Print History: Katharine Smith Diehl - Printing in the East Indies

It must have been a wintry day in 1960 when Katharine Smith Diehl, an American librarian in her mid-fifties, first entered the hallowed portals of Serampore College. The college had been founded in 1818 by a group of missionaries affiliated to the Danish mission at Serampore. The material legacy of the mission and its prodigious mission press was now housed in the William Carey Historical Library at Serampore College. It had a valuable collection of early printed books and pamphlets in numerous Indian languages, many of them from the eighteenth century. Diehl, with over three decades of experience in handling books and managing libraries, had never seen such a fascinating and historically important collection.

After the two-year tenure of her Fulbright fellowship at the University of Dhaka ended, Diehl returned to Serampore College. Having secured a grant from the Lilly Endowment, she began to catalogue its library collections. As her linguistic skills were limited to English, Diehl had to rely on her collaborator, Hemendra Kumar Sircar, to catalogue the large number of non-English books in the collection. In mid-1962, the project culminated in an exhibition curated by Diehl, titled ‘Early Indian Imprints’. On display were three hundred books selected from the Carey Historical Library printed before 1850. The highlights of the exhibition included a Tamil Bible printed in 1714 at Tranquebar and a 1778 grammar of the Bengali language, the first book to be printed in Bengal.

The Calcutta correspondent of the Economic Weekly (10 November 1962) noted that, “The exhibition demonstrated, despite primitive equipment, what excellence was achieved in book production by men who worked with love and devotion, and whose knowledge was combined with taste. Almost all volumes, some involving extremely difficult problems, were well printed. Almost every volume had a quiet refinement, beauty and dignity that one associates with books. Some books were, of course, outstanding.” The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue compiled by Diehl and Sircar.

Katharine Smith Diehl came to Serampore a theological librarian but left it a print historian. For the next quarter century, she would attempt to explore the history of books and printers in India and beyond.

Before Serampore
Though women had been studying and teaching at American colleges from the middle of the nineteenth century, higher education for women got an impetus only in the early decades of the twentieth century with the first wave of feminism. Katharine Smith Diehl (1906–1989) was perhaps the first woman in her family to graduate with a college degree when she acquired a BA in Religious Education in 1926 from Boston University. In her graduation yearbook, Diehl is described as “one of our quiet girls. Nevertheless she has accomplished much in her quiet way… With the habit you’ve formed of working hard at all your tasks, you will surely be carried through life successfully.”

Diehl spent the next decade in various teaching jobs before deciding to acquire a degree in library science. After she became a qualified librarian, she joined the Texas Lutheran College as a librarian in 1938. Since ample funds were then available for growing American library collections, Diehl could grow the college library from 6,000 books to 31,000 books in a few years. She became a permanent fixture on the faculty; the 1946 college yearbook notes that: “During their first days on the campus, freshmen feel that Miss Diehl’s library orientation lectures are bothersome, but after she has taught them to use our library’s facilities, they find her courses acquaint them with the essentials.”

After spending fifteen years in a job with no prospects of advancement, Diehl left Texas in 1953 to acquire a master’s degree in library science from the University of Michigan. Thus began a long peripatetic phase in Diehl’s life. It would first take her to many American cities as a student and professor and, on being awarded a Fulbright fellowship, to many countries in Asia. She was already an accomplished bibliographer and had written for library journals. Her first book, Religions, mythologies, folklores: an annotated bibliography, appeared in 1956. She must also have worked on a related subject at the same time but her index on that subject, Hymns and Tunes, was published a decade later. Both these books are still considered essential handbooks by researchers in those fields.

Katharine Diehl arrived in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in July 1959 “to teach the techniques of librarianship at Dacca University, to students who knew little about libraries, possibly less about books, and virtually nothing about service.” Though she felt that most of the students were mediocre, Diehl sensed that “we did cause some sparks to fly. Those sparks lit some individuals to do significant study. All of that has been important to mutual understanding and real friendship.”

And then, Diehl discovered Serampore.

Serampore and later
Located a few miles upriver from Calcutta on the Hooghly, Serampore, also known as Fredericksnagore, was a Danish enclave from 1755 to 1845. Until 1813, the charter of the East India Company did not permit the entry of Christian missionaries into British India. A few of them sought to circumvent this rule by residing at Serampore while carrying on their missionary activities. They established a printing press, popularly known as the Serampore Mission Press, from which they published translations of the Bible in as many languages as they could. They also set up a type foundry to design and cast types of the scripts in which these languages were written. Within a few years, their printing activities were recognised as a landmark in the history of Indian printing. Until 1873, when the press was finally shut down, the Serampore Mission Press produced a prodigious number of imprints in a variety of subjects besides Christian literature.

When Diehl arrived in Serampore in 1962, the collection of books which had been organically built up in the library of the Serampore College was in a state of neglect. Though recognised as invaluable, it was slowly disintegrating. Diehl, with her background in theology and her expertise as a librarian, was perhaps best positioned to appreciate its value. She had discovered Serampore through the kind offices of Hemendra Kumar Sircar, her academic chaperone, and it was with his assistance that she could curate the exhibition ‘Early Indian Imprints’.

Though she returned to the United States towards the end of 1962, Diehl continued to work on the bibliography of books in the William Carey Historical Library. A substantial work of six hundred pages, the bibliography, also titled Early Indian Imprints, was Diehl’s first major contribution to Indian printing history. The byline added that she was “assisted in the oriental languages by Hemendra Kumar Sircar.” The book was published by the Scarecrow Press in 1964. The Scarecrow Press, founded in 1950, specialised in scholarly bibliographies, historical dictionaries and library science monographs. It was perhaps the only American publisher who would have published Diehl’s writings and she stuck with them until the end.

The scope of Early Indian Imprints was works published anywhere within the area administered by the East India Company dated 1850 or earlier and all later imprints of the Serampore Press until its closure in 1873. Sandwiched between a copious introduction and multiple indexes, the bibliographical entries are long and detailed, oftentimes ponderously so. Diehl did not shy away from adding her personal impressions; for example, William Taylor’s A Memoir of the first centenary of the earliest Protestant Mission in Madras (1847) provoked the following comments. After noting that the book was “brittle, almost powdery—but filled with minutiae of the founding of the Christian missions in South India,” Diehl, a few paragraphs later, could not resist adding parenthetically: (My note to myself, after reading the book: Too bad the book is so fragile—it is delightful; ksd). Besides AK Priolkar’s The Printing Press in India (1958), Diehl’s Early Indian Imprints was the only book to have a pan-Indian coverage. Constrained though its scope by the holdings of the Serampore library, it is, despite its many shortcomings, a landmark in the history of printing in India.

In 1964, Diehl joined as assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library Service, Rutgers University. By 1966, when she turned sixty, Diehl’s teaching sensibilities were considered too antiquated for the modern American university. Perforce, she decided to focus on research. While outlining the expectations of contemporary scholars from the librarian, Diehl was essentially describing herself:

What these professors want are not movers of books, not computer-oriented creatures, not folks who will tell other folks what to do, nor people who are unwilling to go digging for answers beyond the normal workweek. They are hunting people who—as university teaching faculty everywhere—work until the task is completed, until the problem is deemed solved, until the new ideas have been blended with those already in hand. They are hunting folks who can and will do original research, folks who can become committed to serious bibliography or historical/cultural studies, and folk who can and will work with them as their own independent projects are continued.

To prepare herself for a long research stint in India, Diehl joined Bengali language classes at the University of Chicago where she was a Research Fellow in South Asian Studies. She was back in Calcutta in 1967 with a two-year fellowship at the American Institute of Indian Studies. While working at the institute, Diehl continued to explore the Carey library at Serampore College. Besides books, it also housed 1600 pamphlets and ephemera, some of them printed as far back as 1625. Diehl compiled a catalogue titled Carey Library Pamphlets (secular series), published by the Serampore College in 1968. After two years in Calcutta, she spent two additional years (1970–72) in Sri Lanka and a few months in Jakarta before returning to the United States at the end of 1972. Wherever she went, she explored libraries, archives and private collections in search of pre-1850 imprints. Recalling this phase of her life, Diehl fondly notes that, “They were great years, those two in Dacca, as were quite a few later years at other locations elsewhere in Asia.”

By the mid-1970s, Diehl, nearing seventy years of age, went into retirement in Seguin, Texas. But there was more to come.

The magnum opus that never was
From the late ’60s, Diehl regularly published essays on printing history in a number of academic journals. In one of her research essays, she outlined her approach to printing history: “My focus has been the press, publishers and their products, people involved in the technology. Chiefly, my interest is people, their response to the press, and what they did with it in their tradition.” The subjects of Diehl’s essays were varied: Lucknow printers between 1820 and 1850, American printers in Asia, and the Dutch press in Sri Lanka in the eighteenth century. She contributed an essay on early imprints from Madras to the Fifth World Tamil Conference held in 1981; whether she travelled to Madurai to read the paper is not known. She attended a colloquium organised in Paris in March 1983 on ‘The Book and Printing in the Far East and South Asia’ where she read a paper on Catholic printing in India.

All these publications, however, were mere samples compared to the book project she had envisaged. It was a grand canvas which would hold all the discoveries she had made “during eight and a half years (of the period 1959-1972) of field research in South and Southeast Asia.” The first public announcement of this grand project is available in the 1983 newsletter of the American Printing History Association which notes that Diehl “is now awaiting the initial announcement of the first volume of her Printers and Printing in the East Indies to 1850, to be published by Aristide D. Caratzas of New Rochelle, NY, in eight volumes.” The announcement, slightly modified, appears in one of her essays, published in late 1986, where she notes that the book “in 8 volumes plus a large ninth volume of bibliography,” will be published “beginning with volume I scheduled for Winter 1985-86. Volume II is to follow directly.”

Diehl had been working on this multi-volume book for a long time; perhaps the first drafts of most of the volumes were ready by 1979 when she must have signed a publication contract with a new publisher. She was still revising them all through the ’80s but it was a race against time: she had been diagnosed with cancer in 1982. Diehl managed to send the manuscript of only the first volume to her publisher. This volume, which dealt with printing in Batavia, the capital of Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia), was published in 1990, a year after she died. The final drafts of the other volumes were sent in 1988 to Robert Frykenberg, her ex-colleague at the University of Chicago, who had been requested to oversee their publication. After Frykenberg promptly managed to lose the shipment, any hopes of the publication of the remaining volumes vanished.

Earlier drafts of the manuscript have been archived at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Each volume runs to over 600 manuscript pages; the Calcutta volume exceeds 750. A cursory perusal of some of the chapters reveal that Diehl had adopted the same strategy – overlong descriptions of books and copious extracts – she had used earlier in 1964 in Early Indian Imprints. Though not structured as a bibliography, each chapter is independent of the others and contains long bibliographical entries. The Bombay volume is divided into two sections, ‘Wand’ring Steps and Slow, Printing in Bombay’ and ‘Communications Network Expansion in Bombay Presidency’; and twelve chapters of varying length. The text betrays a lack of familiarity with the city and its citizens, with its languages and scripts, and, most importantly, with its imprints. On the other hand, the Calcutta volume seems better researched and more comprehensive in its findings.

Over fifty years have elapsed since the research for Diehl’s magnum opus was concluded and nearly forty since the book manuscript assumed its final shape. Much of her research has been superseded and many of her “discoveries” are now common knowledge. If she had chosen to focus on one volume at a time, Diehl might have made a definitive and lasting contribution to the history of printing in South Asia.

I am grateful to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin for sharing a listing of the contents of the Diehl papers as well as for sharing two sample chapters from the Bombay volume of Diehl’s manuscript. The unattributed quotations in the essay from the ‘Introduction’ to the Bombay volume. I am also grateful to Robert Frykenberg, Emeritus Professor of History and South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison for his personal email communication.