You have mediated your engagement with print as a historian of labour. How does this approach contrast with traditional forms of print history?
Two central questions have motivated my engagement with print history. First, I’m interested in how labourers navigated the development of the print economy, and particularly how print labourers engaged with lithographic technologies. I explore how workers used and adapted their technical skills within the presses and how they organised themselves socially and politically as press workers. I’ve focused especially on the development of scribal labour within lithographic presses, but also examined the relationships between scribal workers and other print labourers including machine-men, book-binders, and others.

The second question that motivates my work is how labourers and artisans from across a wide range of trades and industries engaged with an increasingly accessible print economy in turn-of-the-century India. I have focused on technical manuals and community histories that were written for workers such as stone masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths, and which offered both information about new technologies and access to community religious histories. Working on the circulation of print in these communities has meant asking how people with differing levels of literacy engaged with printed texts, and thinking about the intersections of print, orality, and the text as material object. I have also explored how printed texts took on community functions, as they were read aloud and memorised, or used as sacred or social objects.

South Asian print histories, particularly of print consumption and circulation, have tended to be intellectual histories of the middle classes, or have focused on how the middle classes cultivated new literary, social, and political cultures through print. We need those histories, and I build on many of them! But those are not the topics and questions that I personally find most interesting. I’ve always been most interested in practices of making and the adaptation of technical skill sets, and I’ve wanted to know more about how print objects are used beyond elite and middle-class communities.

What sources have you relied upon to construct a history of print labour?
To write about the history of labour in print, I’ve sought to draw together a range of sources and materials. These include technical manuals and treatises about scribal work and other aspects of lithographic printing and bookmaking, as well as government reports on the presses, some union and labour organisation records, and discussions of the presses in the Urdu- and English-language media. In my book especially, I sought to place technical manuals and treatises (primarily written in Urdu) at the centre and to take their authors’ perspectives as a starting point, rather than starting from the state or colonial perspective. I was most interested in the ways of working and knowing that were reflected in texts that circulated in labouring and artisan communities, and then I used the other materials to build out the story of social and political positionality of those communities.

One thing that I have noticed and struggled with is the way that the categories of the colonial archive surreptitiously work their way into our scholarship, even when we’re trying to read and write against them. For those of us who work on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonial archival record is so vast and so dependent on precise categories and forms of organisation that it can be difficult to avoid adopting those categories and frameworks as our own. I am not sure if I’ve always succeeded, but I try very hard to see the colonial archive as supplemental—not a starting point—in much of my work, and to begin with material that likely circulated among the communities that I wish to study.

Could you describe the experience of working in a typical turn-of-the-century lithographic print shop in north India?
Lithographic workshops differed significantly in terms of size and scale. There were very small workshops where the owner or manager would be closely involved in the work and they employed only a small number of people, who might have both scribal skills and mechanical, printing skills. An 1885 scribal manuscript from Rampur that I discuss in my book reflected this type of small-scale press organisation. It described how scribes would first write a text upon starched paper using a grease crayon which they made themselves. The scribes in these small presses also carried out physical press work, and they were joined by a few other workers and managers who engaged in oversight. The scribes and other workers would heat lithographic printing stones and lightly dampen the copy paper and place the paper on the stones to transfer the text to the stones. These would then be covered with a water and gum arabic mix and left to set. Subsequently they would apply ink and oil to the stones using an ink rollers, and then finally they used a hand-cranked press to transfer the text from the stone onto the printing paper. Small presses would often employ local scribes from area workshops as pieceworkers. They worked alongside labourers who maintained the hand-presses, cleaned, and supported the mechanical processes.

But there were also presses that were among the largest Indian-owned factories in several cities, employing dozens or hundreds of people in specialised roles. In the large lithographic presses in cities like Delhi, Lucknow, Lahore, Agra, and Kanpur, people specialised in the different steps of the process, and it was less common to see scribes or managers taking up the mechanical work of printing. These presses employed machinists and fitters, stone-wipers, ink-makers, cleaners, book-binders, and others who had dedicated roles within the process of printing. Towards the turn of the twentieth century, many of the large presses adopted steam lithography, which streamlined the process by using automatic rolls to put the ink on the stone and press the paper. This lessened some of their physical labour requirements, but they still needed to employ people to support the upkeep of the machines, some of the work of preparing the stones, and of course scribal work. While the materials produced in small and large presses was often similar, the organisation of the labour force and the types of skills different workers were expected to use differed significantly.

An illustration of a hand-operated lithographic press from an Urdu technological manual, Makhzan-al Fawaid (1909)

Besides working on print labour, you have also engaged with printing and publication history in Persian and Pashto, Indian languages which have now been relegated to the margins?
There is extensive body of scholarship on the process by which Persian went from a central, vital language of South Asian intellectual, courtly, literary, and political production to a language that was seen as marginal or external to the region. Personally, I’ve long been fascinated by the areas in which Persian persisted in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India, including its print history. In fact, my initial interest in print history was sparked by a summer spent interning at the Library of Congress, where I worked with an (at the time) uncatalogued collection of Indian Persian lithographs from the 1850s and 1950s. In my MA thesis and some subsequent work, I focused on the relationship between these materials and Persian-language education in colonial North India, but there are also important stories being told by other scholars on the circulation of Indian Persian lithographs elsewhere in the Persianate world.

I build on that scholarship in my current work on Pashto print in India. Between the 1860s and 1930s, popular Pashto lithographs were overwhelmingly printed not from Kabul or Peshawar, but from Lahore, Delhi, Bombay, and other major Indian cities. This was due to government limitations on private printers in major Pashto-using regions, as well as economic challenges faced by the lithographic presses that did set up there. I’ve recently written an article on how the Lahore, Delhi, and Bombay presses—and the trans-South Asian movement of Pashto books—shaped the norms and practices of Pashto lithographic print.

You have published extensively in the last five years. Could you provide a brief overview of your publications?
My first book, Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in North India was published by the University of California Press in 2024. It is a history of Muslim artisan communities and their engagement with technological change in colonial India, but it is also a history of print. I argue that artisans and labourers contested and reinterpreted Muslim religious traditions for work through engagement with the expanding print economy. And in the first chapter of the book, I focus on the artisans and workers who created the texts that circulated among other labouring communities, including lithographic scribes and other lithographic labourers. I traced the impact of Muslim religious traditions surrounding scribal work and book production on practices and social relationships within the north Indian print economy, and I also asked how these shaped emerging labour solidarities, especially in the large, industrialised presses.

Several of my journal publications have likewise explored questions of labouring practices and technology adaptation, especially but not only among Muslim artisans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within the realm of print history, I’ve also worked on the translation and adaption of scribal knowledge between Persian and Urdu, and questions of the impact of princely state patronage on lithographic practices and norms. One of my most recent articles turned to paper making and focused on prison-based experimentation with different fibre mixes and paper making practices under colonialism.

You have a wide range of language and script skills. How did you acquire them?
I grew up mostly monolingual in the United States, but I finished my secondary education at an international school near Pune, where I met multilingual peers and realised how much my lack of languages limited my experiences (and my understanding of history!). I was fortunate to have access to excellent language education and funding for language study as both an undergraduate at Georgetown University and an MA and PhD student at Indiana University. I began by studying Persian as an undergraduate, and spent a year in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, learning Persian in both the Perso-Arabic and Cyrillic scripts. I also began studying Urdu as an undergraduate, spending a few months in Lucknow at the American Institute of Indian Studies language school there. I returned to Lucknow repeatedly for additional Urdu classes during my postgraduate education at Indiana University. I began studying Pashto and Arabic at Indiana as well.

You have extensively collaborated with others on your writing and editing projects. How important is collaborative work in producing print history?
Among my most significant collaborations thus far has been my work with Arun Kumar (who teaches at University of Nottingham), with whom I’ve co-written a series for The Wire on artisan and labouring histories, including a piece on the labour of print. I also have several ongoing co-editing collaborations, focused on developing journal special issues that incorporate histories from across South Asian languages and regions. These are in-progress projects, but its delightful to have other scholars who challenge me on a regular basis. I think that collaborations offer us the opportunity to build more rigorous comparative and trans-South Asian projects. Collaborative work is important not only for helping me overcome my own personal linguistic limitations, but also for thinking creatively and comparatively with people who engage with other archives and sources.

How important is the Internet as a site for publication of print history? Which websites do you use most often?
Although I love working in physical archives and libraries, and do so whenever possible, the rise of online archival collections and textual repositories has certainly made the work of print history easier. I think online repositories are making archival research more accessible, and hopefully cutting down on the number of long-distance flights that international scholars take in the age of climate change. That said, in terms of getting a sense of the contours of the archival materials available for the project, I don’t know that anything can ever truly replace working in the physical spaces of libraries and archives. I also worry about the longevity of some digitised collections that don’t have continuous institutional support.

But these days, once I have a sense of the direction for a project, I very happily use digitised collections. I consult material on Chughtai Public Library and Rekhta nearly every day (I also owe a debt of gratitude to Rekhta for helping me get some of the images that I used in my book). I also use several collections from the British Library’s digitised Endangered Archives Project. The Granth Sanjeevani of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai is a go-to resource for newspapers and government publications. I also often use the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics DSpace (digital library) for government publications. And finally, I think that the South Asian Open Archives digitised collection is vital for the field.

Much of my public-facing scholarship can be found online though, including the series that Arun Kumar and I wrote on artisan and labouring histories for The Wire. Some of my other work can be found online through Scroll, Himal Southasian, and Jamhoor. And of course, I was fortunate to work with the University of California Press, which is very committed to open access publishing, and so my book is also available online.

Daftar-i khattat, a manual for lithographic scribes composed in 1885 (manuscript)

Has the phase of discovery ended in print/book history? Is there any likelihood of further discoveries in your focus areas?
I don’t think the phase of ‘discovery’ will ever truly end in print and book history! In the Indian context, the archives and resources are so vast, and there is so much material out there that is yet to be read and analysed by scholars. Every time I work with a new archival collection, I find more stories and materials that challenge my own assumptions and expand my knowledge of print history. In my own areas of interest—labour and technology of lithographic production in languages such as Urdu, Persian, and Pashto—I know for certain that there are many manuals and treatises on print that have never received scholarly attention. Likewise, the circulation and patronage of print materials in (and from) colonial-era India remains an open field; there is exciting work coming out about how printed texts from India made their way to Central Asia, Iran, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and other regions, but still much more to learn. And a final theme that I think deserves more attention is labour organising among print workers in South Asia. Print unions were large and informed both the practices of printing and the cultures of labour organising in other trades, and there were many important print workers’ strikes throughout the twentieth century. The archival resources on these themes are often scattered and often located outside of major government archives, and therefore underutilised. So, there is still plenty of room for discovery (which is, of course, always enabled by archivists and librarians), and I am excited to see the work that comes out on these questions in the future.

Who are the print/book historians whose work has impressed and influenced you most?
Print history and book history are such thriving fields, both within South Asian studies and globally, that there are too many to name! But a few books that I find myself consulting repeatedly include Abhijit Gupta’s The Spread of Print in Colonial India, Ulrike Stark’s Empire of Books, Rochelle Pinto’s Between Empires, Megan Robb’s Print and the Urdu Public, and most recently Prachi Deshpande’s Scripts of Power. I also frequently consult print histories by Graham Shaw, Anindita Ghosh, Francesca Orsini, AR Venkatachalapathy, and Nile Green. Outside of the South Asian context, I’ve been inspired by work including Ahmed El Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics, Christopher Reed’s Gutenberg in Shanghai, and Ian Proudfoot’s work on Southeast Asian print. I’m also currently reading and enjoying Sebouh David Aslanian’s new book on global Armenian diasporic print history: Early Modernity and Mobility: Port Cities and Printers across the Armenian Diaspora, 1512-1800.

What is on your plate now?
I am in the early stages of researching and writing a new book on Afghan and Pashtun migration and work across India and the Indian Ocean. Some of my work on Pashto print history has been related to this project, as I am working to trace texts that circulated in this diaspora. Another area of recent work has been the history of convict labour history in India. Due to the prominence of jail presses, convict labour had a major impact on the development of print in India from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.