Print History: Tyler Williams - The Book before Printing

Congratulations on your new book, If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi, which is being published this month. Can you tell us something about the book and your motivations for writing it?
More than anything else, I intended the book to give readers an impetus and encouragement to work with the pre-print archive in India. The book is, in a way, a celebration of the depth and diversity of the archive of handmade books in the vernacular language of northern India (a variety of dialects that are most often called Hindi or Hindustani), which is in turn a part of a much larger archive of such books in Indian languages. I wanted the book to present an argument for the importance and utility of that archive to students, scholars, popular historians, and so forth in the present moment. People often lament the state of archives in India but it's almost impossible to argue for the conservation of archives until you present an argument for their value and utility beyond an abstract notion of "cultural heritage." The book demonstrates why handwritten materials are critical to our understanding of the past (and the present). The book also, insofar as it describes different types of handwritten books and their features, serves as a guide for students and researchers on how to work with materials in the pre-print archive.

What kind of sources does a researcher of pre-print literary history rely on? In what materials are they inscribed? Where can they be accessed?
The kinds of written sources with which one engages are quite diverse and varied, and we are only beginning to get a grasp and appreciation for that diversity and its significance. This is reflected in language itself: we tend to use only one term in English (manuscript) and in Hindi (hastalikhit granth or, sometimes, pandulipi) for the wide variety of handmade documents found in the archive. Some of these documents are personal notebooks, some are account books, some are royal registers, some are picture books, some are textbooks, and many fit into none of the aforementioned categories. Some of these books are bound; many are unbound. (Many more have been bound, then unbound, expanded, and rebound.) We need to develop a technical vocabulary for discussing these different types of sources and their various features. What we call the archive of handmade books in pre-print South Asia is in fact found in government and private archives, community libraries, temples, monasteries, palaces, and even private homes. One thing I love about my job as a researcher is that it regularly takes me to all of these types of places, in areas as diverse as rural Rajasthan and peninsular Mumbai.

Poetic description and visual illustration of archers from Chandayan; composed by Maulana Daud in Awadhi in 1379 CE, copied in Perso-Arabic script circa 1570 CE. Source: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

Have you experienced an a-ha moment? In other words, any delightful encounters with important manuscript or printed books?
At the end of If All the World Were Paper, I recount an episode during which I was working in the royal pothikhana (library and book atelier) in the City Palace in Jaipur and came across a book with kaner flowers pressed between its pages. Later I found a painter's stencil of a tiny elephant and mahout hiding between the pages of another book. It was a poignant reminder that many books carry the imprints of their readers' lives. More often than not, one finds notes in the margins and fly leaves of books that record the thoughts, memories, and/or transactions of their owners and users. Colophons (sections at the end of a handwritten book or section of a book that record the date, place, and other details of copying) often tell us quite a bit about who commissioned, copied, or read a book, while marginal notes left by readers give clues to how these readers thought about what they were reading.

How did one “publish” a book before the advent of print?
There definitely existed distinctions between published and personal books in India before the introduction of print technology. (And, incidentally, Jain monks were mass-producing copies of certain books long before printing technology was invented.) A book copied for reading by one or more potential readers—a published book—tended to have a certain form and include certain features. For example, it tended to be copied in a script like Nagari (instead of, say, Modi or Kaithi scripts, though these too were sometimes used) and to include folio numbers, verse numbers, section headings, and a colophon that established the quality of its textual transmission. We might compare this last element to the publishing and copyright information printed at the beginning of a modern, printed book.

In the book, I discuss the example of monastic "textbooks" copied by monks of the Niranjani and Dadu sects in precolonial Rajasthan. These monks would almost always copy these books in the loose-leaf "pothi" format in which they would diligently number and tally every verse, quotation, and section, and would end the manuscript by recounting their bibliographical information about the book itself (when and where it was copied, under whose commission, etcetera) in addition to their own guru-disciple lineage: this lineage guaranteed that they were intellectually and spiritually competent to copy the book without making mistakes or introducing spurious interpolations. Even the colophons of lavishly illustrated, bound story books—like copies of the Chandayan, Padmavat, and Mirgavati made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—recorded the details of who commissioned the copy, who copied it, where it was copied, and so forth. Scribes did this not to establish who the book belonged to—that was obvious—but rather to establish for future potential owners and readers of the book the quality of the book's production and its "market value."

A page from a bahi (account book) of the Morarkaji merchant family in the Marwari language and written in Rajasthani Kaithi script. Source: Morarkaji Haveli Museum, Navalgarh, Rajasthan (Photo: Manpreet Kaur).

Print technology came to India in the sixteenth century and printing presses functioned at many places (especially along the coast) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Why was it not more widely adopted, especially in the Hindi heartland, until the mid-1800s?
The startling fact is that most communities in Northern India found no need to adopt printing technology until the nineteenth century, when changes in institutions like education and government service made the adoption of print advantageous or even necessary. Before then, most communities of readers and writers in North India—including Persian munshis, pandits writing in Sanskrit, and court poets writing in Hindi—found that producing books by hand was sufficient, and even preferable, to other alternatives. This is demonstrated by the fact that, thanks to travellers from Tibet and China, North India was aware of print technology centuries before the establishment of printing presses in coastal Portuguese colonial territories. Though we find very little documentation of how people in north India thought about print prior to 1800, it seems clear that the mechanisms of editing, copyediting, authorisation, authentication, and so forth used for handwritten books were understood to be sufficient to the needs of authors, scholars, and readers.

Moving on to the print era, do you see any overlap between the manuscript tradition and the printing conventions which emerged in the nineteenth century?
Print technology introduced many new types of textual objects (new types of formats, new types of publications, and so forth, like magazines and chapbooks and so forth) but it also, quite often, simply took over the production of existing formats and publications. For example, early printed editions of Sanskrit works and scriptural works in Hindi like Tulsidas's Ramacharitamanas imitated the handwritten pothi manuscripts that had preceded them: they were printed in scriptio continua (without word breaks) on wide, unbound folios.

At the same time, many people proceeded to use printed books the same way that they had used handwritten books. For example, religious communities singing kirtan and bhajan across north India began to use printed hymnals when they sang, whereas they had formerly taken aid from handwritten song notebooks (gutaka).

A folio from Mirgavati; composed by Qutban in Awadhi in 1503 CE, copied mid-sixteenth century in Kaithi script. Source: Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi.`

Did the manuscript tradition persist well into the age of print?
Many people and communities continued to use handwritten books alongside printed materials, even making handwritten, manuscript copies from printed archetypes. This practice continues to this day in India. Even today, many schoolchildren and university students in India keep handwritten notebooks in which they copy poems, quotations, and extracts from works that move them, inspire them, or that serve a purpose in their studies or self-development. Monks, kirtankars, and bhajankars (singers of hymns) continue to keep handwritten notebooks of lyrics (pad) and couplets (sakhi). And Jain communities continue to sometimes commission handwritten copies of important works because it produces puṇya (spiritual merit).

Paper and ink manufacturing/sourcing: are there any references to the practical aspects of paper and ink in the manuscripts you have studied?
There are plenty of references to paper and ink manufacturing! In fact, the processes of manufacturing are sometimes used as metaphors for intellectual and spiritual activity by the Hindi poets of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries like Kabir, Ravidas, and Muhammad Jayasi. The method of ink preparation had special significance in the Sikh tradition. There are also manuscripts in the Ramdasi tradition of Maharashtra and Sanskrit manuscripts from further south that detail the production of ink and preparation of paper. Persian codices from North India, from the precolonial as well as colonial periods, provide textual information about and even visual illustrations of paper-making.

Your research requires the acquisition of wide range of language and script skills. Can you take us through that journey?
I always tell people that I am a scholar of Hindi only, because that is my main expertise and because there are other scholars who know so much more than I do about other languages and subjects. In fact, my BA, MA, and MPhil degrees are all in Hindi (the latter two being completed at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi). While an MPhil student at JNU, my advisor, Purushottam Agrawal, told me that I should research manuscript anthologies of bhakti poetry. I asked, "How do I do that?" He replied, "Go to the archives and read lots of manuscripts!" And so that is exactly what I did for two years.

Later, while pursuing a PhD at Columbia University in New York, I learned Sanskrit and Persian (and read more broadly in Urdu). Then, during the fieldwork for my dissertation, I began to learn forms of Rajasthani, as well as the formal tools and techniques of palaeography, bibliography, codicology, and so forth, from Indian as well as American scholars. I also began to learn some of the techniques of the digital humanities, using the computer and quantitative techniques to notice patterns in texts and book production. Yet at the end of the day, the most critical education I received was from my teachers, classmates, and colleagues when I studied in JNU and lived in India, and the most critical training I received was simply spending hours, days, weeks, and months in archives around North India.

Have you undertaken any internet-based projects?
Together with Manpreet Kaur of Columbia University, I am developing the Afsana Project, a web-based interactive fiction game in Hindi. The game, once launched, will be free and open to the global public. Players read a story in Hindi and are asked to make decisions about what individual characters will do in the narrative. It introduces beginning and intermediate readers of Hindi to new vocabulary and grammar and tests reader comprehension by requiring the player to remember critical details of the story.

I have also contributed to BHAVA Bhakti Virtual Archive, an online resource for students and scholars studying bhakti-related traditions, and have helped in small ways with the impressive efforts of Jim Nye and the Philologic Project at the University of Chicago to expand and improve online lexicographical resources in Indian languages.

What is on your plate now? Any projects which never took off?
Many projects have not taken off but I never give up hope of starting them again! At present, I am researching a book on the religious and literary lives of merchants and merchant communities in north India from 1500 to 1800. Merchants played a large role in the expansion of bhakti religiosity and the development of Hindi literature in the precolonial period but their involvement has been largely forgotten. In addition to the Afsana online game, I am slowly building a library of digital texts in Hindi and Rajasthani for scholars and students to use. And I've had the good fortune to work with a group of amazing musicians over the past several years on two music projects: a Bollywood punk band called Do the Needful, and an original Indi-pop band that will begin performing this summer.

Who are the print/book historians whose work has impressed and influenced you most?
I would be remiss if I didn't begin by mentioning my colleague at the University of Chicago, Ulrike Stark! Her work on Hindi and Urdu publishing has been foundational to the field. Colleagues at other universities in India and elsewhere, like AR Venkatachalapathy (The Province of the Book [Permanent Black]), BN Goswamy (The Word is Sacred, Sacred is the Word [Niyogi Books], Jinah Kim (Receptacle of the Sacred [University of California Press]), Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty (who have edited and authored several books on Indian print history), Uday Shankar Dubey (Hastalikhit Hindi granthoṃ ki khoj ka itihas [Hindustani Academy]), François Déroche [Islamic Codicology (Furqan)], and of course the work of Francesca Orsini on print history in Hindi.

Anything else you might like to add.
I cannot emphasise enough how much exciting work has yet to be done on book history and print history in India, and how much fascinating material is sitting in Indian libraries and archives, waiting to be opened and read. People sometimes take a pessimistic view of the outlook for archives in India but I take an optimistic view: it is probably the largest group of archives of handwritten materials in the entire world and contains untold treasures. The health and functioning of those archives will only improve with more use by scholars and researchers.