Introduction

The world of cheap print has largely gone unappreciated in the writings of social and cultural history of nineteenth century Bengal. Historians have tended to pick on the refined literature of the educated middle classes to inform their understandings, and have ignored the cultural self expression in print of lesser social groups. One idea in such historiography is that a refined, standardized modern Bengali print culture flourished and became the marker of a culturally distinguished bhadralok middle class. But print did not mirror the aspirations of the dominant classes only. Other groups were able to impress their stamp on it. Focussing on more commercial forms of print literature is a useful counterweight to historiography deriving from only ‘high’ writings that perpetuate images of an undifferentiated, enlightened, Western-educated middle class using the print medium to establish their social and political ascendancy in Bengali society. The present paper attempts to provide a glimpse of what this cheap print in Bengal was like, highlighting the agency of the lower classes in making conscious choices of the material that they were printing, producing and consuming, thereby giving rise to an alternative print-culture that was contesting with the already established elite print-culture. In the following two sections I would attempt to provide a glimpse of what this cheap print in Bengal was like, highlighting the ‘translational’ aspect of such popular print phenomenon.

Print as Translation

Translation as cultural traffic was revolutionized with the advent of technology and it’s (technology’s) subsequent dispersal (traffic) to various parts of the world. And the primary invention for translation and also for any other literary incident is print technology and its social equivalent – the formation of a print culture. Printing in India dates back to the sixteenth century when the Portuguese set up the first printing press on the subcontinent, but the indigenous printing and publishing industry really took off in Bengal in the first half of the nineteenth century. Bengal emerges as the focus of study for various reasons. It was not only the seat of the first established vernacular press (The Serampore Press) and the earliest printing and publishing industry in the country, but also the seed-bed of Indian nationalism.
In nineteenth century Bengal, the emerging elite ‘bhadralok’ ¹ culture was a depiction of this idea of translation and the ‘translated man’ in Salman Rushdie’s terminology. ² The bhadralok culture tried to suppress the prevalent folk culture. Though it is commonplace to associate the culture of Calcutta with that of the elite in the nineteenth century, that was in no way the popular culture. The popular culture of Calcutta rested in the folk and other ‘unrefined’ and ‘carnivalesque’ forms which developed as a reaction against the suppression. These forms were against the tastes of the English educated elite. The main trends in Bengali culture prior to the advent of the British were folk songs, rituals, poetry and verse plays, all of which had developed through the social and occupational customs of the labouring classes and through popular religious beliefs. Sumanta Banerjee, ³ in his seminal study, draws attention to the fact that the migrants from Bengal’s villages to the city primarily imported the rural folk forms. This migration to the city was in search of jobs and a better livelihood. The folk forms that these migrants brought with them were adapted to the demands of the urban populace. Thus, such folk culture that was imported from the neighbouring villages could be called ‘urbanized-folk’, that is, folk forms that were uprooted from their place of origin and this displacement led to hybridization and resulted in forms that, nevertheless, had certain folk elements in them. Here, again, one can see cultural translation at work. These folk traditions of Bengal were threatened by the introduction and the spread of the written word through printed books, which began to be published on a mass scale from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The culture that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century was thus an amalgam of the earlier folk culture which had migrated to Calcutta and that of the new elites.

Translation: from Orality to Print

With printing and the associated notion of standardization, the English rulers and the elite hoped for a wholesale transformation of the cultural scenario. However, to their chagrin, the English found that the printing press had failed to turn the attention of the common man from popular forms of entertainment and the themes of folk culture. On the contrary, print initiated another interesting phenomenon, that of Bengal “street literature” – the “Bat-tala” publishing extravaganza. Thus, the Bat-tala phenomenon, which incorporated some of the earlier folk performances, was a means of resisting localized powers of repression.

An interesting consequence and a failure of the purists’ attempt to standardize the Bengali language were evident in the Bat-tala publications. The heart of the book trade lay in the crowded indigenous quarters in the north of the city where teeming small presses in the Bat-tala area, run primarily by the artisan castes, poured out books and pamphlets and pictures for widespread commercial consumption. The spatial distribution of the presses were also significant – while the Bat-tala presses were located in the north of the city, the more respectable ones like the Tattvabodhini Press and the Sanskrit Press were located further south. This demarcation of location also signaled a distinction in the kind of material published. The Bat-tala presses specialized in genres like “almanacs”, mythology and fiction. The Bat-tala presses were doing a brisk trade and their output often surpassed the limited output of the more respectable presses in the city. Composed in the colloquial, these presses were mostly the product of the pre-print era and helped to continue that tradition further, and the tradition comprised oral as well as written texts in manuscript form. Thus, early printing in Bengal was not a mere triumph of technology but was a way of carrying forward the oral tradition into that of the printed.

It is interesting to note that in the early days Bat-tala printing and publishing survived on punthis or manuscripts. In order to maintain a link between Calcutta and the adjacent towns, hawkers were employed who bought the books themselves at wholesale price and sold them at a profit. In this process, they also served another function. They would buy manuscripts from families and households and bring them back for publication. Often, the Bat-tala published books were directly exchanged for old manuscripts. In this process, a horde of old manuscripts were amassed and the printers at Bat-tala then published these at a very low price and enhanced the appeal of the text by including illustrations. Illustrations also helped the uninitiated reader of the printed word and can be said to be an incorporation of the oral traits into the printed. The pictures that accompanied the Bat-tala texts initiated a new visual semiotics that was to continue till the twentieth century.

The popularity and readership of the genres that were churned out of the Bat-tala presses is also indicative of the way in which the pre-print and folk traditions found their way into print and existed alongside the standardized elite literature of the period. It is natural that in the early days of printing there would have been a certain degree of overlap between the pre-print and the print genres. Nevertheless, what remains worth exploring is the nature in which some of these pre-print genres found their place and were contained within the print tradition. The contest between the popular and the elite thus continued to facilitate the traffic of translation and negotiation that shaped the modern Bengali literary taste.

Of the different genres that were the products of the Bat-tala presses, almanacs, social farces, educational literature, Puranic mythology, songs and poetry were the most popular. All of these genres had an element of the oral in them. The language used for these was colloquial, coarse and intelligible to the common man who was neither English educated nor had the training to appreciate the printed word. There was a sudden proliferation of the social farces (prohoshon) from the 1860s onwards. This genre sprang from the earlier pre-print songs and pantomimes that lampooned urban culture and society (shongs). The Bat-tala social farces were a means of criticizing and deriding the social superiors, the English educated elite who were learning not only the English language but also the English ways of life to gain the favour of the rulers. Full of mocking laughter and pungent lower-order hatred of the elites, these farces were really popular among the consumers of the Bat-tala presses.

The structure and format of the farces provided the crucial transitional phase for the new readers of print to switch from an oral to a print-culture. The rules of standard writing demanded clarity, linear development, reasoning and objectivity. The audience for the farces would have little in common with these structured forms. The dramatic form, with its easy conversational style, provided a ready breathing space. The oft-adopted strategy of anonymity was useful, too. It demanded no more than modest levels of achievement from the authors, while guaranteeing effortless comprehension for readers. Contemporaneity and sensationalism added to the attraction. Songs were an integral part of the text. In fact, when staged, sometimes prostitutes from the nearby red light area were hired to appear in song and dance sequences, to provide additional delight to the audience.

For the first generation readers of print, the simple language of the farces set out in the form of dialogues was very welcome. The change from a listening, sharing oral culture to a private, silent mode of reading was abrupt and stifling. Such participatory and expository forms of narration, as in the tradition of kathakata, the challenge and counter-challenge formats of the kobi-combats, the models of addressing the standing spectators inherent in narrative structures of panchalis—all had made for a lively and active role for the pre-print audience. ⁴ Early printed Bengali texts therefore took care to preserve enclaves of oral tradition within the format of the standard narrative, to increase their appeal to the reader. The prolific nature of paintings and pictures in the early Bat-tala texts indicate the crucial moment of transition from the oral to the printed culture. The pictures played an important role in assisting the reader who was being newly introduced to the world of the printed page and who had so long been part of the oral performing tradition in which the written word and the pictorial representations had no significance. A visual semiotics was emerging. The pictures in the Bat-tala texts thus mark an important moment in the process of ‘cultural translation’. The dramas and social farces of Bat-tala took up and continued this tradition. It was much later into the nineteenth century that the oral and the printed existed simultaneously in the printed text and for a long time, the printed texts had elements of the oral in them, lending a different flavour to the literature of the time.

What appears from a reading of the popular Bat-tala texts of the period is that the Bengal Renaissance failed to incorporate a monolithic power structure like the West, which was happy in the way print dismantled and segregated the oral from what was henceforth to be regarded as the literary. This proved an advantage, allowing, Bengalis to realize over the years, that their culture was being intruded upon by an alien power that needed ousting. Both the elite of nineteenth century Bengal and the literature they
produced tried to imitate the West blindly. On the other hand, Bat-tala literature tried to keep alive the themes of folk culture, and in turn also questioned the new emerging elite and their values
about art and life.

It has been customary to assume literacy as being a necessary pre-condition for identifying consumers of print literature. But these limits need extending as the instance of Bat-tala literature has shown. The non-literate formed a sizeable portion of the Bat-tala audience for two reasons. First, the continuing practice of reading aloud to a gathered group as in the pre-book world meant that the printed text reached out more widely than is usually presumed. Second, as some of these dramas were actually performed on stage, the literacy factor no longer defined its audience. The oral context in which popular commercial print cultures operated in the nineteenth century need not be overemphasized.

The existence of Bat-tala as a product of print culture in Bengal as a local form of traffic (shunned perhaps but too prolific to be banned by the elite culture of Bengal), was more a precursor to the formal configuration of a notion called popular entertainment rather than a political tool for ousting ruling powers. The fact that it endorsed slang culture indicated a process of subversion of the elite literary motifs of the bhadralok texts. Similar processes were also happening in the West, but their nature and impact were different owing to the theological politics which played the role of a censoring body, stalling the kind of prolific output that was possible in Bengal.

Most studies on the development of printing in Bengal tend to focus on the dominant print culture, which was shaped by the educated elite. They usually assume ‘a linear causal link’ between Western education, control over print and the dissemination of Occidental knowledge. However, the existence of the Bat-tala is a pointer to what Ghosh lucidly chronicles in the essay in Book History: “What needs to be appreciated is that the collisions and negotiations on the borders between orality and print resulted in a productive and volatile mix, which found powerful and prominent expression in the world of Indian commercial vernacular publishing. The rapid spread of literacy and the availability of cheap print technology bred enormous popular markets for ephemeral genres that encapsulated the desires of a reading public still geared to preprint tastes. Elaborate efforts by the educated Indian elite to “improve” literary standards and sanitize tastes remained unrealized in the face of this unbridled and cacophonous print revolution.” ⁵

The Bat-tala phenomenon is, thus, an interesting instance of popular culture that brings together the emergence of new genres in response to a changing socio-political context, the sensibility of the lower class determining the content of such forms and the power of print. Often such texts were satirical and critical of the culture of the ‘babus’. The farces were critical of the social change that did not benefit the public. The later bhadralok appropriation of some of these Bat-tala texts makes an interesting case-study. The gradual incorporation of some of these texts into an elitist tradition shows the transforming nature of the dominant culture. The translational aspect of the print phenomenon may be located in this domain. In fact, the conjunction of print and popular culture did alter the very form of later Bengali prose. Many of the tendencies evident in the Bat-tala narratives point to a ‘novelization’ of reality. We can relate this phenomenon to the emergence of the novel which was taking place in the same phase of cultural history.

Categorization is a basic instinct in human nature – we tend to categorize with a specific purpose. However, in the case of the early printed texts in Bengal, the boundaries that were demarcated proved insufficient and incapable of separating the oral from the printed. Thus, apart from serving the purpose of ‘mechanical reproducibility’ ( Walter Benjamin : ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1936), print in nineteenth century Bengal facilitated the combination of the pre-print oral performing traditions within the domain of the printed page available for the reading public. In fact, the oral and the printed existed simultaneously in a single printed text and this made Bengali literature unique. Print in Bengal was unable to displace the existing practice of the oral and was thus never able to become fixed in certain ways. Far from displacing earlier traditions and freezing writing habits into standardized norms and predictable genres, print actually equipped them with more enduring and resilient technologies and furthered the process of ‘cultural translation’.

Select Bibliography

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Bhattacharya, Tithi. The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Ghosh, Anindita. Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.

• ‘Revisiting the ‘Bengal Renaissance’: Literary Bengali and Low-life print in Colonial Calcutta’ (EPW Special Article, October 19th, 2002).

• ‘An Uncertain “Coming of the Book”: Early Print Cultures in Colonial India’ (Book History Vol. 6, 2003, pp 23-55.

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