A Companion to the History of the Book (24 page)

Tran Nghia (2002) “A Survey of Sino-nom Translations and Compilations in the 20th Century.”
Vietnam Social Sciences
, 88: 57–66.

Woodside, Alexander B. (1971)
Vietnam and the Chinese Model
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Yamamoto, Tatsuro (1999) “Development of Movable Type Printing in Vietnam under the Lê Dynasty: A Study of the Comparative History between Vietnam and Japan.”
Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko
, 57: 1–11.

9

South Asia

Graham Shaw

The book, in physical forms both familiar and unfamiliar to the West, has an extremely long, rich, and diverse history in South Asia. For two millennia, from the third century bc onward, that history primarily revolved around the widespread and large-scale commission, production, and dissemination of manuscripts – what has even been termed the “pre-print publishing industry” of South Asia (Pollock 2007). This sophisticated manuscript culture enjoyed a close and mutually influential relationship with the oral and performance culture that had preceded it but which continued to flourish in parallel. The cultivation of memory (often to a phenomenal degree) and oral transmission always remained central to Indian notions of cultural, religious, and literary authority and authenticity. The interaction of the oral and manuscript traditions has had a far deeper and longer-lasting impact on the Indian imagination than any attributable to print. By contrast, print culture is very much a latecomer to South Asia, a significant cultural carrier for only the past two hundred years from the early nineteenth century onward.

In fact, Indian culture seems to have shown a pronounced resistance to print technologies. On present evidence, the early East Asian tradition of woodblock printing (xylography) associated with Buddhism did not expand further south than Tibet and Nepal. This is despite the fact that northern Indians almost certainly knew of the technique from the Tibetans who had acquired it from the Chinese in the ninth century. Similarly, when printing with movable metal type was introduced from Europe by Portuguese Jesuits in the mid-sixteenth century, it did not replace traditional book-production methods at the Indian court or any other level. The Mughal emperor Akbar was presented with a copy of Plantin’s famous polyglot printed Bible, but this did not result in an imperial printing press supplanting the well-established manuscript studio. The Islamic calligraphic tradition held in high regard by the Mughals was not suited to mechanical reproduction, and print could not match the visual splendor of contemporary illustrated manuscripts. Print’s power of rapid duplication held no appeal when there was already a highly developed information network, underpinned by organized guilds of Muslim scribes (
katib
or
khush-navis
), with newsletters (
akhbar
) being regularly compiled and distributed by news-writers in every corner of the empire (Bayly 1996). The same held true for contemporary Hindu kingdoms where hereditary castes of professional scribes (
kayastha
) fulfilled the role of information providers and circulators.

The one printing technology that did strike a cultural chord, particularly with Muslim communities, was lithography, introduced to South Asia in the 1820s (Shaw 1998). This was precisely because it enabled the printed book to imitate the characteristics of the manuscript which still held cultural authority (Robinson 2000). Ironically, it was print that appeared strange and produced problems of legibility in South Asia. This was why as late as the 1830s Christian missionaries in Orissa paid scribes to copy biblical texts onto palm leaves, a practice begun by the Danish missionaries at Tran-quebar in south India in the early eighteenth century – print yielding to the more familiar manuscript letter-forms. But lithography overcame this problem by realizing a paradox: the mass-produced manuscript.

South Asia’s Manuscript Culture

The large-scale production of manuscripts in South Asia ceased only about 150 years ago, so that India’s extant manuscript heritage is immense. Estimates range between five and thirty million manuscripts surviving in libraries, archives, temples,
madrasas
, monasteries, and, not least, private collections. And this must be a mere fraction of what was actually produced, given the perishability of the writing surfaces used. The choice of these was dictated by geography and flora, with different materials used in the Himalayan region and in the subcontinent proper. In western Himalayan areas such as Kashmir, birch bark was used, and aloe bark in eastern parts such as Assam. The earliest surviving South Asian manuscripts are Buddhist scrolls of birch bark from the ancient kingdom of Gandhara (which straddled modern Pakistan and Afghanistan) dating from the first century ad (Salomon 1999).

Below the Himalayas, the palm leaf was paramount. The usual writing palm of ancient India, the Talipat, was indigenous only to the far south of the peninsula. In the north, the leaves of other trees must have been used initially, such as plantain leaves traditionally written on in village schools. Only when the Mauryan empire expanded into the south in the third century bc would the northern Indians have become aware of the Talipat palm. The commercial cultivation of palm groves and a flourishing south–north trade in Talipat leaves ensued, as witnessed by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan Tsang during his seventh century ad visit. From about 1500, the Talipat palm was ousted by the Palmyra which offered more products (fruit and sap as well as leaves) and fared better in the northern Indian climate. But the Palmyra was an inferior writing surface. Whereas the Talipat palm was written on with a reed pen in ink, the Palmyra did not take ink at all well. Instead, the text was incised using an iron stylus, ink being smeared into the grooves afterwards. Once paper became widely available, palm cultivation became uneconomic, except in Sri Lanka where the leaves continued to be used for manuscript production until much later. The life expectancy of texts on palm leaf or bark was relatively short, given the heat and humidity of the Indian climate and the appetites of insects and rodents. The periodic re-copying of worn-out manuscripts was the tradition. Discarded copies were ritually buried in jars if Buddhist or if Hindu consigned to the waters of holy rivers – a “liquid
genizah
.”

Parchment and paper found no place in traditional Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain book culture. The Western use of parchment involving the slaughter of young animals for their skin (particularly the holy cow) would have been anathema to all. In 1931, a large cache of texts written on poor-quality paper was discovered at Gilgit in northern Pakistan, suggesting that papermaking was practiced there as early as the sixth century ad. But the widespread use of paper did not begin in northern India until the early thirteenth century, the Muslim world being the intermediary as for Europe. At first, paper must have been largely imported from Iran until local centers of manufacture developed, such as Daulatabad, Ahmedabad, and Lahore. Even when it was introduced, paper did not have the same impact in South Asia as it did in Europe, providing a cheap alternative to parchment and enabling the mass distribution of text. Although Islamic manuscripts were always written on paper in South Asia, non-Muslim scribes in many areas preferred to continue to use traditional writing surfaces. Birch bark continued in use in Kashmir up to the end of the seventeenth century, and in Nepal, where paper-making was well established by the twelfth century, the use of palm leaf far outstripped paper until the sixteenth century. When Hindus and Jains adopted paper, they imposed on it the traditional design parameters of the earlier palm leaf, paper sheets commonly having a height to width ratio of 1 : 3 at first and then 1: 2 , the so-called
pothi
format (Losty 1982).

The Invention of Writing

Before the arrival of print, there were two key developments in the history of literary culture in South Asia. The first of these was the invention of the Indian writing system. That invention, it is now generally accepted, was made by the court administration of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka about 260 bc. Previously, the earliest written records from South Asia had been believed to be the inscriptions on clay and stone seals from the Indus Valley Civilization, the earliest urban culture in the subcontinent. This flourished between 2600 and 1900 bc, spreading over a vast area north to the Himalayas, south to Rajasthan and Gujarat, west to the Iranian border, and east as far as Delhi. The Indus Valley Script was initially variously interpreted as encoding some form of either Indo-Aryan or Dravidian, the major language families of South Asia. Recently, however, scholars have demonstrated convincingly that the signs do not encode speech at all but represent a nonlinguistic religious symbol system, for which ancient Near Eastern parallels exist. Their most likely function would have been to ensure social cohesion within the Civilization’s large multilingual population, linking families, clans, cities, or whole regions with specific gods for ritual purposes (Farmer et al. 2004).

The earliest South Asian script invented at Ashoka’s court was called Brahmi. Its invention was for political rather than literary purposes: the need to promulgate royal edicts throughout the Mauryan Buddhist empire which covered a vast swathe of the subcontinent from northern Afghanistan to southern Karnataka. In this way, Brahmi became the first “pan-Indian” script and the foundation of every regional script in South Asia and beyond in those parts of Central and Southeast Asia which came under Indian cultural influence. It must be emphasized that in South Asia, unlike other areas of the world, the adoption of writing did not eradicate the practices of orality. The collection of divinely revealed Hindu liturgical texts known as the Veda were transmitted from teacher to pupil for a thousand years without the use of writing but in remarkably stable form. For rituals to be effective depended critically upon recreating exactly the same sounds as the original divine revelation. Writing on transient palm leaf or birch bark was irrelevant in a tradition demanding such precise oral transmission. A Sanskrit couplet from the ancient Indian epic, the
Mahabharata
, translates as: “The sellers of the Vedas, the mis-pronouncers of the Vedas, and the writers of the Vedas, are all bound for Hell.” The cultivation of memory was central to the Vedic tradition, and core cultural value continued to be placed on performance long after the arrival of literacy. Orality continued to play a major role in how a religious or secular literary text was actually experienced.

The very circumstances of the invention of writing in South Asia established a close relationship between the creation of text and political power. As the Mauryan empire expanded and united almost the entire subcontinent under a central government, so its literary culture grew into a trans-regional phenomenon – what has been dubbed the “cosmopolitan-vernacu lar revolution” (Pollock 2007: 83). Consequently, the primary written language, Sanskrit, attained a similar status in South Asia to that of Latin in Europe; that is, as the classical vehicle for literature, religion, and all forms of written knowledge. The primacy of this Sanskrit-based cosmopolitan culture under successor empires to the Mauryan was to last for some 1,200 years. Later, Persian under various Muslim dynasties and English under the Raj would create cosmopolitan cultures of their own across many regions of the subcontinent.

About
AD
1000, the second momentous event in South Asian literary history took place. This was the so-called “vernacular revolution” when Sanskrit’s monopolization of literary creation was at last challenged. This shift was associated with the fragmentation of centralized political power in South Asia and the consolidation of new regional power bases. A trans-regional mode of expression was no longer required; instead, the development of more local cultural identities became important. Accordingly, the various regional languages gradually emerged to replace Sanskrit as culturally respectable vehicles for literary creation. In most parts of India this “vernacularization” was promoted by the new regional royal courts, maintaining the close link between power and culture. Regional scripts developed and became more differentiated from each other. Other developments were also set in train to underpin the new local literatures, such as vernacular grammars, dictionaries, and orthographies. The regional languages were standardized in a way that runs counter to the Western orthodox view that such transformations only happened with the arrival of print. In South Asia, it was in the pre-print era that the process of standardization was in large measure achieved.

As has been stated, South Asia’s manuscript culture was enormously productive and well organized. It was a cultural economy made up as much of professional scribes and patrons who paid for their services as of “amateurs” making copies for personal use or for family members or teachers. Manuscripts could be commissioned in various sociocultural contexts. An example of direct political motivation is represented by Hemachandra’s famous twelfth-century Sanskrit grammar. This was commissioned by a king of Gujarat, Jayasimha Siddharaja, at the enormous cost of 300,000 coins. No less than 300 scribes were employed to make copies which were sent as far as Assam, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. As well as political patronage, religious patronage of manuscript production was also common to promote the interests of particular spiritual lineages. Krishnadasa Kaviraj’s famous biography of the Vaishnava reformer Chaitanya, the
Chaitanyacharitamrita
, is a case in point. After the work was composed in the region of Braj (near Agra in modern Uttar Pradesh), one copy was sent back to Bengal (Chaitan-ya’s homeland) where Srinivasa, the leader of the Chaitanya community, was also a professional scribe and, in effect, became a “manuscript publisher.” Copies were made and distributed to every community group throughout Bengal, Orissa, and Braj. More than two thousand manuscript copies have survived and all are virtually identical, showing that in the South Asian context print was not a prerequisite for avoiding textual drift. Instances can even be found of works indicating that an early-modern intellectual economy was evolving. Around 1625, Annambhatta composed his
Tarkasamgraha
as an introductory textbook on logic and ontology. This seems to have been specifically compiled to meet the needs of a new educational market – a “precolonial set text” as it were. It was not produced under royal or religious patronage but initiated by professional scribes as a straightforward piece of commercial speculation (Pollock 2007). Whether such manuscript production was in fact truly on an “industrial” scale requires much further research and validation.