A Companion to the History of the Book (26 page)

It is difficult to find up-to-date, reliable figures for total current book production in South Asia. This is partly due to the nature of publishing in the region itself. There are very few large publishing concerns (except in the English-language sector), but rather a plethora of medium- and small-scale enterprises scattered throughout the subcontinent. There are reputed to be over 15,000 publishers in India alone. In output terms, India dwarfs its neighbors, publishing probably well over 75,000 titles per year. Of these, roughly 80 percent are in the regional languages and 20 percent are in English. Among the regional languages, Hindi predominates (accounting for a quarter of India’s total book production), with Tamil, Bengali, and Marathi also important. There are no statistics available for book production in either Pakistan or Nepal. According to official statistics, Sri Lanka produces 6,000 books annually, and Bangladesh about 500. But these are probably both underestimates. The legal deposit arrangements in all countries of South Asia (such as the 1954 Delivery of Books Act in India) are little known, inadequately complied with, and poorly enforced by government. This makes the role of the national libraries in collecting the national published archive and in compiling the national bibliography very difficult.

Distribution is still a major problem for South Asian publishers, both within and between the individual countries of the region. There are insufficient bookshops even in the metropolitan centers. In many rural areas it remains very difficult to obtain books except at special promotional fairs. In this respect the railway bookstalls throughout South Asia play a vital role. Those in northern India are still operated by A. H. Wheeler, who in the nineteenth century produced cheap editions of Kipling, and those in the south by Higginbothams, well-known booksellers of Madras. Book piracy between the countries of South Asia is extensive. Indian books are reprinted without permission on a large scale in both Pakistan and Bangladesh (and vice versa though to a much smaller extent). These pirated editions are transported back to India to damage the livelihoods of both Indian publishers and authors. But piracy is almost inevitable when free trade in books between India and Pakistan is not allowed by their respective governments. For several decades after independence, standards of South Asian book production were not high, due to the quality of the paper used, the methods of color printing employed, and the bindings produced. But production standards have risen more recently. Regional-language publishing in South Asia was slow in general to seize the wider market potential of the paperback. Hind Pocket Books from the mid-1950s onward was a notable exception (Malhotra 1998).

That South Asia is a region of book-lovers is shown by the huge crowds, for instance, attending the annual Book Fair in Calcutta, the largest retail book fair in the world, or the World Book Fair held in New Delhi biannually since 1972. South Asia’s inhabitants are still avid newspaper readers, with sales having increased 17 percent in the four years up to 2002. Seven dailies enjoy a circulation of one million or more, the most popular being the Hindi
Dainik Jagran
of Kanpur with over 1.9 million readers. The power of the printed word to cause considerable controversy is illustrated by the case of the Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasreen whose works have been banned in her homeland for being anti-Islam and who has lived in exile since 1994 under the death threat of a
fatwa
(Jones 2001). Or take the case of Dwijendra Jha, a professor of history at Delhi University, and his book
The Myth of the Holy Cow,
documenting meat-eating by Hindus in the past. The original publisher suddenly withdrew during the final stages of printing under pressure from Hindu fundamentalists, and when it was published in 2001 by Matrix Books of New Delhi, a court order was obtained restricting its circulation and the author’s life threatened. Authorial and academic independence also became a major issue when, in 2000, two further volumes of
Towards Freedom,
a documentary history of the independence movement 1937–47, being published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi, were unilaterally withdrawn from publication by the official sponsoring body, the Indian Council for Historical Research. Vigorous academic protests and press campaigns followed, seeing this as direct government interference in the writing of history (the Bharatiya Janata Party was then in power). Despite the ever-increasing importance of visual media – Bollywood and television – and the popularity of the Internet in South Asia, the region’s appetite for the book, both in terms of production and consumption, remains undiminished.

References and Further Reading

Abraham, Thomas (2005) Quoted in
The Bookseller
, March 31.

Bayly, C. A. (1996)
Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, c.1780–1870.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blackburn, S. and Dalmia, V. (eds.) (2004)
India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century.
New Delhi: Permanent Black.

Chakravarty, S. and Gupta, A. (eds.) (2004)
Print Areas: Book History in India.
New Delhi: Permanent Black.

Chatterjee, R. (2001) “A Short Account of the Company’s Trade with the Subcontinent.” In E. James (ed.),
Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, 1843–1970
, pp. 153–69. London: Macmillan.

— (2006)
Empires of the Mind: A History of Oxford University Press in India under the Raj
. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Darnton, R. (2001) “Literary Surveillance in the British Raj: The Contradictions of Liberal Imperialism.”
Book History
, 4: 133–76.

— (2002) “Book Production in British India, 1850–1900.”
Book History
, 5: 239–62.

Farmer, S., Sproat, R., and Witzel, M. (2004) “The Collapse of the Indus-script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization.”
Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies
, 11: 19–57.

Ghosh, A. (2006)
Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Hansen, K. (1992)
Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jeffrey, R. (2000)
India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-language Press,
1977– 99.
London: Hurst and Co.

Jones, D. (2001) “Taslima Nasreen: Bangladeshi Novelist and Poet, 1961–.” In D. Jones (ed.),
Censorship: A World Encyclopedia
, vol. 3, pp. 1681–2. London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Joshi, P. (2002)
In Another Country: Colonialism,
Culture, and the English Novel in India.
New York: Columbia University Press.

Losty, J.P. (1982)
The Art of the Book in India
. London: British Library.

Malhotra, D. N. (ed.) (1998)
50 Years of Book Publishing in India since Independence.
New Delhi: Federation of Indian Publishers.

Pollock, S. (ed.) (2003)
Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

— (2007) “Literary Culture and Manuscript Culture in Pre-colonial India.” In S. Eliot, A. Nash, and I. Willison (eds.),
Literary Culture and the Material Book
, pp. 77–94. London: British Library.

Robinson, F. (2000) “Islam and the Impact of Print in South Asia.” In
Islam and Muslim History in South Asia
, pp. 66–104. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Salomon, R. (1999)
Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments
. London: British Library.

Shaw, G. W. (1987)
The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB) Stage 1: 1556–1800.
London: British Library.

— (1998) “Calcutta: Birthplace of the Indian Lithographed Book.”
Journal of the Printing Historical Society,
27: 89–111.

— (2004) “Communication between Cultures: Difficulties in the Design and Distribution of Christian Literature in Nineteenth-century India.” In R. N. Swanson (ed.),
The Church and the Book
, pp. 339–56. Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Ecclesiastical History Society.

— (2007) “The British Book in India 1695–1830.” In M. Suarez and M. Turner (eds.),
The History of the Book in Britain
, vol
.
5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zutshi, C. (2004)
Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir.
London: Hurst and Co.

10

Latin America

Hortensia Calvo

The study of books and printing in Latin America has followed a different path from that of Europe and the English-speaking world. Rather than stemming from the methods and concerns of the Annales School of social history in the 1950s and 1960s, modern approaches to the book in the region began in the 1910s, when research into the institutional context of the transatlantic book trade led to a reconsideration of cultural life in the Spanish colonies. Since then, most research on print culture has centered on the Spanish American colonial period (1498–1820s in most of the region, except Brazil and Cuba). Attention has concentrated mainly on Mexico and (to a lesser extent) Peru, the two countries with the longest typographical traditions. Since at least the 1980s, there has been an increased emphasis on the social and cultural aspects of print, and the initial focus on the colonial period has broadened to include subsequent centuries and other countries, such as Argentina and Brazil.

The printing press was brought first to Mexico City (1539) and then to Lima (1581), which remained the only two printing centers in the Spanish territories of the New World until the first presses were brought to Puebla (1640) and Guatemala (1660). The rest of the region did not have presses until much later. In the remote Jesuit missions of Paraguay, printing began in 1700, when a press was constructed with local materials by native Guaraní laborers who had converted to Christianity. The first Havana imprint is from 1707, and in Santafé de Bogotá printing did not start until 1736, exactly two hundred years after the city was founded. Most Spanish colonial cities, such as Quito (1759) and Buenos Aires (1780), did not have presses until the latter half of the eighteenth century. Printing began in Caracas in 1808, and a press functioned briefly in 1776 in Santiago de Chile. But in San José (1830), and most cities in what later became Central America, printing was not established permanently until after independence from Spain. The Portuguese crown prohibited printing altogether in colonial Brazil, and although a press may have operated briefly in 1747, the first permanent printing press arrived, along with the entire administrative entourage of King João VI, when he settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1808.

In the Spanish colonies, the printing press served the ideological, political, and administrative purposes of Spain. The first presses were brought to Mexico City and Lima for the explicit purpose of aiding missionaries in the Christianization of native populations. Multilingual catechisms, instructional religious tracts, and grammars and vocabularies of Amerindian languages were the first products of early colonial presses. In the course of the sixteenth century, the Crown’s initial preoccupation with the moral and spiritual welfare of Amerindians shifted toward the education of increasing numbers of European settlers in the viceregal capitals. By the mid-seventeenth century, colonial printing primarily served the purposes of peninsular administrators and reflected the growing prosperity and intellectual needs of lettered urban
criollos
, Europeanized white or
mestizo
colonists. Both Mexico City and Lima produced printed sermons for funerals and religious celebrations, hagiographies, histories of religious orders, royal decrees, and other legal provisions, as well as officially sanctioned histories of the New World, chronicles of local events, and works on military topics.

Book production and the circulation of printed works in the Spanish colonies were circumscribed by a series of practical and legal restrictions, as well as by the nature of scholarly culture in the region. Paper was largely imported from Europe, and the high costs of imported machinery and other supplies, coupled with the Crown’s monopoly on the book trade, constituted the main commercial obstacles to local publishing. Other restrictions arose from ideological concerns. The perceived threat of heresy stemming from the European Reformation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the eighteenth century, the fear of French and British sociopolitical philosophies resulted in a succession of laws and decrees designed to curtail the free flow of local presses and the circulation of books. Moreover, strict control of licenses and authors’ rights, as well as the prohibitive costs of publishing, ensured that books were available for only a small fraction of the population. Despite these restrictions, European works were imported legally or illegally, supplying the bulk of reading material in the colonies.

Thus, in the first two centuries of Spanish rule, the printing press was not an agent of change. It served to consolidate the status quo rather than challenge established authority, in contrast to the situation in Europe. This was not primarily due to official censorship, but rather to the fact that the sociopolitical dynamics of viceregal societies inhibited the development of independent intellectual enclaves and literary circles outside the patronage of church and state. Centrally engaged in the civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracies of the colonies, and thus ultimately employed in the service of the metropolis, colonial lettered elites used the printing press to gain social ascendancy and wield power. Moreover, the Crown’s control of local publishing kept colonial scholars heavily dependent on European presses for publication of original works, many of which circulated in America in manuscript form. For all of these reasons, until well into the eighteenth century, printed works were less a means for intellectuals to engage with local realities than vehicles that kept them connected to Spain and Europe.

The Western book in colonial Spanish America thus functioned as a powerful tool of European culture and domination. And the historiography of the book during this period has historically been shaped, either tacitly or explicitly, by polarized perspectives on the role of Spain in the Americas and the legacy of colonial institutions. The Spanish legacy was, in fact, one of the most passionately debated issues among nineteenth-century historians after independence was secured in most of the region (c.1820s). Throughout the century, efforts to reconstruct national cultural traditions produced a succession of bibliographical works documenting the intellectual production of the past. Largely compiled as part of the broader project of nation-building in the newly formed republics, these bibliographical catalogues played a key role in constructing a collective foundational history. Among liberal and positivist historians, there was a generalized indictment of Spain for keeping the colonies culturally isolated from Europe. By inventorying the limited output of printing presses in the colonies and uncovering records of legislation concerning metropolitan control of books and reading, nineteenth-century bibliographers seemed to provide solid documentary proof for the view that Spanish repression had stifled intellectual life in the colonies.

One major concern among scholars engaged in constructing national literary traditions was the meager presence of imaginative works, particularly novels, in colonial bibliographical inventories. In particular, two royal decrees (1531 and 1543) prohibiting the importation of fictional literature to the colonies were repeatedly invoked as evidence that Spain had effectively cut the colonies off from all but the most orthodox religious ideas from Europe. The work of the Chilean José Toribio Medina (1852–1930), the towering figure of Spanish-American bibliography, played a key role in cementing this vision of the region’s cultural past. His monumental seven-volume
Biblioteca hispanoamericana (1493–1810)
(1898–1907) and hundreds of works on colonial literary production, the Inquisition, and other topics set the foundations of modern critical studies of the book in the region. Medina also uncovered a wealth of previously unpublished legislation restricting the exportation of books to the New World, thus giving further credence to prevailing views of Spanish institutions as repressive mechanisms. This paradigm of cultural stagnation in the colonial period was reiterated by some scholars as late as the 1960s. However, starting in the 1910s, a shifting intellectual climate contributed to reconsidering the Spanish imperial enterprise as an essentially positive mission, in which the coming of the Western book was conceived as playing a civilizing role.

Two publications opened the door for subsequent research into the circulation of books in the colonies beyond the letter of the law. In 1911, Francisco Rodríguez Marín, a Spanish literary scholar, published documentary proof that several hundred copies of what was probably the
princeps
edition of
Don Quijote
had been registered for shipment to the colonies in 1605, only a few months after publication. Three years later, the Mexican Francisco Fernández del Castillo’s
Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI
appeared, containing a wealth of previously unpublished archival documents concerning the origins of printing and the diffusion of European books in New Spain.

The 1930s through the 1950s were watershed years, as new documentary evidence – such as ships’ registers, bills of sale, Inquisitorial records, and other sources for inventories of books and private libraries – cast new light on the circulation of books in the colonies. In particular, two historians, the Argentine José Torre Revello and Irving Leonard from the United States, published a succession of books and articles revealing evidence of an extensive transatlantic book trade from Spain to the New World. Their investigations provided mounting and convincing evidence that, as in other areas of Spanish rule, a huge gap existed between legislation and actual practice. In 1940, Leonard was able to document the arrival and receipt of the same shipment of Cervantes’ novel that Rodríguez Marín had confirmed registered in Seville, thus dispelling prevailing notions that even if books managed to leave Spain, they were systematically con-fiscated on arrival in the Indies. That same year, Torre Revello published his monumental history of printing and book circulation in Spanish America,
El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América durante la dominación española
, amply documenting the shipment of European books to the New World. By 1949, when Leonard published his now classic work,
Books of the Brave
, it was conclusively proved that whatever the official policy had been, major works of fiction such as
Don Quijote
, picaresque novels, even the popular chivalry novels expressly forbidden by royal decree, as well as secular dramatic works, classic Latin and Greek authors, and other nonreligious printed works not only arrived regularly in the New World but, in many cases, were shipped shortly after publication in Spain. Other scholars scoured archives for documentary evidence to disprove any notion that Spanish obscurantism had deprived colonial readers of the latest titles from Europe.

In the past four decades, most scholarship on the Western book in early Spanish America has remained largely within the thematic and methodological contours established by the modern founders of the discipline. Primary sources for documenting the book trade continue to be ships’ registers, bills of sale, Inquisitorial and other official records of trials, book merchants’ properties, and post mortem inventories. And the dominant goals have been either to document the establishment and development of printing in specific regions or to trace the dissemination of European ideas through print, whether through the transatlantic book trade or, to a much lesser degree, through colonial printing presses. Most studies are descriptive in nature and many, particularly those on regions beyond Mexico and Lima, are isolated findings, published in journals or as books that are not easily accessible.

Since at least the 1960s, early Spanish-American studies have undergone profound shifts in theoretical orientation and thematic focus that have generated strong critiques of the traditional methods and concerns of book historians. They have also created interest in the role of books and printed works in the processes of Europeanization and the cultural transformation of native societies. Rolena Adorno’s re-examination of censorship and the role of chivalry novels in conquest scholarship is a prime example of this kind of approach. In her introduction to a new English edition of
Books of the Brave
(Leonard 1992), she critically re-evaluates Leonard’s main tenets in the light of recent trends in early Spanish-American studies. Examining the publishing success of early works about native Americans within the epic genre, as opposed to narrative ethnohistories of the period on the same subject that never made it to print, Adorno reconsiders the role of the popular chivalry genre in this period. She concludes that, rather than firing the imagination of the conquistadors toward noble deeds, as Leonard suggested, the rigid conventions of epic forms of representation were promoted by the Crown toward political ends, as officially endorsed narrative frameworks to contain writings that dealt with the controversial topic of Amerindian customs and beliefs in Counter-Reformation Spain. So, too, recent reconsiderations of the relationship of literary expression to social institutions and networks of power have called into question the relevance of traditional debates concerning the perceived inadequacies of colonial literary production. Where Leonard and other book historians were perplexed by the scarcity of literary masterpieces in the Spanish colonies, Adorno argues that nineteenth-century definitions of literature are too narrow to encompass the richness and variety of colonial letters.

Likewise, Magdalena Chocano Mena (1997), a scholar focusing on elite Creole culture, highlights the circumscribed character of print culture in early Spanish America, where the primary ways of circulating ideas and information were probably either oral or by manuscript. Thus, she questions the relevance of “printing revolution” approaches to the study of the book in the region, at least for the first two centuries of Spanish rule. Some scholars are exploring scribal or notarial literature and practices, a key framework that shaped a wide array of written texts within the highly legalistic lettered culture of colonial Spanish America.

Book history in Latin America has largely been conceived as the study of the printed word produced by technologies imported from Europe. Native American “books” are often mentioned in surveys of the book as early autochthonous cultural products, but the study of native texts has remained separate from that of the Western book in the region. However, a number of contemporary studies by scholars working on pre- Hispanic and post-contact Amerindian texts and symbolic practices suggest fruitful insights and future directions for a broader conception of the “book,” native and Western, including the tensions and intersections of print and non-print forms of communication among the peoples of the New World. Walter Mignolo (1998) situates early modern European conceptions of the book in the light of Renaissance philosophies of language and writing, which privileged European forms of recording (paper, book, writing instruments) as exclusive vehicles for knowledge, effectively excluding Amerindian ways of recording and knowing. Other scholars examine the role of printed works in cultural exchange, transformation, and indoctrination, including codices and pictorial representations that served as vehicles of Westernization among Mesoamerican populations.