Description

Print and Pleasure tells the story behind
the boom in commercial publishing in
nineteenth-century North India.How did the new technology of printing and the enterprise of Indian publishers make
the book a familiar object and a necessary part of people’s leisure in a largely illiterate society? What genres became popular in print? Who read them and how were they read?Our perception of North Indian culture in this period has been dominated by the notion of a competition between Hindi and Urdu, and the growth of language nationalism. Print and Pleasure argues that many other forces were also at work which,in the pursuit of commercial interests, spread
quite different and much more hybrid tastes.The importance of this major new book lies in showing, moreover, that book history can greatly enrich our understanding of literary and cultural history. Francesca Orsini mines a huge and largely untapped archive in order to reveal that popular songbooks, theatre transcripts, meanderingly seralized narratives, flimsily published tales,
and forgotten poems are as much a part
of colonial history as the elite novels and
highbrow journals that are more frequently the subject of historical studies.This book represents the first comprehensive attempt to gauge
the impact of the popular press in Hindi and Urdu in post-1857 British North India. It charts the existence in text and performance of genres now ascribed to either Hindi or Urdu. Francesca Orsini
has discovered and re-created worlds lost to us after the Hindi-Urdu divide. But she has offered us no utopias, for her book also traces the slow crystallization of Hindi as separating itself from Urdu even in popular print, first cemented in the 1890s detective novel industry, and in that pleasure of all pleasures — the qissa of Chandrakanta, suitably and subtly Hinduized.Truly, Print and Pleasure is pleasure in print.