Print Culture and the Modern World

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: This is Chapter V of NCERT's India and the Contemporary World II (Reprint 2026-27), the only chapter of Section III, "Everyday Life, Culture and Politics". Its claim is that print "was not just a development, a new way of producing books; it transformed the lives of people, changing their relationship to information and knowledge, and with institutions and authorities". It feeds GS1 modern and world history and GS2 questions on press freedom.

Contemporary hook: One press law from the period this chapter covers lasted into this century. The Press and Registration of Periodicals Act, 2023 (Act No. 51 of 2023, assent 28 December 2023) provides in section 22(1) that "The Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867 is hereby repealed"; under the new law a publisher applies online to the Press Registrar General and a specified local authority, where the 1867 Act required a declaration before the District Magistrate (PRS Legislative Research).

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Two technologies. Hand printing came first, in East Asia: paper rubbed against inked woodblocks. Mechanical printing came with Gutenberg's press and movable metal type. In NCERT's words, this shift "led to the print revolution".

A new public. Before print, "Common people lived in a world of oral culture": they heard texts read and tales told. Print made books cheaper and more plentiful, and "If earlier there was a hearing public, now a reading public came into being". The two did not separate cleanly: printers published ballads and folk tales to be read aloud, so "the hearing public and reading public became intermingled".

Print opens debate, so authority fears it. Anyone could now print and circulate ideas, including "those who disagreed with established authorities". Religious authorities, monarchs and colonial governments answered with control: the Roman Church's Index, the Company's press regulations, the Vernacular Press Act. NCERT's Box 5 states the logic: "The power of the printed word is most often seen in the way governments seek to regulate and suppress print."

Print shapes, it does not dictate. On the French Revolution NCERT's verdict is careful: readers met Voltaire and Rousseau but also "monarchical and Church propaganda", and "Print did not directly shape their minds, but it did open up the possibility of thinking differently." Use the same caution for India.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Table 1: Timeline of the chapter

Source: NCERT ch. V "Print Culture and the Modern World" (Reprint 2026-27), pp. 105-127; rows with another basis: UNESCO Memory of the World, Britannica, Fordham, the British Library, the Darul Uloom Deoband and the Sedition Committee's report (links in the Sources list).

Table 2: From hand printing to mechanical printing (background for NCERT's Project)

Source: NCERT ch. V, pp. 106-109 and 118.

Table 3: Papers, presses and publishers named in the chapter

Source: NCERT ch. V, pp. 120-127.

Table 4: The fear of print and its control, Europe and India (NCERT exercises "Discuss" 2 and "Write in brief" 1c, 1d, 2c)

Source: NCERT ch. V, pp. 112-113, 127.

Table 5: NCERT lines to read with care

Source: NCERT ch. V, pp. 108-127, and front matter (Reprint 2026-27); the other source named in each row is linked in the Sources list.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

The first printed books (East Asia)

"The earliest kind of print technology was developed in China, Japan and Korea", a system of hand printing. "From AD 594 onwards, books in China were printed by rubbing paper – also invented there – against the inked surface of woodblocks." Both sides of the thin sheet could not be printed, so the Chinese "accordion book" was folded and stitched at the side.

China. The imperial state was "for a very long time, the major producer of printed material", printing textbooks for the civil service examinations "in vast numbers"; more candidates from the sixteenth century meant more print. By the seventeenth century urban culture widened print's uses: merchants used it for trade information, "Reading increasingly became a leisure activity", rich women read, and many women published poetry and plays. Western printing techniques and mechanical presses were imported "in the late nineteenth century", and Shanghai became "the hub of the new print culture".

Japan. Buddhist missionaries from China brought hand printing to Japan "around AD 768-770". NCERT next names "The oldest Chinese book, printed in AD 868", the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, with six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations. In medieval Japan "books were cheap and abundant", and in late eighteenth-century Edo (later Tokyo) libraries and bookstores held hand-printed books on women, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, etiquette, cooking and famous places.

Korea. NCERT's side notes name two UNESCO Memory of the World entries. The Tripitaka Koreana, a collection of Buddhist scriptures, was engraved on "about 80,000 woodblocks" and inscribed in 2007; UNESCO's entry counts 81,258 blocks carved in the 13th century. The Jikji, "among the world's oldest existing books printed with movable metal type", names about 150 monks of India, China and Korea; its surviving second volume is in the National Library of France, and it was inscribed in 2001. NCERT dates it to the "late 14th century"; UNESCO's entry gives July 1377.

Print comes to Europe

Chinese paper reached Europe by the silk route in the eleventh century, and scribes used it for manuscripts. In NCERT's account, Marco Polo returned to Italy from China in 1295 and "brought this knowledge back with him"; Italians began producing books with woodblocks, and the technology spread. Luxury editions stayed handwritten on vellum for aristocrats and monastic libraries, which "scoffed at printed books as cheap vulgarities", while merchants and students bought cheaper printed copies (exercise "Write in brief" 1a).

Demand outran the scribes even when "More than 50 scribes often worked for one bookseller": copying was expensive and slow, and manuscripts were fragile and hard to carry. Woodblocks spread, and by the early fifteenth century they printed textiles, playing cards and religious pictures. "The breakthrough occurred at Strasbourg, Germany, where Johann Gutenberg developed the first-known printing press in the 1430s."

Gutenberg and the printing press (exercise "Write in brief" 2a). The son of a merchant, Gutenberg had seen wine and olive presses as a child, and became a master goldsmith who made lead moulds for trinkets. He combined the two: "The olive press provided the model for the printing press, and moulds were used for casting the metal types for the letters of the alphabet." "By 1448, Gutenberg perfected the system." His Bible took three years for about 180 copies, "fast production" for the time; no more than 50 survive. Fig. 6 shows the parts (handle, screw, platen, frame, printing block over damp paper) and the output: "250 sheets on one side per hour". Moveable type "remained the basic print technology over the next 300 years".

Early printed books imitated manuscripts. Metal letters copied ornamental handwriting, borders were illuminated by hand, and each buyer chose the design and the painting school for the illustrations, so "No two copies were the same", which elites liked. Between 1450 and 1550 presses were set up in most of Europe, often by travelling German printers: "20 million copies" in the second half of the fifteenth century, "about 200 million copies" in the sixteenth.

The print revolution and its impact

A new reading public. Printing cut the cost of books and the time and labour per copy. Before it, reading "was restricted to the elites"; knowledge passed orally. But "the rates of literacy in most European countries were very low till the twentieth century", so publishers printed popular ballads and folk tales, "profusely illustrated", to be "sung and recited at gatherings in villages and in taverns in towns". "Oral culture thus entered print and printed material was orally transmitted."

Religious debates and the fear of print. Print let dissenters "persuade people to think differently, and move them to action". It also frightened religious authorities, monarchs, writers and artists: without control, "rebellious and irreligious thoughts might spread". In 1517 Martin Luther wrote his Ninety Five Theses against practices of the Roman Catholic Church; a printed copy was posted on a church door in Wittenberg. His writings were "immediately reproduced in vast numbers", the Church divided and the Protestant Reformation began. His New Testament "sold 5,000 copies within a few weeks", and Luther called printing "the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one" (exercise "Write in brief" 1b). Fig. 9, J.V. Schley's L'Imprimerie (1739), shows the press descending from heaven, with Gutenberg among six pioneer printers.

Print and dissent. Popular religious print "stimulated many distinctive individual interpretations of faith even among little-educated working people". Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller, read the books available to him and formed a view of God and Creation that "enraged the Roman Catholic Church"; when the Church began its inquisition against heretical ideas, he "was hauled up twice and ultimately executed". The Church then "imposed severe controls over publishers and booksellers" and kept an Index of Prohibited Books (on NCERT's year, see Table 5; exercise "Write in brief" 1c).

The reading mania

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries churches set up village schools, and by the end of the eighteenth century literacy in some parts of Europe was "as high as 60 to 80 per cent". There was "a virtual reading mania". Pedlars carried almanacs, ballads and folk tales to villages; in England, chapmen sold penny chapbooks "so that even the poor could buy them"; in France came low-priced books "bound in cheap blue covers" (on NCERT's spelling of their name, see Table 5), along with romances and "histories". The periodical press grew from the early eighteenth century, mixing current affairs with entertainment, and Newton, Paine, Voltaire and Rousseau reached wider readers.

"Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!" (exercise "Discuss" 1). By the mid-eighteenth century many believed books could "liberate society from despotism and tyranny". The French novelist Mercier (on his name, see Table 5) declared, "The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force that will sweep despotism away", and in his novels "the heroes are transformed by acts of reading". Source B, his own account of reading like "a man dying of thirst", comes from Robert Darnton's The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995).

Print culture and the French Revolution. NCERT sets out three arguments historians make. First, print popularised Enlightenment ideas, which attacked "the sacred authority of the Church and the despotic power of the state". Second, print "created a new culture of dialogue and debate". Third, by the 1780s literature that "mocked the royalty and criticised their morality" circulated underground, and cartoons showed a monarchy "absorbed only in sensual pleasures while the common people suffered immense hardships" (Fig. 11). Then the caution of First Principles: readers also met "monarchical and Church propaganda", accepted some ideas and rejected others, so print "did open up the possibility of thinking differently" without directly shaping minds.

The nineteenth century

"The nineteenth century saw vast leaps in mass literacy in Europe", with new readers among children, women and workers. Once primary education became compulsory "from the late nineteenth century", textbooks became "critical for the publishing industry", and France got a children's press in 1857. The Grimm Brothers' 1812 collection of peasant folk tales left out whatever seemed vulgar or unsuitable: "print recorded old tales but also changed them". Women read penny magazines and household manuals (Table 5), and women novelists defined "a new type of woman: a person with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think". Lending libraries, in existence "from the seventeenth century onwards", educated white-collar workers, artisans and the lower middle class; as the working day shortened, workers wrote "political tracts and autobiographies in large numbers". NCERT's Fig. 12 dates the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to 1832-1835.

Further innovations. Table 2 traces the presses from Gutenberg's to Hoe's cylindrical press and the offset press. Publishers also kept finding new ways to sell: serialised novels in periodicals, England's cheap "Shilling Series" in the 1920s, the dust jacket, and cheap paperbacks when the Great Depression of the 1930s threatened sales.

India and the world of print

Manuscripts before print. India had "a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts" in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and the vernaculars, on palm leaves or handmade paper, often illustrated, produced "down to the late nineteenth century". They were expensive and fragile, and pre-colonial Bengal's village schools taught writing from dictation, so "Many thus became literate without ever actually reading any kinds of texts."

Print comes to India. "The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century." Jesuits learnt Konkani, and "By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in the Konkani and in Kanara languages". In NCERT's account Catholic priests printed "the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin" and the first Malayalam book in 1713, and "By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts". The Company imported presses from the late seventeenth century, yet English printing came late and from private enterprise: from 1780 James Augustus Hicky (Table 5) edited the weekly Bengal Gazette, "a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none". He printed advertisements, including some for the sale of slaves, and gossip about senior officials; Warren Hastings persecuted him and encouraged "officially sanctioned newspapers". The first Indian newspaper, in NCERT's account, was another weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, "who was close to Rammohun Roy".

Religious reform and public debates

From the early nineteenth century reformers and the orthodox argued "in public and in print", and print "shaped the nature of the debate" by letting a wider public join it (exercise "Write in brief" 3c). The issues were "widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry". In Bengal, ideas went into "the everyday, spoken language of ordinary people": Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821, and the orthodoxy commissioned the Samachar Chandrika to oppose him. From 1822 came two Persian papers, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, and in the same year the Gujarati Bombay Samachar.

In north India the ulama, anxious about the collapse of Muslim dynasties and fearing conversion and changes to personal law, used "cheap lithographic presses" for Persian and Urdu translations of scripture and religious papers. The Deoband Seminary (on its year, Table 5) "published thousands upon thousands of fatwas" on everyday conduct, and many Muslim sects and seminaries used Urdu print to "conduct these battles in public". Among Hindus, the first printed Ramcharitmanas came out from Calcutta in 1810, cheap lithographed editions flooded north India by the mid-century, and from the 1880s the Naval Kishore Press (Lucknow) and the Shri Venkateshwar Press (Bombay) printed religious texts in the vernaculars, portable and easy to read aloud.

Print also "connected communities and people in different parts of India": newspapers carried news from place to place, "creating pan-Indian identities".

New forms of publication

Readers "wanted to see their own lives, experiences, emotions and relationships reflected in what they read", and the novel, developed in Europe, "soon acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles"; lyrics, short stories and essays followed. By the end of the nineteenth century "a new visual culture was taking shape": Raja Ravi Varma made images for mass circulation (Fig. 17), poor wood engravers set up shop near the letterpresses, and cheap bazaar prints and calendars shaped "popular ideas about modernity and tradition". By the 1870s caricatures ran in journals: some mocked educated Indians' taste for Western clothes, some feared social change, and imperial and nationalist cartoons attacked each other (Fig. 18: on the cover of the Indian Charivari, a British figure shows seated Indians a copy of Punch).

Women and print

Women's reading "increased enormously in middle-class homes": liberal families taught daughters at home and sent them to the women's schools set up "after the mid-nineteenth century", and journals carried women's writing and home syllabi (exercise "Write in brief" 3a). Not every family agreed: "Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed", and some Muslims feared Urdu romances would corrupt women. Rebels found ways: a girl in a conservative north Indian Muslim family secretly learnt Urdu, and in East Bengal Rashsundari Debi learnt to read "in the secrecy of her kitchen"; her Amar Jiban (1876) was, in NCERT's words, "the first full-length autobiography published in the Bengali language". From the 1860s Kailashbashini Debi wrote on women "imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance"; in the 1880s Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote "with passionate anger" on the lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows.

Hindi printing "began seriously only from the 1870s", much of it for women's education, and early twentieth-century journals for women discussed education, widowhood, widow remarriage and the national movement. Print also carried the other side: in Punjab, Ram Chaddha's Istri Dharm Vichar taught women "how to be obedient wives", and the Khalsa Tract Society printed booklets in the same vein. Calcutta's Battala printed cheap religious texts and literature thought "obscene and scandalous", and pedlars carried both to women at home.

Print and the poor people

Very cheap books were sold at crossroads in nineteenth-century Madras towns, and public libraries came up from the early twentieth century, mostly in cities and towns (exercise "Write in brief" 3b). Caste entered print "From the late nineteenth century": NCERT gives 1871 for Jyotiba Phule's Gulamgiri on the injustices of caste, and in the twentieth century B.R. Ambedkar and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) wrote on caste for readers across India. Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 "to show the links between caste and class exploitation"; another Kanpur millworker's poems (1935-1955), written as Sudarshan Chakr, became Sacchi Kavitayan; by the 1930s Bangalore millworkers set up libraries after the Bombay example, sponsored by reformers who also tried to curb drinking, spread literacy and sometimes preached nationalism. NCERT's Fig. 22 adds Lakshminath Bezbaruah (1868-1938), "a doyen of modern Assamese literature" and author of "O Mor Apunar Desh".

Print and censorship

Before and after 1857. "Before 1798, the colonial state under the East India Company was not too concerned with censorship", and its early measures targeted Englishmen "critical of Company misrule", lest critics in England use their writing against the Company's trade monopoly. By the 1820s the Calcutta Supreme Court passed regulations "to control press freedom", and in 1835 Bentinck, petitioned by editors, agreed to revise the press laws; Macaulay's new rules "restored the earlier freedoms". After 1857 "Enraged Englishmen demanded a clamp down on the 'native' press".

The Vernacular Press Act, 1878 (exercise "Write in brief" 2c). As vernacular papers grew "assertively nationalist", the government passed the Act, "modelled on the Irish Press Laws". It gave "extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press"; a paper reporting anything judged seditious was warned, and if it ignored the warning, "the press was liable to be seized and the printing machinery confiscated".

The cycle of repression and protest. Nationalist papers still multiplied, reporting misrule and encouraging nationalist activity, and each attempt to throttle them "provoked militant protest". When Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907, Tilak wrote about them "with great sympathy" in his Kesari; his imprisonment in 1908 provoked protests across India. Box 4 shows the government struggling to find loyal editors, and Box 5 lists the wartime controls (Table 4).

Did the 2020-21 edition differ?

Only in two words; the lines in Table 5 were already there. Where Reprint 2026-27 reads "The oldest Chinese book, printed in AD 868" (the Diamond Sutra), the 2020-21 edition read "The oldest Japanese book"; and its "a literary firm" (on the novel) now reads "a literary form". This page follows Reprint 2026-27.

Source: NCERT ch. V, 2020-21 edition (jess305.pdf in the whole-book zip, Wayback Machine capture of 9 October 2021).

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Frames for Mains Answers

1. How print helped Indian nationalism (NCERT "Discuss" 4). Print carried reform debates in "the everyday, spoken language of ordinary people"; papers connected regions and created "pan-Indian identities"; nationalist papers reported colonial misrule; repression (the 1878 Act, Tilak's 1908 imprisonment) fed protest; Gandhi tied Swaraj to press freedom (1922).

2. Did print cause the French Revolution? NCERT's three arguments (Enlightenment ideas, a culture of debate, underground satire on the monarchy), then its caution: readers chose, and print "did open up the possibility of thinking differently".

3. Print and the women's question (adjacent: gs1-pyq-2017-18). Women's journals and home syllabi; Rashsundari Debi, Kailashbashini Debi, Tarabai Shinde, Pandita Ramabai, Begum Rokeya; the counter-current of Istri Dharm Vichar, the Khalsa tracts and the Ghor Kali woodcuts.

4. Print and socio-religious reform (adjacent: gs1-pyq-2021-04). Rammohun Roy's Sambad Kaumudi against the Samachar Chandrika; the ulama's lithographed fatwas; cheap vernacular scriptures; caste critiques from Phule to Periyar.

Exam Strategy

Prelims fact-traps:

• Two Bengal Gazettes in NCERT: Hicky's English weekly from 1780, and Gangadhar Bhattacharya's, the first Indian paper.
• Hand printing reached Japan from China (AD 768-770); the Jikji (Korea) used movable metal type; NCERT places Gutenberg's press at Strasbourg in the 1430s.
• The Vernacular Press Act was modelled on the Irish Press Laws; Bentinck and Macaulay (1835) had restored freedoms before it.

Practice Questions

NCERT's exercises for this chapter have no MCQs. Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers): questions 1-5.

1. With reference to early print in East Asia, as described by NCERT, consider the following statements:
1. Chinese books were printed from AD 594 onwards by rubbing paper against inked woodblocks.
2. Hand-printing technology reached Japan through Buddhist missionaries from China.
3. The Jikji of Korea was printed by the woodblock method.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
(a) 1 and 2 only
(b) 2 and 3 only
(c) 1 and 3 only
(d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (a). The Jikji was printed with movable metal type.

2. Which of the following pairs are correctly matched?
1. Sambad Kaumudi: Rammohun Roy
2. Samachar Chandrika: commissioned by the Hindu orthodoxy
3. Bombay Samachar: a Persian newspaper
Select the correct answer:
(a) 1 and 2 only
(b) 2 and 3 only
(c) 1 and 3 only
(d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (a). The Bombay Samachar was Gujarati; the Persian papers of 1822 were Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar.

3. The Vernacular Press Act, 1878:
1. was modelled on the Irish Press Laws.
2. allowed the government to seize the press of a newspaper that ignored a warning.
3. applied equally to English-language newspapers.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
(a) 1 and 2 only
(b) 2 and 3 only
(c) 1 and 3 only
(d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (a). The Act's powers were over the vernacular press.

4. Consider the following writers and works:
1. Rashsundari Debi: Amar Jiban
2. Kashibaba: Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal
3. Ram Chaddha: Istri Dharm Vichar
Which of the pairs given above are correctly matched?
(a) 1 only
(b) 1 and 2 only
(c) 2 and 3 only
(d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (d).

5. NCERT concludes that print "did not directly shape their minds, but it did open up the possibility of thinking differently". Examine this with reference to the Reformation in Europe and reform debates in nineteenth-century India. (150 words)

NCERT exercises (where the answers are on this page): Write in brief 1 (a) Print comes to Europe, (b) Luther, (c) Print and dissent with Table 5, (d) Source F; 2 (a) Gutenberg, (b) Source A, (c) the Vernacular Press Act; 3 Women and print, Print and the poor people, Religious reform. Discuss 1 Mercier; 2 Table 4; 3 Print and the poor people; 4 Frame 1. Project: Table 2.

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, India and the Contemporary World II, Textbook in History for Class X, ch. V "Print Culture and the Modern World", Reprint 2026-27 — ncert.nic.in PDF.
• NCERT, India and the Contemporary World II, front matter (Contents, "For Extended Learning"), Reprint 2026-27 — ncert.nic.in PDF.
• NCERT, India and the Contemporary World II, 2020-21 edition (whole-book zip), as archived on 9 October 2021 — Wayback Machine.
• UNESCO Memory of the World, Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol (vol. II) — unesco.org.
• UNESCO Memory of the World, Printing woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana and miscellaneous Buddhist scriptures — unesco.org.
• Britannica, "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" — britannica.com.
• Fordham University, Internet History Sourcebooks, "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" — sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu.
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogue record "Mercier, Louis-Sébastien (1740-1814)" — catalogue.bnf.fr.
• Hicky's Bengal Gazette; or, Calcutta General Advertiser, British Library run (Adam Matthew, Eighteenth Century Journals) — amdigital.co.uk; The Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania — onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu.
• Darul Uloom Deoband, official site — darululoom-deoband.com.
• PRS Legislative Research, "The Press and Registration of Periodicals Bill, 2023" (bill track, with the Act as published in the Gazette of India, 29 December 2023) — prsindia.org.
• Sedition Committee, 1918: Report (Calcutta, 1918), with Justice S.A.T. Rowlatt's covering letter of 15 April 1918 — archive.org.