Gandhi's Printing Press

Isabel Hofmeyr

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674074774
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

At the same time that Gandhi, as a young lawyer in South Africa, began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper. Gandhi's Printing Press is an account of how this project, an apparent footnote to a titanic career, shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma. Pioneering publisher, experimental editor, ethical anthologist—these roles reveal a Gandhi developing the qualities and talents that would later define him.Isabel Hofmeyr presents a detailed study of Gandhi's work in South Africa (1893–1914), when he was the some-time proprietor of a printing press and launched the periodical Indian Opinion. The skills Gandhi honed as a newspaperman—distilling stories from numerous sources, circumventing shortages of type—influenced his spare prose style. Operating out of the colonized Indian Ocean world, Gandhi saw firsthand how a global empire depended on the rapid transmission of information over vast distances. He sensed that communication in an industrialized age was becoming calibrated to technological tempos.But he responded by slowing the pace, experimenting with modes of reading and writing focused on bodily, not mechanical, rhythms. Favoring the use of hand-operated presses, he produced a newspaper to contemplate rather than scan, one more likely to excerpt Thoreau than feature easily glossed headlines. Gandhi's Printing Press illuminates how the concentration and self-discipline inculcated by slow reading, imbuing the self with knowledge and ethical values, evolved into satyagraha, truth-force, the cornerstone of Gandhi's revolutionary idea of nonviolent resistance.

1

Printing Cultures in the Indian Ocean World

At low tide from the beach in Porbandar in Gujarat, it is said one can just glimpse the tip of a shipwreck. Originally the SS Khedive, this vessel is the subject of a double legend. The first is that it carried Mohandas Gandhi on one of his voyages between Bombay and Durban. The second is that the ship sank with Gandhi’s printing press on board.1

This is not the only report of a phantom printing press associated with Gandhi. More than a century earlier, another account had emerged, this time at the other end of the Indian Ocean, in Durban. Toward the end of 1896 Gandhi was headed for this port, on his way back from Bombay. Angry white mobs awaited his arrival, claiming he had traduced white settlers in the international media and was furthermore organizing an “Asiatic Invasion.” Rumors circulated that Gandhi had a printing press and thirty compositors on board. In the imaginings of the white worker mob, the frontier of Asian migration moved with a printing press at its helm. The mob was organized into artisanal platoons: railway men, carpenters and joiners, store assistants, plasterers and bricklayers, saddlers and tailors, and printers. The pressmen on the port wharf carried a sign “Printers” that announced their view that the exclusive right to a press defined the white workingman’s ideal of racial democracy (Fig. 5). According to the Natal media, the lynch mob intended first to attack Gandhi and then the printing press (Natal Witness, January 11, 1897).

In part this phenomenon of the phantom printing press can be easily explained. In the Durban case, it had been well known for some years that Gandhi wished to acquire a press in order to start a newspaper that could speak for the interests of Indian merchants in Natal.2 The alarm that much of white Natal society felt over this idea expressed itself in the rumor of the imaginary press. White artisans were equally perturbed by the prospect of cheap compositors coming to undercut the market.

A few years later, in 1898, Gandhi did indeed play a part in purchasing a press, which was to print his newspaper Indian Opinion. When he returned to India in 1914, newspapers continued to be a key component of his noncooperation movements. Gandhi, the newspaper, and the printing press were closely associated, and hence the memory of Gandhi’s printing press persisting in legend is understandable. Indeed, Gandhi’s press has become something of a minor icon in his life story. A chapter of his autobiography discusses his printing press in South Africa, while the presses he used in India and South Africa feature in exhibitions and museums.3

Yet pertinent as these explanations are, they do not clarify one important aspect of these stories: both are accounts of a printing press at sea. Furthermore, both feature a press unable to make landfall in the Indian Ocean. In Durban, the guardians of the global color line keep the press at bay. In the Porbandar case, the press comprises part of Gandhi’s South African baggage that cannot endure the Indian Ocean crossing. Unable to survive in South Africa or transplant itself to India, its utopian potential drowns in the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean has long been a site for utopian imaginings: peaceful cosmopolitan trade, mare liberum, island utopia, pirate republics, and, more recently, a series of transoceanic dreams, whether of theosophy or Greater India, followed by ideals of nonalignment and Afro-Asian solidarity.4 In the reckoning of some, the Indian Ocean’s ancient history of transoceanic trade enables utopian thinking, an argument made in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land.5 Ghosh himself has given the book a utopian gloss, describing it as a narrative of nonalignment, which explores again the ancient transoceanic exchanges of the Indian Ocean interrupted by colonial rule.6

This portfolio of Indian Ocean utopianisms provides an appropriate setting for the story of the International Printing Press (IPP), a modest jobbing press that became a central protagonist in the satyagraha saga. A “colonial-born” press, it belonged to a class of similar tiny jobbing operations that dotted the Indian Ocean world and that likewise printed material on behalf of utopian causes. Like the IPP, these Indian Ocean presses took shape in multiply diasporic environments. Taken together, they constitute an important but little-explored strand in global histories of print. This chapter traces the outlines of these Indian Ocean printing cultures as a framework for the biography of the IPP that follows in the next chapter.

Diasporic Printing

There are currently rich legacies of scholarship on transnational histories of print. These include work on imperial print culture and postcolonial book history, as well as studies of newspapers and periodicals in empire.7 Yet these studies tend to operate in circumscribed areas: the transatlantic book trade; print and printers in the “white dominions”; and media in British India.8 Studies of transnational religious publishing are likewise balkanized and tend to follow the watersheds of particular faiths. Accounts of Christian mission publishing in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, pay little attention to Indian diasporic print ventures or African commercial concerns, creating the impression that all printing in this region is of European Christian evangelical provenance.9

To complicate such views, one need only consider the printing sector in any of the major cities in southern or East Africa in which several diasporic groups intersected. In these settings, Muslim printers from Bombay; Africans tutored in Protestant evangelical presses; Indians (and Britons) trained in mission, state-run, or commercial printing concerns in the subcontinent; and British printers as well as print workers from diasporic locales like Mauritius converged.10 These “journeymen” shaped multilingual, multiracial, and multireligious printing ventures, working with and against each other.

Generally financially tenuous, these small printing operations produced material on behalf of (or at times came into bring through) organizations espousing grand transoceanic schemes, whether Hindu reformist, Sikh transnationalist, African nationalist, pan-Islamic, or white laborist. Central to these repertoires of transnational communication were streams of print culture: blizzards of periodicals, pamphlets, leaflets, and tracts setting out the programs and principles of their makers wafted around the port cities of the Indian Ocean. These flows of printed matter created maritime markets of faith, ideology, and information (to adapt Nile Green’s terminology).11 Examining the case of Bombay’s variegated Muslim traditions, Nile Green demonstrates how the city’s vernacular publishing industry produced a stream of demotic religious material—hagiographies, miracle narratives, cures, and talismans carried by holy men both further inland and outward to sea, in some cases to new, underdeveloped markets like Durban.

In obtaining this transnational media, diasporic organizations relied on the print cosmopolises of the Indian Ocean—Bombay and Cairo—but also created new presses and smaller centers of publication in places like Durban, Beira, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Nairobi, and Port Louis. These diasporic presses were wrought from different printing traditions carried by migrant groups from across the Indian Ocean and beyond. Two major streams emanated from Britain and India.

Printing Frontiers: Greater India Meets Greater Britain

British and Indian printers were global figures with an international profile and reach. By the later nineteenth century, major printing centers in both places had long been extruding print workers into empire. Unimpeded by immigration restrictions, British printers moved freely across empire, and especially the dominions where workers could refine a sense of themselves as “white.”12 These laboring men were less print capitalists than what we might call “print laborists”—men who attempted to define printing as part of white racial privilege. The print capitalists, proprietors, and master printers for whom they worked shared their racial ideologies if not their laborist proclivities.

More limited in their capacity to move, Indian printers did nonetheless make their presence felt across much of empire. They were drawn from a sizable Indian printing industry, which by the late nineteenth century had developed major nodes in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, as well as in Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, and Lahore.13 Fueled from the 1820s by a mixture of colonial-state printing, Protestant and Catholic mission vernacular presses, the spread of appropriate technology (the portable iron press, lithography), a paper industry, and accelerating communications networks, the printing sector was substantial and differentiated.14

In addition to large European-run concerns, there were sizable Indian-owned operations. As Ulrike Stark’s wonderful history has shown, the Nawal Kishore Press in Lucknow employed 350 hand presses, a “considerable number” of steam presses, and 900 employees producing material in a range of languages.15 By 1909, Madras was home to 120 printing concerns and sixteen factories for manufacturing printing presses.16 Large Indian-owned Madras printer-publishers in the fashionable areas of the city like Ananda Press, Andhra Patrika Press, and Perumall Chetty & Sons employed several hundred employees each.17 Beneath these strata of elite printing lay a sprawling world of smaller ventures, some comprising one- or two-man operations. As Anindita Ghosh shows for Calcutta, these printers huddled together in the narrow lanes of north Calcutta, producing a steady stream of popular almanacs, pamphlets, and images.18

Unlike the dominions, British India did not have an apprenticeship system, and forms of training varied, from learning on the job, to instruction in state-run colleges like the Madras Technical Institute for Printers or the Roorkee Engineering College, to tuition in prisons where substantial quantities of government printing were done.19 Lacking the tight solidarities of apprenticeship, printing in India acquired varied meanings. In some cases printing was closely associated with caste, where particular artisanal groups like smiths and artisans in Calcutta had moved into the trade.20 In other cases religion and caste shaped the meaning of printing, where lower caste or dalit groups were drawn into Christian mission presses.21 Among proprietors, printing acquired a strong aura of reform and progress, with the figure of the printer-editor-proprietor an almost stock character of reformist movements across the subcontinent.22

Greater Indian Printing Diasporas

While there is a rich body of work on print traditions within India itself, the question of the printing diasporas it generated is something about which we know less. But move Indian printers certainly did. In some cases they followed their own linguistic communities into the diaspora, pursuing established trajectories like those from western India to East Africa, Mauritius, and southern Africa, the latter two destinations for south Indian artisans as well.23 These printers initially worked in existing concerns or in cases where they had capital, set up their own presses, usually buying secondhand equipment and importing type from India or, more rarely, setting up lithographic operations. The earliest Tamil printing on Mauritius dates to 1843, followed by lithographed Gujarati and Urdu in 1883, and then by Urdu, Gujarati, and Hindi in letterpress.24 Printers a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: A Gandhian Theory of Text
• 1. Printing Cultures in the Indian Ocean World
• 2. Gandhi’s Printing Press: A Biography
• 3. Indian Opinion: Texts in Transit
• 4. Binding Pamphlets, Summarizing India
• 5. A Gandhian Theory of Reading: The Reader as Satyagrahi
• Conclusion: “No Rights Reserved”
• Illustrations
• Appendix: Pamphlets Reprinted from Indian Opinion
• Notes
• A Note on Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index