Digital Culture Unplugged

Probing the Native Cyborg’s Multiple Locations

Nalini Rajan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000084115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

This edited volume is an exploration of the many different ways in which contemporary society negotiates digital technologies and media in South Asia. It especially focuses on cyber-religion, the notion of self-formation and digital technology, urban cybercultural phenomenon, digital era in cinema and photography that represent an eclectic mix o

1 Exaggerated Obituaries: The Tamil Book in the Age of Electronic Reproduction

A. R. Venkatachalapathy

The death of the book, in the wake of the digital onslaught that was predicted, anticipated or feared—depending on one’s ideological and cultural position—in the 1990s seems exceedingly alarmist now in the mid-decade of the 21 st century. Following Mark Twain we could say that the obituaries for the book appear to have been somewhat exaggerated. However, even though Marshall McLuhan prophesied the disintegration of the Gutenberg galaxy as early as in the 1960s, there is no mistaking the anxiety occasioned in the 1990s.

Over the past few decades, in the blink of the eye of history, our culture has begun to go through what promises to be a total metamorphosis [...]. The stable hierarchies of the printed page [...] are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits.

—(Birkets 1994: 3)

Even though, in hindsight, Sven Birkerts’ anxiety seems unfounded there is no mistaking the palpable nature of such fears. But one should be conscious of the fact that the culture that Birkerts mentions is Western culture, which is predicated on the Enlightenment notion of self and knowledge, and the possible disappearance of an artefact that has been valued in that culture for over half a millennium. Given Roger Chartier’s perceptive statement of its centrality in Western culture that ‘the book has been one of the most powerful metaphors used for conceiving of the cosmos, nature and the human body’ (1993: 49) one can understand and even empathise with such fears and anxieties.

However, such insights from the specialisation that has come to be called ‘the history of the book’ also point to the fact that there is no one universal history of the book. If there is no one universal history of the book, it does indeed follow that there need be no one single future for the book. If books have specific and contingent histories, it would thus follow that the advent of digital technologies will have its own differential impacts. The thrust of this essay is therefore to make a specific argument for the case of Tamil books and track how Tamil book publishing has fared in its engagement with digital technology.

I

First, a few preliminaries: about 70 million people the world over now speak the Tamil language. Though this population is concentrated in the state of Tamilnadu in the Indian Union and in Sri Lanka, it is also dispersed across all continents especially due to the colonial policy of indentured labour (to offset the abolition of slavery) in the mid-19th century, the Tamil diaspora in the wake of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and the boom in immigration as a result of the explosion in the global software industry. Further, Tamil is a classical language with an unbroken literary tradition of some 2,000 years.

Tamil is the first non-European language, not to speak of Indian languages, to see moveable types and printed books. Thampiran Vanakkam (Doctrina Christinam), the first printed Tamil book, was published in 1577, barely a century from Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible. The first complete translation of the New Testament (by Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg in 1714), the first full translation of the Bible (by Fabricius, in 1796), and the first extended lexicon and the first modern encyclopedia constitute some other ‘firsts’ that printed Tamil can claim in relation to other Indian languages.

Such justifiably proud claims, however, conceal a host of congenital problems and weaknesses that characterise the Tamil publishing world. By common consent, Bengali and Malayalam, two modern Indian languages, whose engagement with printing begins some 200 years after Thampiran Vanakkam are way ahead of Tamil publishing.

Despite the early origins of print in Tamil, until the mid-19th century, printing was a European preserve with missionaries dominating the scene. From the later half of the 19th century, print made some inroads into Tamil society and developed organic links with indigenous society. The recovery of ancient Tamil classics and their canonisation through the mediation of print had far-reaching social and political consequences. Until the end of the 19th century, Tamil publishing was largely sustained by forms of traditional patronage derived from zamindars, native princes, religious monasteries, landlords and caste leaders. However, the establishment of Western-type schools and the expansion of a modern, bureaucratic administration had its implications for publishing. Apart from the demand for printed materials that this created, the emergence of new social classes based on education and colonial occupations and professions disrupted the material foundations of Tamil publishing. And by the time of World War I Tamil publishing was breaking away from patronage forms of publishing and inching towards a faceless and impersonal market.

In the inter-War period Tamil publishing showed vitality and growth, a trend that became more pronounced during World War II. The inflationary war economy ignited Tamil publishing, a process further fuelled by the influx of Chettiar capital fleeing Burma, Indochina and South-East Asia from both Japanese invasion and local resistance. Many of the characteristic features of Tamil books until the advent of the digital technology—layout, typography, cover design, etc.—took shape during this period.

The process of state takeover of textbook publishing, which started in the mid-1960s and reached a head in 1971, exposed the real foundations of Tamil publishing: the bedrock of assured textbook sales had subsidised trade books. Once again, with characteristic myopia, publishers looked to the state without exploring ways and means to expand and reach out to a market. The outcome was the establishment of the Local Library Authority¹, which almost as a matter of routine, bought a certain number of copies—as much as 50 per cent of the actual print run. Even if this ensured the bread and butter for publishers, it effectively lulled creativity and innovation.²

II

This was the backdrop in which digital technology announced its entry into Tamil publishing. The deepest impact of digital technology in Tamil publishing has been in the field of text composition. Until the mid-1990s the technology of print had remained unchanged. For nearly a century movable types, cut and cast in local foundries, were used for composition in establishments that were little more than sweatshops. Even though hot metal technologies such as monotype, linotype and rotary were certainly available throughout the 20th century—and widely employed for publishing in English even in Chennai—these were rarely resorted to in the case of Tamil publishing. The primary reason was the low print run—the average print run of Tamil books hovered at the 1,000 mark. (In fact, in the shrewd manner of cost-cutting in which Tamil publishers are adept, they made printers print 1,200 copies for the price of 1,000 as they claimed that 200 copies were meant for free distribution to authors, reviewers and promotion!) The rare occasion when the rotary was used was when C. Rajagopalachariar’s popular prose renditions of Mahabharata and Ramayana were published by Sakti Karyalayam and printed at the daily Dinamani press in the 1950s. Or when the periodical magazine press occasionally dabbled in book publishing they pressed their rotary machines into service. Given that the dimensions of the paper rolls used for these machines were different from the sheets that were ordinarily used for Tamil books such books were often in ‘unsize’ as popular publishing parlance went. The only major publisher to use hot metal technology—monotype in this case—was Poompuhar Prasuram, established in the mid-1970s by the owners of Eagle Press, the market leaders in the publication of diaries. Printing establishments such as Maruthi Press which had its own foundry would employ this luxury to occasionally use only freshly cast types for printing.

Another major impediment to the adoption of hot metal technology was the unwieldy nature of Tamil characters, which necessitated a vast number of types difficult to accommodate on a keyboard (a difficulty digital technology also had to encounter at the outset). Even when photo typesetting (with bromide print-outs) had made its entry in the 1980s—apart from the prohibitive costs involved both due to the process itself as well as the compulsory recourse to offset printing it necessitated—it was only rarely used (for instance by Cre-A publishers. Kanthalakam was one of the few firms to provide photo typesetting facilities in Tamil). Even when big publishers went in for offset printing they often preferred to do typesetting in letterpresses and took out an ‘art pull’ on the machine which was then filmed.

By the beginning of the 1990s the PC revolution was very much at the Indian doorstep. In the initial years progress in Tamil typesetting was tardy as good DTP software with WYSIWYG was still sometime in the future. Only with its advent did DTP become entrenched. This meant the gradual folding up of type foundries, such as Nelson Type Foundry and Modern Type Foundry, which were reduced to casting a limited amount to types for small letterpresses doing job work, especially in the mofussil or outlying areas.

Computer typesetting made it imperative to go for offset printing. Well, until the mid-1990s offset printing cost twice as much as regular mechanical printing. In a very inelastic book market this posed an insurmountable problem.

In the first instance, therefore, publishers took to offset printing only for printing of wrappers and jackets. Earlier, artists and illustrators had designed wrappers and covers printed in two or three colours using metal blocks. Emphasis was usually on stylistic and calligraphic writing. This simply did not work when offset printing could be done. Given the then prohibitive costs of scanning, plate making and printing, the pioneers in this field used single-colour wrappers, which were quite a novelty. They used elegant black and white photographs with un-stylised typefaces. It would take a decade before multi-colour wrappers made their entry into Tamil book wrappers. (Even then, book wrappers are printed four at a time to cut down on costs—it would be no exaggeration to say that printing single wrappers is still commercially unviable for Tamil books. Initially, many publishers instead of generating original wrapper designs used pictures from the National Geographic without acknowledgement—whether they were relevant to the contents of the book or not. The dominant trend now is to download images from the World Wide Web!)

Composing text using digital technology had its more than fair share of teething problems. The prime problem was the availability of suitable word-processing and DTP software. Despite various governmental and non-state initiatives Tamil digital technology is still faced with a multiplicity of keyboards (typewriter, phonetic and standard)—the standard keyboard ‘accepted’ in an international Tamil computing conference being one of the many available options. A Unicode is yet to gain acceptance in Tamil even though it seems inevitable in the foreseeable future. Presently there is a plethora of encoding systems: TAM, TAB, TSCII with each DTP software developer opting for their own encoding system. If the efforts of the Indian government’s Pune-based C-DAC for Indian languages was too Devanagari-centred and impervious to Tamil needs, efforts by the Tamils themselves have taken two different trajectories. Though the pioneering efforts by Tamils abroad (especially in Singapore; the name of N. Govindasamy, who developed the Murasu software, will remain immortal in the history of Tamil computing) were tecbnosawy in keeping with the demands of technology and the net, the fonts developed were far from aesthetic. On the other hand, the development of DTP software in Tamilnadu was almost exclusively propelled by publishing needs where the elegance of fonts was given priority. After a certain stage of development, interests had become so entrenched that no compromise could be effected between the two.

The long history of the Tamil fonts from the days when the earliest types were cut in Halle was forgotten and in the first instance the new fonts in Tamil DTP software, to which Tamil readers had been socialised to over more than half a century, did not gel with existing fonts in the letterpress. Even some first lessons were forgotten. The character of Tamil orthography lends itself to a slight tilt to the right, unlike the roman letters, and straight typefaces do not work well. (A corollary, given this natural tendency to the right, has been the still persistent difficulty of fashioning suitable and workable italics for Tamil fonts.) In the initial stages there was a medley of inelegant and unreadable fonts in use, a problem that has subsided only recently. Another outcome of the evolving digital typefaces was its independent development in Tamilnadu and Sri Lanka, not to speak of Malaysia and Singapore. While an almost universal set of typefaces had evolved in the movable type era, fonts diverged again. So much so, books produced in Tamilnadu and Sri Lanka have come to have distinct appearances, a situation further accentuated by the wider variety of paper available in Sri Lanka due to their open policy on the import of printing paper.

The other set of problems that cropped up with the advent of DTP was the redundancy of compositors and the resultant new recruitment of keying-in personnel. Though traditionally composition was a skilled manual job, which was pursued by people with little formal education, compositors acquired skills through long years of apprenticeship and training. (There are legendary stories about Ma.Po. Sivagnanam and Vindhan who started their lives as compositors and later emerged as not insignificant writers. There are many instances of compositors gaining political consciousness by simply reading the material they composed.) Through such a training process compositors produced decent galley and page proofs even when the authors (as they were often wont to) did not submit acceptable press copies. (In any case Tamil publishers do not usually have formal editorial staff.) Well-versed in standard page layouts and elementary proofing skills, some compositors could well make a page even without going through the galley stage. They were well-versed in em and en dashes, leading, etc.

Such training was virtually absent in the case of the new generation of computer typesetters. Basically they got trained only in the quick keying-in of text. The falling standards of school and even college education in Tamilnadu from 1980s to the present are evident in the mess they made of the copies they keyed in. The absence of even elementary, useable spell-checking software for the Tamil language (a still persistent problem) only compounded the confusion. Apart from the limited number of fonts that could be used for text composition, the non-standardisation of leading, inter-word pacing, hyphenation (being an agglutinative language with a syllabary rather than a phonetic alphabet, Tamil words do not require hyphenation), etc. made for some grotesque books in the 1990s. The entire aesthetics of the Tamil books, which had evolved over a period of about a century (from about the time of World War I when Tamil books began to be produced for a larger, impersonal market), very nearly collapsed. The almost innumerable ways in which fonts could be manipulated created confusion rather than being put to effective use. A new aesthetic based on the new digital technology emerged only by the turn of the new millennium and is far from being well entrenched even now.

It the new digital technology played such havoc in printing protocols, it also provided a variety of conveniences. Theoretically at least, it made proofreading a more effective and less time- and place-bound activity. Given the magnitude of the publishing industry, letterpress printing establishments were small and had very little type. Consequently, it was nearly impossible for the printers to k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Exaggerated Obituaries: The Tamil Book in the Age of Electronic Reproduction
• 2. Religion and Theology in the Information Society
• 3. Alterity, Technology, and Human Nature
• 4. What Mobile Phones Make of Us
• 5. The Unplugged City and the Global Nomad
• 6. Internet, Mobiles, and the New Digital Lifestyle
• 7. Digitising the Sociological Imagination
• 8. The ‘Real’ Story of Children’s Publishing
• 9. The Digital Phenomenon:Panacea or Faustian Bargain
• 10. Blog In, Blog Out
• 11. The New Technologies and the Constitution of ‘Theft’
• 12. Acting among the Shadows of the Screen
• 13. Digital Cinema in India: Apparent Horizons
• 14. Radio Daze: A Medium in Churning
• 15. The Internet and The Bully
• Notes on Editor and Contributors
• Index