What did the spread of print culture in nineteenth century India mean to:

(a) Women

(b) The poor

(c) Reformers

(a) Women — Women in India were immensely affected by the print culture. Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways. Women’s reading, therefore, increased enormously in middle-class homes. Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and sent them to schools when women’s schools were set up in the cities and towns after the mid-nineteenth century. Girls of conservative families secretly learnt to read and write. Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why women should be educated. As a result some women like Rashsundari Debi and Kailashbashini Debi, became writers. Rashsundari Debi wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban which was published in 1876. It was the first full-length autobiography published in the Bengali language.

(b) The poor — Printing made small books and booklets affordable for poor people. Enlightening essays were written against caste discrimination and its inherent injustices. Workers in factories were too overworked and lacked the education to write much about their experiences. But Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote and published "Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal" in 1938 to show the links between caste and class exploitation. The poems of another Kanpur millworker, who wrote under the name of Sudarshan Chakr between 1935 and 1955, were brought together and published in a collection called "Sacchi Kavitayan". Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of 'low caste' protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri (1871). In the twentieth century, B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker in Madras, better known as Periyar, wrote powerfully on caste and their writings were read by people all over India. Local protest movements and sects also created a lot of popular journals and tracts criticising ancient scriptures and envisioning a new and just future.

(c) Reformers — The introduction of Printing in India had a significant impact on reformers. This was a time of intense controversies between social and religious reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry. In Bengal, as the debate developed, tracts and newspapers proliferated, circulating a variety of arguments. It facilitated the dissemination of ideas, enabling reformers to reach a wider audience. Reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy utilized print media to promote social and religious reforms, fostering awareness and discussion among the masses. This played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual landscape during the nineteenth century.