Print Culture and the Politics of Marginalisation: Contesting Gentility in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

Abstract

This article investigates the contested terrain of print culture in nineteenth‑century Calcutta, situating it within the broader debates on the Bengal Renaissance and colonial modernity. Traditionally, the Renaissance has been celebrated as a moment of intellectual awakening led by elite, English‑educated bhadralok reformers such as Rammohun Roy, William Carey, and their colonial interlocutors. Historiography from Jadunath Sarkar to David Kopf has often valorised this period as a rupture from the past, aligning it with European Renaissance ideals and the civilising mission of empire. Yet more recent scholarship, particularly that of Sumit Sarkar, has challenged this narrative, exposing its elitist biases, selective reforms, and complicity with caste hierarchies. Building on this critical turn, Anindita Ghosh’s Power in Print reorients the discussion by foregrounding plebeian print traditions, especially those emerging from Battala presses, which thrived despite elite attempts at cultural sanitisation. The paper argues that print culture in colonial Bengal was not a unilinear project of elite refinement but a contested field where marginalised voices—petty bhadralok, women, and poor Muslims—resisted erasure and reshaped literary modernity. Battala publications, often dismissed as “vulgar” or “polluting,” produced almanacs, romances, farces, and devotional texts in colloquial registers that reached diverse audiences across class, gender, and community. These works exposed the hypocrisies of bhadralok gentility, satirised elite pretensions, and valorised oral traditions. Women’s writings, expressed through meyeli bhasha and autobiographical accounts, challenged patriarchal silencing and asserted domestic idioms as legitimate literary registers. Muslim Bengali literature revived dobhashi Bangla, blending Perso‑Arabic vocabulary with Bengali and producing romances and puthi narratives that contested the Sanskritised Bengali promoted by elites. Together, these traditions destabilised the monopoly of bhadralok culture and demonstrated the plurality of Bengali literary modernity. Methodologically, the paper combines close reading of primary texts with historiographical analysis, situating Bengali print culture within comparative frameworks of language politics in colonial India, including the Hindi‑Urdu controversy, Tamil devotional movements, and Oriya language agitation. By doing so, it highlights Bengal’s distinctiveness: here, plebeian print traditions directly challenged elite attempts at refinement, creating a dynamic interplay between oral and print cultures. The study contributes to ongoing debates in cultural history, subaltern studies, and the history of the book by repositioning print as a site of negotiation, dissent, and alternative modernities. It underscores that the Bengal Renaissance was not simply an elite‑led awakening but a fractured, contested process shaped by marginalised voices whose contributions remain vital to understanding colonial cultural history. In foregrounding these voices, the paper advances a more inclusive historiography that recognises the politics of marginalisation and the resilience of subaltern creativity in the face of elite and colonial dominance.