The ‘Book’ in India: Orality, Manu-Script, Print (Post)Colonialism

Abstract

Any treatment of the history of the book in South Asia undertaken in the early twenty-first century is likely to feel the need to engage with what has come to be known as postcolonial discourse. It thus behoves us to enquire at the outset just how fitting a backdrop to the subject this discourse provides. This is all the more pressing a requirement since, despite being self-consciously and even apologetically informed by the best liberal-guilty will in the world, certain strands in postcolonial discourse continue to betray some of the fondest vanities of the colonial enterprise itself in its confident heyday. One of these abiding pieties is that imperial rule offered the colonies, for example, the book. On the other hand, some of the more radically deconstructive strands of postcolonial discourse appear to institute a kind of ex post facto discursive parity between the colonizer and the colonized, the ruler and the ruled, the centre and the periphery, and indeed between any similar ‘binary’, purportedly because of the inherent ambivalence of all experience, representation and meaning-making. Is this easy assumption of equality, resting as it does on indeterminacy, perhaps more blithe and feckless than politically engaged or sincerely egalitarian?