The Modernizing of Communication: Vernacular Publishing in Nineteenth Century Maharashtra

Abstract

One of the most profound technological changes that Indian society has experienced in the last hundred years has occurred in its methods of communication. This is the change from a primarily oral system of communication, in which most texts were sacred ones, to a primarily written system utilizing the printing press, which was introduced generally into India at about the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is assumed in a general way that communicative modernization must have produced changes in the nature of relationships in India, but only recently has the relationship between communicative modernization and sociopolitical change in India begun to be examined.1 Interest in the relationship between communication and sociopolitical change in India has been stimulated by the writings of Karl Deutsch, who has analyzed the phenomenon of nationalism as a product of the system of communication through which particular groups perceive their common interest and common identity. In Deutsch's words, Membership in a people . . . consists in the ability to communicate more effectively over a wider range of subj ects with members of one large group than with outsiders.2 This sense of membership is spread by a network of communicative channels uniting the political, economic and administrative centers of a territory with more isolated outlying areas.3 The process by which people within a territory come to perceive their commonalty through these communication channels, Deutsch has termed social mobilization. Deutsch's various analyses of the formation of national states in Europe indicate that the process of mobilization underlies both the formation of the ideology of nationalism and the development of the institution of national states. Since mobilization is a communicative process, its measurement requires close attention to communicative media and institutions. These have received perhaps less attention than they deserve in the literature dealing with Europe, since printing and the communicative modes associated with it have been well established there for some centuries. But this is not