Reviewed by: Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India by Megan Eaton Robb Nile Green (bio) Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India By Megan Eaton Robb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 247. Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India By Megan Eaton Robb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 247. Over the past twenty years, the spread of "print culture" across colonial India has become an important area of research, bolstered more recently by interest in delineating South Asia's multilingual public spheres. Yet compared to the series of monographic studies on Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and even Ladino newspapers from the Middle East, similarly detailed treatment of their counterparts in Urdu (arguably colonial India's most widely used written language) is a long-standing lacuna outside scholarship in Urdu. For this reason alone, Megan Eaton Robb's close study of the newspaper Madinah is welcome. But her Print and the Urdu Public does more than fill the proverbial gap: it provides an insightful investigation of how a provincial Indian newspaper made maximal use of print and telegraphy to present its smalltown site of production as a place of cultural authenticity, while reporting events from as far afield as Europe. Space forms a key part of Robb's analysis, as she uses the newspaper "to demonstrate the benefits of looking at the public as a category with temporal and spatial resonances" (p. 10). She does so through a discursive and material interpretation from Madinah's founding in 1912 to Partition in 1947. After discussing the meaning of the public in colonial India, and the rise of a Muslim "pious public" concerned with religious readings of contemporary events, the book's first chapter outlines the history of Madinah, named after the holy city in Arabia rather than its location in the North Indian qasbah (market town) of Bijnor. As one of many Urdu newspapers, after an initial print-run of 350 copies in 1912, its circulation peaked at around 12,500 copies per week in 1922. Nonetheless, Robb argues, it punched above its paper weight by presenting itself as the voice of a culturally conservative "qasbah consciousness" unlike the secularized or otherwise Westernized views perpetuated in big city periodicals. She bolsters this case via cultural-biographical profiles of Madinah's proprietor, editors, and contributors, in a legal environment of changing press laws. Later chapters examine the articles in Madinah about European affairs (particularly wars involving the Ottoman Empire) and local concerns (from agriculture to elections). Technology and Culture readers will be most interested in the book's two central chapters (chs. 2 and 3). Here the author examines the interplay between time, space, and technology, exploring how Madinah was shaped by the early arrival in Bijnor of the telegraph (in 1875) and the late arrival of the railway (in 1930), and how its [End Page 914] editors capitalized on the consequent access to distant information amid transportational isolation, as the telegraph carried news from the Ottoman Empire quicker than a person could travel to Bijnor from Calcutta. Chapter 3 also examines Madinah's material and visual dimensions, exploring how lithographic printing (widely used for Urdu) could maintain traditional calligraphy while enabling newer possibilities of visual reproduction through maps of World War I battlefields and the picture of the mosque in Medina above the paper's masthead (fig. 3.6). A particularly valuable section (pp. 104–14) focuses on "the first known" Urdu lithography manual, published in 1926—surprisingly late given that Indian Muslims had adopted the technology a full century earlier. Robb's conclusions return to her primary concerns with the interplay of space, time, and the public sphere. "First, public spaces are not purely figments of an abstract discourse but may be built on key geographic hearthstones. And second, [the book] demonstrates that a necessary component of a common language must be a coherent cosmology of time. These are to be considered productively together as a timescape" (p. 185). These are suggestive findings indeed in view of Madinah's small-town location, at once a stark contrast to port-city printing...
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Jun 1, 2021
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