Learning How to Print in Colonial North India: The Nizami Press in Budaun and the First Urdu Manual on the Art of Lithography

What is it about?

The arrival of lithography in South Asia during the early nineteenth century marked a watershed in the history of print on the subcontinent. In contrast to movable type, lithography became the preferred printing method for the reproduction of texts in the Person-Arabic script and quickly spread across North India. Yet, access to technological innovations and state-of-the-art knowledge about lithography remained scarce. In this article, I focus on the first manual on lithography in Urdu, published in 1924 by the Nizami Press in Budaun (U.P.), to explore how a Muslim publisher in a small North Indian town tried to reform educational methods in his trade. I introduce the Nizami publishing house (est. 1905) and compare the manual with similar European and Indian instructional handbooks. I ask: How did Indian printers and publishers learn their craft? What were the tools and materials used for lithographic printing in colonial India? And given the popularity of lithography, why were instruction manuals so rare in Indian vernaculars? By examining the material and technical aspects of the lithographic printing process explained in the Urdu manual, this article engages with larger scholarly debates revolving around knowledge production, pedagogy and technological developments in colonial India. Furthermore, it analyzes the manual’s language to demonstrate how printers and publishers were engaged in discourses about nationalism, modernization and social reform.

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