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?
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Notes
Lucien Febvre and Henri Jean-Martin, L’apparition du livre (1958), tr. as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: NLB, 1976)
David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, An Introduction to Book History (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 91.
Brijraj Singh, The First Protestant Missionary to India: Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1683–1719) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 31–4
Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, cited and discussed by Harish Trivedi, in Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, Volume 4: 1790–1900, Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, eds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 340–54.
N. Jha and N. S. Rajaram, The Deciphered Indus Script: Methodologies, Readings, Interpretations (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2000), p. xi.
B. S. Kesavan (ed.), The Book in India: A Compilation (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1992), p. 3.
Duncan Greenlees, The Gospel of Guru Granth Sahib (Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House 1952), p. lxxv
Sahib Singh, About [the] Compilation of Sri Guru Granth Sahib (Amritsar: Lok Sahit Prakashan, 1996)
Homi K. Bhabha, The location of culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 108
Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India Under the Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 11.
See Amrit Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times, tr. from Hindi by Harish Trivedi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Thomas Duer Broughton, Selections from the Popular Poetry of the Hindoos (London: John Martin, 1814).
David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds, The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 3.
John Feather, A Dictionary of Book History (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 126.
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© 2008 Harish Trivedi
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Trivedi, H. (2008). The ‘Book’ in India: Orality, Manu-Script, Print (Post)Colonialism. In: Fraser, R., Hammond, M. (eds) Books Without Borders, Volume 2. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289130_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289130_2
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