ABSTRACT
T he introduction of print to India dates back to the year 1556, when Portuguese Jesuit missionaries set up the first printing press in Goa.1 Two decades later, the first book in an Indian language and script appeared in the form of the Doctrina Christam (1577), a Tamil translation of a Portuguese catechism prepared by the Jesuit Henri Henri ques.2 By contrast, it was not until the last decades of the eighteenth cen tury that northern India saw a similar turning point in its cultural history when, for the first time, the introduction of movable type founts enabled the production of printed matter in Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Urdu, and Hindi on Indian soil. This momentous event marked the ‘real advent of print’ in the East and North of the subcontinent. It was followed by an other revolutionary development in the 1820s, when the introduction of lithography opened up the realm of print to Indian agency, allowing for widespread Indian ownership of printing presses. At the technological level, these innovations together formed the starting point for the emer gence of the Indian-language press and the printed book in Hindi and Urdu.
