ABSTRACT
P rint became an essential medium in the nineteenth century for standardizing the Bengali language and sanitizing its literary traditions, by the colonial intelligentsia. Classical and ‘high’ literature flourished and the local literati joined hands to push through the project started by colonial administrators. But the process had also given a tremendous impetus to the small book’ trade. Print generated not only the ‘high’ literature o f vernacular reformists and purists, but also a large corpus of cheap, popular books, the language, concerns, and themes o f which ran seriously against the concerns of Bengali in telligentsia and colonial reformers alike. The printing press unleashed a huge production o f petty pamphlet literature-consisting of my thologies, fables, popular religious texts, farces, almanacs, sensational novels and the like-whose content was quite contrary to the domi nant acceptable forms.
