ABSTRACT
P rint reached India in the mid-sixteenth century and Tamil books were printed soon after, although commercial printing did not develop until the early nineteenth century; this was also when folklore first entered print. By 1900, however, printed folklore was used in schools, read as cheap pamphlets and published as scholarly books; from the 1870s, folklore, especially folktales in English translation, had entered nationalist discourse. In this chapter, I will argue that to understand these uses of printed folklore in nineteenth-century Madras we must look back to nearly three centuries of interaction between south Indians and Europeans; printing is an obvious legacy of that encounter, but hand in hand with the new technology, the colonial encounter also initiated literary practices that fundamentally changed Tamil literary culture. None of these practices began precisely or exclusively as a result o f either colonial contact or printing, but their effects on Tamil literary culture were magnified through the encounter with Europeans and European languages and through their alliance with print.1
