Print Culture and the Modern World Class 10 Notes: From Woodblocks to the Vernacular Press Act

Print Culture and the Modern World is Chapter 5 of Class 10 History, from the NCERT book India and the Contemporary World II. It traces how printing started in China, Japan and Europe, how Gutenberg’s press changed the world, and how print culture grew in India and shaped religious reform, women’s writing and the national movement. These notes give you the whole chapter in simple English, with a timeline for quick revision.

Chapter at a glance

• The earliest print technology was woodblock printing, developed in China, Japan and Korea.
• Johann Gutenberg made the first printing press in Europe by 1448; the first printed book was the Bible.
• Print created a new reading public, spread new ideas, fed religious debates and helped prepare the ground for the French Revolution.
• In India, print began with Portuguese missionaries in Goa, grew through newspapers and reform debates, and gave a voice to women, workers and the poor. The colonial government controlled it through laws like the Vernacular Press Act of 1878.

The first printed books

China, Japan and Korea had the earliest print technology: hand printing. From AD 594, books in China were printed by rubbing paper against inked wooden blocks. The Chinese “accordion book” was folded and stitched at the side. The imperial state in China was the major producer of printed material, because it recruited officials through civil service examinations and printed textbooks in huge numbers. By the 17th century, merchants used print in daily life, and reading became a leisure activity. Shanghai later became the hub of the new print culture, and mechanical presses replaced hand printing.

Buddhist missionaries from China brought hand-printing to Japan around AD 768–770. The oldest Japanese book, printed in AD 868, is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra. In late 18th-century Edo (Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings showed urban culture; artists like Kitagawa Utamaro made ukiyo (“pictures of the floating world”) prints.

Print comes to Europe

Marco Polo returned to Italy from China in 1295 with the knowledge of woodblock printing. Before that, books in Europe were manuscripts, written by hand and copied by scribes: expensive, fragile and slow to produce. As demand for books grew, woodblock printing became popular for textiles, playing cards and religious pictures.

Gutenberg and the printing press

Johann Gutenberg of Strasbourg developed the first known printing press in the 1430s. He used his knowledge of the olive press to make the printing press, and moulds to cast metal types for the letters. By 1448 the system was perfected. The first book he printed was the Bible: about 180 copies took three years, which was fast for that time. Early printed books looked like manuscripts: borders were illuminated by hand, and rich buyers ordered decorated copies. Between 1450 and 1550, presses were set up in most European countries. About 20 million printed copies flooded the market in the second half of the 15th century, rising to about 200 million in the 16th century. This shift from hand printing to mechanical printing is called the print revolution.

The print revolution and its impact

• A new reading public. Books became cheaper and reached new readers. Earlier, common people heard books read out (oral culture). Printers began publishing ballads and folk tales with pictures, so oral culture and reading culture mixed.
• Religious debates and fear of print. Many feared that printed books would spread rebellious and irreligious ideas. Martin Luther, the religious reformer, wrote his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 criticising the Roman Catholic Church; printed copies spread fast and led to the Protestant Reformation. Luther said, “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.” The scholar Erasmus feared that print would flood the world with worthless books.
• Print and dissent. The Italian miller Menocchio read books and formed his own view of God and creation; the Roman Church executed him. From 1558, the Church kept an Index of Prohibited Books.

The reading mania

By the 17th and 18th centuries, literacy rose in Europe. Churches set up schools, and readers wanted books. Pedlars sold almanacs (ritual calendars), ballads and folk tales. In England, penny chapbooks were sold by chapmen. In France, the Bibliotheque Bleue were low-priced small books in cheap blue covers. Periodicals, newspapers and journals appeared. The ideas of scientists and philosophers such as Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Rousseau became accessible. The writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier declared: “Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtual writer!”

Print and the French Revolution

Historians argue that print culture created the conditions for the French Revolution in three ways. It spread the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who attacked tradition, superstition and the authority of the Church and the state. It created a culture of dialogue and debate in which people questioned everything. And by the 1780s, literature mocked royalty and criticised their morality, which raised questions about the social order. But print did not directly shape people’s minds; people read many different things and made their own choices.

The 19th century: children, women and workers

• Children: a children’s press was set up in France in 1857. The Grimm Brothers in Germany collected folk tales, published in 1812, after removing whatever was thought unsuitable for children.
• Women: women became important readers and writers. Penny magazines were meant for them. Famous women novelists: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot.
• Workers: lending libraries in England, which existed from the 17th century, became a way to educate white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people. After working hours were shortened, workers wrote political tracts and autobiographies.

Further innovations

By the mid-19th century, Richard M. Hoe of New York perfected the power-driven cylindrical press, which printed 8,000 sheets per hour. The offset press could print six colours at a time. Electrically operated presses arrived in the 20th century. Publishers also used new marketing: the Shilling Series in England (cheap paperback editions in the 1920s), the dust cover or book jacket, and cheap series during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

India and the world of print

Manuscripts before print

India had a rich tradition of handwritten manuscripts in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and vernacular languages, copied on palm leaves or handmade paper, often illustrated, and preserved between wooden covers. They were expensive and fragile, and hard to read because scripts were written in different styles.

Print comes to India

The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-16th century. Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed tracts; by 1674 about 50 books had been printed in Konkani and Kanara. Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book at Cochin in 1579 and the first Malayalam book in 1713. English printing grew slowly. From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began editing the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine described as “a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none”. Hickey published gossip about the Company’s senior officials, so Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted him. By the end of the 18th century, several newspapers were run by Indians; the first Indian newspaper was the Bengal Gazette brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya.

Religious reform and public debates

From the early 19th century, printed tracts and newspapers spread new ideas and debates on widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry. Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi in 1821; Hindu orthodoxy replied with the Samachar Chandrika. Two Persian newspapers, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, appeared in 1822, and the Gujarati Bombay Samachar in the same year. Muslim ulama in north India printed cheap lithographic Urdu and Persian translations of holy scriptures and religious newspapers; the Deoband Seminary, founded in 1867, published thousands of fatwas. Among Hindus, the first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas came out in Calcutta in 1810. From the 1880s, the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published many religious texts in vernacular languages.

New forms of publication

Print created new forms of writing: the novel, lyrics, short stories and essays on social and political matters. Printing presses and visual culture grew together: cheap prints and calendars by artists like Raja Ravi Varma were bought even by the poor. By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons in journals commented on social and political issues, and imperial cartoons mocked nationalists.

Women and print

Women’s reading increased in middle-class homes, though conservative Hindus and Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted or widowed. Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a conservative household in East Bengal, learnt to read in secret and wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban, published in 1876, the first full-length autobiography in Bengali. Kailashbashini Debi wrote about women’s experiences; in the 1880s, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women. Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi print culture developed early; Hindi printing for women began in earnest in the 1870s. In Punjab, folk literature taught women to be obedient wives. In Bengal, the Battala area of central Calcutta printed cheap books that pedlars carried to homes.

Print and the poor

Cheap small books were sold at crossroads in Madras towns, and public libraries were set up from the early 20th century. Jyotiba Phule wrote Gulamgiri (1871) about the injustices of the caste system; in the 20th century, B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) in Madras wrote powerfully on caste. Workers wrote too: Kashibaba, a Kanpur mill worker, wrote Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal (1938); a mill worker’s poems were published under the name Sudarshan Chakr as Sacchi Kavitayan. Bangalore cotton mill workers set up libraries to educate themselves.

Print and censorship

Before 1798, the East India Company was not concerned with censorship; early control was aimed at Englishmen in India who criticised the Company. By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court passed regulations to control press freedom; in 1835, Governor-General Bentinck’s liberal press laws (drafted by Thomas Macaulay) restored the earlier freedoms. After the revolt of 1857, attitudes changed. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878, modelled on the Irish Press Laws, gave the government wide powers to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press: a newspaper could be warned, and if the warning was ignored, its press could be seized and its machinery confiscated. Nationalist newspapers grew anyway. In 1907, when Punjab revolutionaries were deported, Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote with sympathy about them in his Kesari, and was imprisoned in 1908, which caused widespread protests.

Quick timeline

Year	Event
AD 594	Woodblock printing in China
AD 868	Diamond Sutra printed in Japan
1295	Marco Polo brings woodblock printing knowledge to Italy
1448	Gutenberg’s printing press perfected; Bible printed
1517	Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses
1558	Roman Church starts the Index of Prohibited Books
1579	First Tamil book printed at Cochin
1780	Hickey’s Bengal Gazette
1821	Rammohun Roy’s Sambad Kaumudi
1871	Jyotiba Phule’s Gulamgiri
1876	Rashsundari Debi’s Amar Jiban
1878	Vernacular Press Act
1908	Tilak imprisoned

Important questions

1. Give reasons for the following: (a) Woodblock print came to Europe only after 1295. (b) Martin Luther was in favour of print and spoke out in praise of it. (c) The Roman Catholic Church began keeping an Index of Prohibited Books from the mid-16th century. (d) Gandhi said the fight for Swaraj is a fight for liberty of speech, liberty of the press and freedom of association. (5 marks)
2. What did the spread of print culture in 19th-century India mean to women, the poor and reformers? (5 marks)
3. Explain how print culture assisted the growth of nationalism in India. (3 marks)
4. Why did some people in 18th-century Europe think that print culture would bring enlightenment and end despotism? (3 marks)
5. Describe the Vernacular Press Act of 1878. (3 marks)
6. How did print culture create conditions for the French Revolution? (3 marks)

Stuck on any of these? Type the question in the DoubtPay study space, choose Social Studies and Class 9–10, and get a point-wise answer with the keywords examiners look for. One credit per answer, packs from ₹9, no subscription.

FAQs

Who invented the printing press?

Johann Gutenberg of Strasbourg developed the first known printing press in the 1430s and perfected it by 1448. The first book he printed was the Bible.

What was the Vernacular Press Act?

A law passed in 1878 by the British government in India, modelled on the Irish Press Laws, that allowed the government to censor and punish newspapers published in Indian languages.

Which is the oldest dated printed book?

The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text printed in Japan in AD 868, is described in the chapter as the oldest Japanese book and is widely counted as the oldest dated printed book.

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