The backbone of this book on books is a history of a most unusual concept of the book that developed in South Asia with reference to the Veda… By the 19th century, regional cultures of print showed an uneven and spatially discontinuous development across the Indian subcontinent. They variously fed on regional patterns of communication, configurations of power, patronage, and a new economic regime. Their development formed part of tremendous transformations in the structures of power, statecraft, authority, and communication that the subcontinent was going through while being gradually absorbed into the globalizing orbit of the emerging British Empire. The period witnessed a general shift of knowledge-production sites and relocation of distribution and text-circulation networks towards new urban centres…. This book tries to understand how the emerging regional cultures of print created conditions for, inspired, and accommodated differently configured projects of bringing out printed editions of Vedic texts while leaving distinct traces of their respective nature on their editorial principles, book format, typographic form, and publishing ideology.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- I. Objects, spaces and practices
- I.1. The book as an object circulating in space
- I.2. The rebel book of the Veda
- II. The Veda before print
- II.1. The beginnings: the travelling Veda
- II.2. The living libraries: the memorized Veda
- II.3. Performance and spectacle: the ritual Veda
- II.4. Scribes and scripture: the handwritten Veda
- II.5. The Veda commented upon
- II.6. The Veda in the empire of writing
- III. The coming of print to Indian subcontinent
- III.1. The missionary, the government and the commercialprinters
- III.2. Preachers, printers and pundits
- III.3. The Empire in print and the ethnographic state
- III.4. Indian commercial printing after 1835(new beginnings)
- IV. The Printed Veda
- IV.1. The lost and the imagined Veda
- IV.2. The recovered and the philological Veda
- IV.3. The imperial Veda
- IV.4. The printed Veda for paṇḍitas and pundits
- IV.5. The Veda printed by Indians in India
- V. Towards social history of print culturesin colonial India
- V.1. Printing revolution and social change
- V.2. Publishing Indian religions in print
- V.3. Regional print cultures and the Veda
- V.4. Towards a new understanding of reading cultures
- Abbreviations
- References
- APPENDIX.
- General index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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