Subscription Publishing and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Indian Print Culture (corrected edition)

Studies of Indian print culture almost invariably have dated its origins to the period after 1800. The consumption and production of print in South Asia before then, supposedly, was limited to Europeans. This article challenges this consensus through an examination of Indian participation in subscription publishing. It uses lists of subscribers to reveal the existence in the eighteenth century of a community of Indian print readers and patrons. It identifies more than one hundred members of this community, and, to the extent possible, reconstructs their backgrounds and motivations. It finds that they were a diverse lot: they lived in various places, belonged to various social groups, bought various kinds of books, and did so for various reasons. In the eighteenth century, print caught on with some of the key groups and individuals responsible for its later spread. If Indian print culture blossomed in the nineteenth century, then it was able to do so because its roots had been planted – by Indians – already.