Book review: Exploring the secret history of Hindi writing and material text artefacts

For my teacher, the medium was the message. The words written in his little book were inextricable from the circumstances that led to their inscription. The physical form in which books are produced, as well as the material and social circumstances of production, play a crucial role in our understanding of the history of the Hindi language.

As a historical framework this is especially relevant for Hindi since Hindi publishing as an organised industry is no more than 100-odd years old, when the demand for a common tongue for India’s freedom movement resulted in the standardisation of the language. These factors also ended up shaping how Hindi was established as a versatile language of the masses in the subcontinent—a medium for poetry, politics, devotion and even revolution.

These two interrelated arguments form the core of Tyler W. William’s excellent book, If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi. As he explains in the introduction, each chapter “reconstructs a ‘scene’ of vernacular writing in early modern north India, explaining how ideologies of writing, textual genres, practices of inscription and performance, and material text artefacts worked together to form an organic whole."

The scenes being described pertain to specific genres or kinds of texts: the pem-katha (epic romance), the pothi (scholastic book), the gutaka (handwritten personal notebooks like the one described in this essay’s opening paragraph) and, finally, the granth or vani (Sikh scriptures collecting the sayings of a particular guru).

In the chapter on the pem-katha, for instance, Williams analyses 14th-century poet Maulana Daud’s epic Sufi romance Candāyan (1379). Daud leaves a number of linguistic clues indicating the influence of Amir Khusrau’s rekhta (mixed) verses that incorporated both Hindi and Persian lines, like the poem Sakal Ban Phool Rahi Sarson (Yellow mustard blooms in the field), often sung during the Hindu springtime festival of Basant Panchami.

The author shows us how the ideal of a polyglot emperor, well-versed in a number of languages, including Sanskrit and Persian, was described in verse by Daud—scholars like Sheldon Pollock and Christian Novetzke now locate this point in history as the beginning of the subcontinent’s multilingual literary culture, propagated by Sultanate courts and spread across the land by their occupants.

Similarly, the chapter on the pothi describes how nirgun (without attributes) Bhakti writings (from the 17th to the early 19th centuries) created a new kind of “written vernacular". Though they followed the grammar and morphology of Hindi, these texts included well-chosen stock phrases like “ganeshaaya namah" (obeisance to Ganesha) and “Arjun uvacha" (thus Arjun spoke) to evoke the “feel" of a classical language like Sanskrit. Williams is especially attentive to the handwritten idiosyncrasies of the text. Red ink was used for meta-textual commentary, following older traditions, where the pothi was copied out in multiple languages for various rulers of the time.

Generally speaking, meta-text is a versatile tool for the kind of analysis we see in If All the World Were Paper. Premodern Hindi manuscripts (12th-16th centuries) are unusually detailed and descriptive when it comes to meta-text, including an array of phrases describing the physical act of writing—racha (Sanskrit verb for “create"), granth-bandh, gaanth (literally, “to tie") and so on, each indicating a different mode of production for these historically important texts.

Williams describes his research methods in detail, explaining how the physical inspection of manuscripts as well as close reading yield vital clues and hypotheses. There is a crucial third technique involved here, too, one that students of the digital humanities are finding increasingly relevant: “distant reading".

The phrase describes the aggregation of large amounts of text and the subsequent quantitative, computer-led evaluation of the same. A computer’s deep dive into a mountain of premodern texts can tell you how often a word or phrase or string of characters occur in a certain saint or poet’s corpus. In the hands of an interdisciplinary academic like Williams, distant reading can be the beginning of a hypothesis—or the means to definitively prove one.

The million-dollar question is, why is any of this important? Why should we study the materiality of books? What can we learn about the texture of lived reality by smelling the ink, so to speak?

There are any number of examples from around the world that demonstrate the importance of this endeavour. In the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius, Lithuania, you can see several samizdat exhibits—“samizdat" is the Russian word for banned, censored or underground publications produced under the Soviet regime, often written by hand and concealed in plain sight. Pamphlets would be hidden in the binding, words in old newspapers would be strategically highlighted to create encrypted passages, invisible ink was used in certain cases. Because these techniques were used to evade Soviet censors, studying the samizdat texts can tell us a lot about the sociopolitical temperature at any given point in the history of the erstwhile USSR.

And we needn’t go far from home to understand the importance of materiality in the literary context. Take journalist and writer Akshaya Mukul’s masterful non-fiction book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015). It told us how the Gorakhpur-based Gita Press played a central role in shaping a “Hindu consciousness", especially among north Indian middle-class families. More recently, scholar Aakriti Mandhwani in Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Printing in Post-Independence India (2024) explained how the rise of Hindi magazines like Sarita and Dharmyug in the 1940s contributed to nascent middle-class aspirations after independence.

A contemporary student of history cannot stop at reading the words themselves. They must investigate the economics behind the production of the book, pause to inspect the ink, typeface, binding, and other accoutrements of printing and publishing. At the end of the day, a book is an artefact that belongs to the realm of the physical, and upon its body is imprinted the story of its life for those persistent enough to join the dots.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.