Economic & Political Weekly EPW MAY 17, 2014 vol xlIX no 20 35 book reviewS A Well-Told Tale of the Book Abhijit Gupta B ook history is now sufficiently established in south Asian academia as to not require any special pleading. Over the past two decades, there have been some excellent studies of the history of the book in the region. Unlike book history projects in the west, a national book history project is inconceivable in south Asia because of the large number of languages and dialects and the uneven history of print. The first two centuries of print in India, beginning with the accidental arrival of a press in Goa in 1556, have often been described as a “non-history” of printing owing to its stop-start nature while creeping along the coastal regions of India without quite being able to penetrate into the hinterland. During this so-called non-history, Tamil became the first Indian language to be printed in Indic characters in 1577, in Goa (there had been a previous Tamil volume printed from Lisbon in 1554, but in Roman script). This was followed by the establishment of Danish Lutheran missionary Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg’s famed press in Tranquebar, which, among others, printed the New Testa- ment in Tamil exactly three centuries ago, in 1714. This was the first full trans- lation of the New Testament in any south Asian language. Despite being quicker off the mark than any other Indian language, the his- tory of Tamil printing has been one of false starts and aborted attempts, though, according to Graham Shaw, as many as 338 imprints were issued from Tranquebar during the 18th century. Among the false starts, Venkatachala- pathy, the author of the book under review, also counts the Vepery Press of Fabricius and the press established in Thanjavur by Serfoji II. The establishment of the College of Fort St George in 1812 provid- ed an impetus to printing, but it is not till the end of the 19th century that the The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes and Scribblers in Colonial Tamil Nadu by A R Venkatachalapathy (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), 2012; xvii, pp 292, Rs 795 (hardback). printed book was sufficiently socialised in the world of Tamil letters. In contrast, printing came to Bengal much later, in the 1770s, but was almost immediately able to generate a head of steam which led to Calcutta and Serampore becom- ing two of the most important centres of printing in south and south-east Asia. Why was this so? Venkatachalapathy ar- gues that in the case of Tamil Nadu “movable type had come into a society suffused with a scribal culture” and the longue durée of writing, literacy, and scribal culture along with the “materiali- ty of (the) palm-leaf book” stood in the way of the codex form of the book. One wonders whether a partial reason might not be found in the very differing atti- tudes towards print among the Jesuits and the Lutherans, respectively. While Ziegenbalg repeatedly petitioned his parent body for a press as a means of validating Christianity through a “supe- rior” technology, Jesuits such as Beshci and De Nobili seemed content to work within the prevailing scribal culture. Anecdote and Analysis The current study begins from the peri- od when the Tamil book “really takes off”. Venkatachalapathy asks a number of questions, which he seeks to answer in the subsequent seven chapters. As many who have worked in the field of book history will attest, one of the key challenges of the methodology is to de- cide on a narrative strategy. Given the very broad scope of the discipline (some have even called it “interdisciplinarity run riot”) there is every danger of sink- ing into a quicksand of material and archival excess. Venkatachalapathy has dealt with this challenge admirably. The key themes of his narrative are clearly and lucidly explicated, and the wealth of sources that he has drawn on is skilfully marshalled. Thus, the opening narrative strand concerns the role and persistence of patronage in the world of Tamil let- ters. As opposed to England where liter- ary patronage suffered a dramatic and decisive death in the mid-18th century, patronage in Tamil Nadu lingered on till the second half of the 19th century even as the marketplace of books thrived else- where. The case of Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai is at the heart of this narrative. His affiliation to the institutions of both the traditional math and the modern college mark him out as a transitional figure whose career encompassed several para- digms of knowledge production. We thus find him situated in the worlds of orality, script and print, more or less simultaneously. Mixing anecdote and analysis in equal measure, Venkatachala- pathy is able to convey a vivid picture of the world of Tamil patronage, and the protocols – such as the arangettram or the literary premiere – which sustained it, and gradually withered away. The transition from traditional forms of patronage to other forms of subven- tion and the marketplace is more marked in the cases of Pillai’s disciple U V Swaminatha Iyer and the great Tamil poet Subramania Bharati. In the second chapter of the book, Venkatachalapathy traces the shift from the patron to the public through an account of Bharati’s meteoric but ill-starred literary career, ending in penury and a premature death. Bharati’s career shows how there was no seamless transition from the re- gime of patronage to that of the market- place, and how his misplaced faith in the munificence of a new reading public led to the collapse of his grand design. An- other heroic project, that of translating the Mahabharata into Tamil by M V Ra- manujachari, met with more success but could only be executed at great financial cost to the translator-publisher. What therefore emerges from the opening two chapters is a fairly lengthy period of