Print Culture and the Modern World · Class 10 History: 100 flashcards
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1. Where did the earliest print technology develop?
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In China, Japan and Korea, as a system of hand printing.
2. How were books printed in China from AD 594?
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By rubbing paper against the inked surface of woodblocks.
3. Why was the Chinese 'accordion book' folded and stitched at the side?
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Because both sides of the thin, porous paper could not be printed.
4. Why did the Chinese imperial state print large numbers of textbooks?
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For the civil service examinations through which its huge bureaucracy recruited officials.
5. How did the uses of print in China change by the seventeenth century?
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Merchants used print for trade information, reading became a leisure activity, and women began to read and publish.
6. Which city became the hub of China's new print culture in the late nineteenth century?
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Shanghai.
7. Who introduced printing into Japan, and when?
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Buddhist missionaries from China, around AD 768-770.
8. What is the Diamond Sutra?
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A Buddhist text printed in AD 868, the oldest Chinese book, with six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations.
9. What was ukiyo?
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'Pictures of the floating world' — prints depicting ordinary, especially urban, human experiences, made famous by Kitagawa Utamaro.
10. When and how did paper reach Europe?
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In the eleventh century, from China via the silk route.
11. What was Marco Polo's contribution to print in Europe?
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He returned to Italy from China in 1295 with knowledge of woodblock printing.
12. What is vellum?
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A parchment made from the skin of animals, used for luxury handwritten books.
13. Why could handwritten manuscripts not satisfy the demand for books?
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Copying was expensive, laborious and slow, and manuscripts were fragile, awkward to handle and hard to carry.
14. Where and when did Gutenberg develop the first-known printing press?
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At Strasbourg, Germany, in the 1430s.
15. Which existing technologies did Gutenberg adapt?
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The printing press was modelled on the olive press, and moulds were used to cast metal type.
16. What was the first book Gutenberg printed?
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The Bible — about 180 copies, which took three years.
17. Why were no two copies of Gutenberg's Bible exactly alike?
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Borders, illustrations and colours were added by hand by artists on each copy.
18. How many sheets could the Gutenberg press print per hour?
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About 250 sheets on one side.
19. How many printed books circulated in Europe in the sixteenth century?
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About 200 million copies, up from about 20 million in the second half of the fifteenth century.
20. What led to the print revolution?
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The shift from hand printing to mechanical printing.
21. What was the print revolution?
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Not just a new way of producing books, but a transformation of people's relationship to information, knowledge, institutions and authorities.
22. How did printing make books more accessible?
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It reduced the cost, time and labour of producing books, and made multiple copies easy.
23. What was oral culture?
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A culture in which common people heard sacred texts, ballads and folk tales read or recited, and knowledge passed orally.
24. Who could read before the age of print?
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Reading was largely restricted to the elites.
25. How did printers reach people who could not read?
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They published illustrated ballads and folk tales that were sung and recited at gatherings in villages and taverns.
26. What happened to the line between oral and reading cultures?
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It blurred: oral culture entered print, printed material was transmitted orally, and hearing and reading publics intermingled.
27. What is a ballad?
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A folk tale or a piece of history set in verse, meant to be sung or spoken aloud.
28. What were taverns?
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Places where people gathered to drink, eat, meet friends and exchange news.
29. How did print help people who disagreed with authorities?
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They could print and circulate their ideas, persuade others to think differently and move them to action.
30. What were Martin Luther's Ninety Five Theses?
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A text of 1517 attacking the rituals and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. A printed copy was nailed to a church door at Wittenberg.
31. What was the result of the wide printing of Luther's writings?
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A division within the Church and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
32. How successful was Luther's translation of the New Testament?
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Five thousand copies went within weeks, and a second edition followed inside three months.
33. What did Luther say about printing?
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He called it 'the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one'.
34. Who feared the effects of printed books?
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Religious authorities, monarchs, and many writers and artists.
35. Why did they fear print?
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Without control over what was printed and read, rebellious and irreligious thoughts might spread and the authority of 'valuable' literature would be destroyed.
36. What did Erasmus say about printed books?
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In Adages (1508) he complained that swarms of new books, many scandalous, irreligious and seditious, created a glut harmful to scholarship.
37. Who was Menocchio?
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A sixteenth-century Italian miller who read local books and reinterpreted the Bible's view of God and Creation.
38. What happened to Menocchio?
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The Roman Catholic Church's Inquisition hauled him up twice and ultimately executed him.
39. What was the Inquisition?
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A former Roman Catholic court for identifying and punishing heretics.
40. Why did the Roman Church begin keeping an Index of Prohibited Books?
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Troubled by popular readings and questioning of faith, it imposed controls on publishers and booksellers and listed banned books from 1558.
41. How did literacy spread in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe?
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Churches of different denominations set up schools in villages, bringing literacy to peasants and artisans.
42. How high were literacy rates in parts of Europe by the end of the eighteenth century?
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As high as 60 to 80 per cent.
43. What was sold by pedlars in European villages?
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Little books such as almanacs or ritual calendars, ballads and folk tales.
44. What were penny chapbooks?
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Cheap pocket-size books sold for a penny in England by pedlars called chapmen, so even the poor could buy them.
45. What was the Bibliotheque Bleue?
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Low-priced small books in France, printed on poor-quality paper and bound in cheap blue covers.
46. What did the periodical press combine?
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Information about current affairs with entertainment, including news of wars and trade.
47. Which thinkers' writings were widely printed and read in the eighteenth century?
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Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau, along with scientists like Isaac Newton.
48. What did Louis-Sebastien Mercier believe about the printing press?
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That it was the most powerful engine of progress, and that public opinion would sweep despotism away.
49. What is despotism?
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A system in which one individual exercises absolute power, unchecked by legal and constitutional limits.
50. What is the first argument linking print and the French Revolution?
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Print popularised Enlightenment ideas that criticised tradition, superstition and despotism and argued for the rule of reason.
51. What is the second argument?
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Print brought a habit of argument and discussion in which every value, every norm and every institution was opened up for reassessment.
52. What is the third argument?
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By the 1780s literature and cartoons mocked the royalty and its morality, spreading hostility against the monarchy.
53. Why should we be careful about saying print caused the French Revolution?
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People also read royal and Church propaganda and accepted some ideas and rejected others; print opened the possibility of thinking differently but did not directly shape minds.
54. How did children become important readers in the nineteenth century?
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Primary education became compulsory, making school textbooks critical; a children's press was set up in France in 1857.
55. How did the Grimm Brothers change folk tales?
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They collected peasant tales but edited out anything unsuitable for children or vulgar to elites before publishing in 1812.
56. Name three women novelists of the nineteenth century mentioned in the chapter.
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Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot.
57. How did lending libraries help workers in nineteenth-century England?
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They turned into a means of educating clerks, artisans and the lower middle class.
58. What was Richard M. Hoe's contribution to printing?
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He perfected the power-driven cylindrical press, which printed 8,000 sheets an hour and was useful for newspapers.
59. What was special about the offset press?
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Developed in the late nineteenth century, it could print up to six colours at a time.
60. Name three strategies publishers used to sell more books.
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Serialising novels in periodicals, the cheap Shilling Series of the 1920s, and cheap paperbacks during the 1930s Depression (also dust covers).
61. In which languages were Indian manuscripts written?
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Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and various vernacular languages.
62. On what materials were Indian manuscripts copied?
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Palm leaves or handmade paper.
63. Why were manuscripts not widely used in everyday life?
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They were expensive and fragile, had to be handled carefully, and were hard to read because scripts were written in different styles.
64. How did pupils in pre-colonial Bengal's village schools learn?
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Teachers dictated texts from memory and pupils wrote them down, so many became literate without reading texts.
65. When and where did the printing press first come to India?
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To Goa, with Portuguese missionaries, in the mid-sixteenth century.
66. Which language did Jesuit priests learn and print in at Goa?
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Konkani.
67. When and where was the first Tamil book printed?
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In 1579 at Cochin, by Catholic priests.
68. When was the first Malayalam book printed?
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In 1713, by Catholic priests.
69. What had Dutch Protestant missionaries printed by 1710?
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32 Tamil texts, many of them translations of older works.
70. Who began editing the Bengal Gazette in 1780?
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James Augustus Hickey.
71. Why did Warren Hastings persecute Hickey?
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Hickey published a lot of gossip about the Company's senior officials, which damaged the colonial government's image.
72. Which was the first Indian newspaper?
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The weekly Bengal Gazette brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya.
73. Which issues did reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy debate in print?
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Widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry.
74. Which newspaper did Rammohun Roy publish from 1821?
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The Sambad Kaumudi.
75. Which newspaper did the Hindu orthodoxy commission to oppose Rammohun Roy?
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The Samachar Chandrika.
76. Which newspapers appeared in 1822?
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The Persian Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, and the Gujarati Bombay Samachar.
77. Why did the ulama turn to print?
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They feared that after the collapse of Muslim dynasties colonial rulers would encourage conversion and change Muslim personal laws.
78. What did the Deoband Seminary publish?
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Thousands of fatwas telling Muslims how to conduct themselves and explaining Islamic doctrines.
79. Which presses published Hindu religious texts in vernaculars from the 1880s?
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The Naval Kishore Press, at Lucknow, and Bombay’s Shri Venkateshwar Press.
80. How did newspapers help create pan-Indian identities?
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They conveyed news from one place to another, connecting communities and people in different parts of India.
81. Why did new forms of writing like the novel become popular in India?
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The more people who could read, the more they wanted to find their own lives on the page — what they had lived through, what they felt, and the people around them.
82. Which new literary forms entered the world of reading?
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The novel, lyrics, short stories, and essays about social and political matters.
83. Who produced images for mass circulation in the late nineteenth century?
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Painters like Raja Ravi Varma.
84. What did caricatures and cartoons of the 1870s comment on?
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Social and political issues — some mocked Western tastes, some feared social change, some were imperial and others nationalist.
85. Why did conservative families oppose women's education?
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Conservative Hindus believed a literate girl would be widowed, and Muslims feared educated women would be corrupted by Urdu romances.
86. Who was Rashsundari Debi?
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A young married woman in an orthodox East Bengal household who learnt to read secretly and wrote Amar Jiban (1876), the first full-length Bengali autobiography.
87. What did Kailashbashini Debi write about?
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From the 1860s, how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced into hard domestic labour and treated unjustly.
88. Who wrote about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women in 1880s Maharashtra?
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Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai.
89. When did Hindi printing begin seriously, and what was much of it devoted to?
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From the 1870s; a large segment was devoted to the education of women.
90. What was the Battala?
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An area in central Calcutta devoted to printing popular books, from religious tracts to scandalous literature.
91. How did print reach poor people in nineteenth-century Madras?
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Very cheap small books were sold at crossroads in market towns, allowing poor travellers to buy them.
92. What was Jyotiba Phule's Gulamgiri about?
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Published in 1871, it wrote about the injustices of the caste system.
93. Name two twentieth-century writers on caste whose works were read across India.
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B. R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) in Madras.
94. What did Kashibaba's Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal show?
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Published in 1938 by a Kanpur millworker, it showed the links between caste and class exploitation.
95. Against whom were the East India Company's early censorship measures directed?
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Englishmen in India who were critical of Company misrule and particular Company officers.
96. What happened to press laws in 1835?
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Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise them, and Thomas Macaulay formulated new rules restoring earlier freedoms.
97. What was the Vernacular Press Act?
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A law of 1878, modelled on the Irish Press Laws, giving the government extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press.
98. What happened under the Vernacular Press Act if a report was judged seditious?
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The newspaper was warned; if it ignored the warning, the press could be seized and its printing machinery confiscated.
99. Why was Tilak imprisoned in 1908?
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He wrote with great sympathy in his Kesari about Punjab revolutionaries deported in 1907.
100. What did Gandhiji say in 1922 about the fight for swaraj?
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That what was being fought for was free speech, a free press and the right to associate.
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