For the first time in the context of South Asia it becomes possible to talk of a nascent book trade which was full-fledged and included the operations of printers, binders, subscription publishing and libraries.
A letter to the editor of the India Gazette (7 April 1781) implies how the easy availability of scribes made printing seem a less urgent step to be introduced by the government "Not many months ago, before the fear of printing in Bengal was somewhat abated, the discerning humourists of the colony were infrequently entertained with manuscript advertisements, hand bills, and other manuals of advice, with divers and sundry further literary; either hawked about, like state minutes in circulation….
S. Natarajan [3] studies these early Calcutta newspapers and the antagonistic relationship they often shared with the official authorities which led to certain restrictions laid by the Wellesley Regulations.
Other than official publications, the imprints of early Calcutta were designed to meet the immediate and more practical requirements of the small European community – maps, grammars and lexicons of the local vernaculars, treatises on medicine, law and land revenue, and so on.
Sir William Jones had famously remarked that "printing is dear at Calcutta" and "the compositors in this country are shamefully inaccurate.
In 1777, he assembled the earliest known Calcutta press and in the same year he was engaged by the East India Company to print their military bills and batta forms.
When Kiernander wanted to get into advertising in print the "forms of writs used in the Supreme Court of Judicature, & c."[1]: 56 Hicky took it upon himself to poke fun at a man set out to become a prospective rival "For the good of the Mission…A part of the types sent out on the behalf of the Mission, to assist the pious design of propagating the Gospel in foreign parts, are now employed in printing Warrants, Summon’s Writs of Lattitats, and Special Capias—those Blister Plaister of the Law.
The well known gem-and-seal engraver Joseph Shepherd, as well as the Bengali blacksmith Panchanan Karmakar, were employed to help him with the designing and cutting of types, and the casting of fonts.
In its early days, the print culture in India was largely restricted to the Anglo-Indian community, which attempted to re-produce the British style of public debate.
Missionaries attempted to create a godly public sphere in which the paganism of the Company would be argued away and India flooded with improving pamphlets.
Fierce controversies over press freedom erupted as Wellesley and John Adam clamped down on newspapers that had substituted sustained political criticism for the grub-street prurience exemplified by James Hicky's Bengal Gazette of the 1780s.Bayly takes note of the fact that the Indian scholars or pundits already had their own models of public debate, significantly different from the patterns of interaction observed in the Western public sphere arising out of print culture.
Though Indian-published newspapers did not emerge till the first decades of the 19th century in any considerable number, Indians had started to participate in Western modes of public interaction.
Around 1806–07, a Hindu called Babu Ram established a printing machine for the first time, in Devanagari type, at Kidderpore, Calcutta, for publishing Sanskrit books.
Thomas Roebuck in The Annals of the College of Fort William[6] talks about the Lord Minto's lecture at Fort William College on 27 February 1808: "A printing press has been established by learned Hindoos, furnished with complete founts of improved Nagree types of different sizes, for the printing of books in the Sunskrit language.
It may be hoped, that the introduction of the art of printing among the Hindoos, which has been thus begun by the institution of a Sunskrit press, will promote the general diffusion of knowledge among this numerous and very ancient people; at the same time that it becomes the means of preserving the classic remains of their literature and sciences."