Book history studies: Some interventions from colonial Punjab

Abstract

This essay seeks to study print cultures, history of book publishing, and language formations in colonial Punjab in the context of debates in the new historical fields of Book History Studies and Print Culture Studies. Historical studies of late-19th and early-20th centuries in Punjab have focused on the formation of communal public and print spheres and the rigidification of religious identities that culminated in Partition in 1947. Rather than assume the formation of fixed and homogenized religious and linguistic identities, this essay seeks to understand the complexity of language formations, traffic between languages, hierarchies of language systems implicated in State support and pedagogy, and other factors that inflected the world of publication in colonial Punjab.