Ever since the now classic Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), the notion of print culture, as explored by E. Eisenstein, has become a recurring idea and a point of reference, either taken for granted or questioned as a basic concept, to refer to the nature of transformations that print allegedly brought to human history as a new kind of communication medium. More recently, the singular form of the collocation suggesting a uniform nature of such a cultural formation has been increasingly put to doubt in studies pointing to a need for more nuanced contextualization of different trajectories that culture(s) of print might take across varied socio-historical and geographical configurations. The same applies to the core idea describing the nature of the effect of the print culture as depending crucially on the shift from handwriting to printing. Other important conceptual framings of the nature of the socio-historical change highlighted rather a shift from orality to writing (Walter Ong, Jack Goody), while taking print as either an extension or amplification of the qualities, potentials, and limitations of writing. Earlier authors to reflect on print culture include M. McLuhan (whose inspiration in Eisenstein's ideas appears to be more often visible than the latter is ready to admit). McLuhan who contextualized its message, while locating it among other formulations, when he spoke of ‘a culture based upon the printed book’, ‘typographic culture’, and ‘the role played by print in instituting new patterns of culture’; but also of other cultural formations, such as ‘ear culture’, ‘auditory culture’, ‘visual culture’, ‘manuscript culture’, ‘electric culture’, and ‘alphabetic culture’. He did use the very collocation print culture; however, the latter one appears in Gutenberg's Galaxy often to be understood as a specific instance of a more general category of visual (or optical) culture which used—in McLuhan's view—to historically contradict the oral (or auditory) one in a radical, if not dramatic, way. He took print culture to represent one side of these binary and mutually opposing forces in cultural history. In spite of the intuitive rather than systematic nature of his remarks, some of McLuhan's ideas seem revealing, or at least inspiring, in the context of the present study.

Increasing volume of recent scholarship focused on regionally differentiated print cultures, especially Bengal, Maharashtra, and South India, tends to belie the simplistic subsuming of all the diverse phenomena of the rise of print in India towards the mid-1800s under one label. A good number of printing enterprises of the earlier stage of these developments remained hybrid in terms of social composition, resting on collaboration between foreign missionaries, Company administration officers, and Indians of a variety of social provenance. Such was the case of the Company's printing press in Calcutta at the very beginning and later on when its operation was handed over to a local printer. Furthermore, the Serampore Press of William Carey, which started around 1800, soon, after its first heroic years, entered a complex relationship of service and commission work, at first for the Bengal Government, Fort William College, and later other institutions, such as the Calcutta Bible Society. In Bombay, the American Mission Society came to accept orders from outside towards 1830 and trained indigenous printers, who later began to establish their own enterprises. Many of the early government and missionary printing enterprises benefitted from the collaboration of the local craftsmen, who brought within their respective orbits of operation their experiences, knowledge, and patterns of work, often inherited from the regional manuscript cultures they were brought up in. This collaborative spirit resulted not only in recreating European patterns of print production and consumption, but also gave rise to a number of innovative forms and practices, that continued and creatively reappropriated regional traditions of writing and reading, specific to particular spaces, communities, religious traditions, and literary genres.

Printing revolution and social change

Several studies that appeared in the last two decades bring often contradictory images of the allegedly ‘revolutionary’ change brought to South Asia by print and its growing use in the middle of the 19th century. Furthermore, the picture of the relationship between the cultural order of the former medium of the manuscript and the new one of print happens to look different, depending on the region under investigation.

No material culture ever evolves in void. And no space can be said to remain neutral to the developments of a material culture within it. The history of the book confirms it in many respects.

In order for the social practices of reading to be constituted over a specific historical period and space, some written objects must be circulated throughout this very space. Even though in a metaphorical sense, we can think or speak of a ‘memorized book’ and accordingly of reading from such a book, especially since certain regional Brahmin communities actually embodied the transmission of the Veda, it is the material form of the book with which I am predominantly concerned here. Accordingly, the memory-orality-performance complex, essential for an understanding of Vedic textuality as a specific type, shall be examined here from the point of view of its material and spatial situatedness and the consequences of this.

To the bewilderment of the first explorers of the remnants of the socalled Maurya empire, around the time of Emperor Aśoka, in the middle of the 3rd century BC, the initial finds of rock and pillar inscriptions turned out to represent a network of inscribed objects distributed over a huge area of subcontinental scale, from the present southern Karnaṭaka state in the south to the present Afghanistan in the north-west. Although they by no means can be regarded as books, we can hardly deny their medial dimension. The network of inscriptions set up within an apparently single project, spanning a relatively short period of time, appears to have had the function of communicating a cultural-political message of ‘an empire on the rise’ to a variety of different peoples inhabiting the vast tracts of the Indian subcontinent. To put into effect this earlier unprecedented and never- -seen-before enterprise, the imperial chancellery of Aśoka had to invent and standardize a system of writing and deploy a communication network that could distribute and display in stone inscription what must have been actually composed several hundred miles away by the chancellery professionals in Aśoka's capital in Pataliputra.

The missionary, the government and the commercial printers

Though the earliest history of printing on the Indian subcontinent is not a direct concern of this study, a cursory survey of the key events and early trajectories of its development may supply the necessary historical context for the slow and regionally diversified rise of regional and communal print cultures. And the latter can be made fuller sense of only against the background of the former. In a simplified typology, we may see the uneven development of print cultures across different regions of the Indian subcontinent with the help of three broad categories of printing enterprises: the missionary, the government and the commercial printers. For most of the formative period of the colonial era on the Indian subcontinent, the three represented three different concepts of the power of print, the concepts that influenced one another and sometimes overlapped, while shaping the unique history of Indian print cultures developing against the background of a struggle over at first trade, and later, of colonial domination of the resources of the vast areas of the subcontinent. The three developed three ultimately different cultures of print, with three different kinds of expectations towards the demand on printed matter on the part of their prospective readers. For the missionary—and in this case, I mean Protestant missionaries who dominated the second phase of print development—it was the inherent power of the word of the Lord, believed to inevitably work on everyone who chanced only to be exposed to its inner truth through intelligible, printed text. It implied a sponsored or semi-commercially organized circulation. Its maps arose out of trajectories drawn by the travelling preachers. Its objects were taken for the embodied word of God and printing itself as the work of such embodying, which resulted in the ceremonial act of bringing about the printed word of the Lord. As we shall see, the same act of printing was a totally different thing in the eyes of those who decided to have their Vedas printed.

APPENDIX. Early Indian printed editions of Vedic texts in regional distribution [with a specific focus on Ṛgveda-related texts]

The beginnings: the travelling Veda

A new interest in isolated pockets of surviving Vedic ritualism in South India has given rise in recent decades to a ritual revivalism. Notwithstanding cases of reconstruction and innovation in its regional variations, it testifies to the sustained power and appeal of the ritual tradition that emerged roughly three millennia ago in the Northern part of the Indian subcontinent. In the centuries that followed, it spread east and south with migrant Brahmin communities who developed varied regional cultures of ritual performance for it. All of them referred back to essentially o ne single textual tradition, preserved thanks to partially shared, sophisticated, and regular memory-cum-performance practices engaging organized collectives of individuals, for whom the preservation of the Veda remained a duty as well as a principle of social identification and self-assertion. Several centuries later, the regional varieties of Vedic ritual tradition came to coexist with and influence the new forms of belief and practice that we collectively refer to as Hindu. Before that, close to the appearance of Buddhism in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent towards the 6th and 5th centuries BC, the already rich textual heritage of the Veda emerged as a systematized canonical collection of religious texts rearranged for ritual use. Most of them had been composed many centuries earlier, and continued to be transmitted through memory-cum-performance practices over a period of several centuries. All that accompanied a slow movement towards the east and south of the people who, in the Veda, call themselves arya, or ‘the noble ones’. Their clans formed and changed alliances, fought among themselves as well as against others, with whom they also formed alliances in a process of a growing cultural synthesis. The Vedic canon, internally complex and multiplied, testifies to a religion which modern scholarship chose to name either ‘Vedism’ or ‘Vedic Hinduism’, which preceded post-Vedic Brahmanism and the later developed set of traditions labelled Hinduism.

Ever since the very first attempt by Baron Sainte-Croix and his Ezour Vedam, nearly all following projects to publish the Veda in print were fraught with emotion and tension. The act of publishing the Veda suggested a disclosure but what actually was, or was imagined to be, disclosed could differ widely, depending on who published it. The gesture of publishing either the allegedly lost or sacred or philologically-mastered Veda entailed articulating a concept of what the Veda actually was. The introduction to Müller's imperial-cum-philological Veda ran for dozens of pages, growing in number in succeeding volumes and the second edition. Other editors of the Ṛgveda felt less self-orientated but more inclined to include the printing of the Veda into the network of relationships of early communal, regional, or national symbolism.

All through the late 18th and 19th centuries, with their discovery of mechanized printing, the marginal niche of the printed Veda filled up slowly and with different ideas in mind of those who ventured to publish in print either the imagined or the lost, philological, or imperial Veda—the truly oral or national Veda. In each of these cases, the same thing might look quite different, while reflecting different presuppositions and distinct expectations of variously targeted audiences putting print to different conceptual uses. Only some analogies concerning the profound changes effected by print since the 16th century, to the understanding of what the Bible was when it domesticated itself in the minds of the nineteenth-century-reader as exclusively ‘the Book’, can be—with due caution—resorted to, when trying to assess the changes in how the nature of the Veda was understood with the appearance of early Indian editions of Vedic texts.

The Veda may not seem to be the best candidate for a study concerned with the history of print and print culture. Unlike the Bible in Europe, the Veda was not the first book to be printed in India, but rather the last. And, also unlike the Bible, it has never—as had happened to Luther's Bible in the hands of 16th century German Protestants—aspired to become the agent of mass reformation through its literal translation into the vernacular. Even the project of the late Bengal reformer, Ram Mohan Roy, which had envisaged such a conception of the Veda, stemmed from radically different circumstances and attempted social reform through rationalizing Hinduism, using the philosophy of the Veda. Others aimed at the rebirth of an imagined nation rather than a religion, though a redefined form of the latter was believed to have become a vehicle for the former. A case apart here may be found in Dayānanda Sarasvatī's interpretation of the Veda in the second half of 19th century, which even earned him the nickname of ‘the Luther of India’. His basic approach to Vedic textuality, however, appears to have been altogether different from that of the early German Protestants. Dayānanda preferred his readers to accept the message of the Veda as explained by him rather than allowing the Veda speak by itself. However, neither the Veda as a whole, nor any specific Vedic text, ever aspired to be the object of mass reading consumption when the first native modern editors took it to print. What were the motifs behind the indigenous (native) Indian printer-publishers choosing to edit the Veda in print?

And what were the consequences: can they be looked at in isolation from the opinions, ideas, and images of the Veda formed by others? These are some of the questions that remain at the background of the present study. A history of the early printed Veda, as attempted in the present study, remains, by necessity, part of the history of the book in India and should be seen against its background. Writing a history of the printed Veda, to some extent, becomes part of writing a history of the book.

Here, by way of a word commentary, I am going to explain a little bit the invocation of the Kagyü [lineage] in general, the famous Short Dorjé Chang Mahāmudrā Invocation. At the beginning there is the invocation through identifying the lineage:

Diamond Holder, who is the great secret of nonduality of knowledge and methods, the 6th Lord of [Buddha] Families; and Telo Shérab Zangpo, who is the yogi possessing four transmissions; and the great scholar Nāro Panchen, who pleased the lama, undergoing twenty-four different hardships in one body, and who finally relying on an initiation of deep symbols, reached the stage of unity at that very moment; and Marpa Chökyi Lodrö, the best of the translators, who is Heruka Hevajra appearing in human form; and Mila Zhäpa Dorjé, who is the foremost among yogis of The Land of Snow; and the great Gampopa, who is the unequalled dharma lord foretold by the Victor; and the great Karmapa knowing and seeing all cognizables without exception, as it is and how it is in the three times, and who is free from all obscuring impediments ‒ Kamtsang Kagyü, and moreover Dagpo Kagyü, Baram Kagyü, Phagdru Kagyü, who are [known as] the four majors; and Dri[gung], Tag[lung], Ya[bzang], Shug[seb], Mar[tshang], Yel[pa], Thro[phu], Ling[ré], known as the eight minors. These lineages and lineage holders, foremost among scholars and the best assembly of siddhas and in particular the three ‒ Drikung, Taglung and Tsälpa, of the activity as vast as space; and glorious Drugpa, etc. gain the power and mastery over mahāmudrā, which is the shortest ultimate path of the completion phase of deep vajrayāna. I invoke Dagpo Kagyü, the unequalled protector of beings, from the depth of the heart, like a child lamenting painfully and calling for his mother.