Prelims High-Yield Explanations & Traps

• in the age before print
• category
• as readers as well as writers
• readers
• in defining a new
• novels, which gave birth to a particular way of writing
• of spreading progress and enlightenment

Essential Definitions & Formulas

This

a royal workshop in the sixteenth century, much before printing began in India.

Right in front

the final product – the double-page printed sheets, stacked in neat piles, waiting to be bound.

Printing

the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.

This

one of the many images produced in early modern Europe, celebrating the coming of print.

In this highly interesting woodcut the coming of print

associated with the end of the world.

Dolly

sent to sell her eggs, she is commissioned to purchase The History of Joseph Andrews .

The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion

the force that will sweep despotism away.

This

how Mercier describes the impact of the printed word, and the power of reading in one of his books: ‘Anyone who had seen me reading would have compared me to a man dying of thirst who was gulping down some fresh, pure water .

A system of governance in which absolute power

exercised by an individual, unregulated by legal and constitutional checks India and the Contemporary World 164 Why do some historians think that print culture created the basis for the French Revolution? Discuss questions about the existing social order.

The dust cover or the book jacket

also a twentieth-century innovation.

This

a palm-leaf handwritten manuscript in accordion format.

Welfare of the People

earnestly solicited.

The task of the native newspapers and political associations

identical to the role of the Opposition in the House of Commons in Parliament in England.

That

of critically examining government policy to suggest improvements, by removing those parts that will not be to the benefit of the people, and also by ensuring speedy implementation.

Notice that the imperial British figure

positioned right at the centre.

He

authoritative and imperial; telling the natives what is to be done.

This

the model, produce Indian versions of it.

Notice that the man is playing the veena while the woman

smoking a hookah.

Here the husband is totally dominated by his wife who

perched on his shoulder.

He

cruel towards his mother, dragging her like an animal, by the noose.

NCERT Thought Questions

• 157 Print Culture
• India and the Contemporary World 160
• 165 Print Culture
• Fig. 13 – Advertisements at a railway station in England, a lithograph by Alfred Concanen, 1874. Printed advertisements and notices were plastered on street walls, railway platforms and public buildings.

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