Every Independence Day, we remember the obvious architecture of freedom. The marches. The speeches. The arrests. The protests. The revolutionaries. The negotiations. The people who went to prison and the people who never came home.
This year, though, I found myself thinking about something different: paper, ink, and printing presses.
Books that travelled from one pair of hands to another. Newspapers unfolded over breakfast tables. Poems memorised and repeated. Political essays debated in homes and colleges. Pamphlets small enough to be carried discreetly but powerful enough for a government to want them confiscated.
Because India’s freedom struggle was not only limited to being political. It was also a publishing movement.
It was also a publishing movement.
And I don’t mean that metaphorically.
Before the Revolution Came the Printing Press
India, of course, did not need the printing press to give it literature.
We had been telling, composing, recording, performing and preserving stories for centuries upon centuries before mechanical printing arrived here. The Vedas survived through extraordinary oral traditions. India developed vast manuscript cultures. Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Persian, Tamil and numerous other literary traditions produced philosophy, epics, poetry, drama, religious texts, scientific works and histories long before anybody was mechanically reproducing pages on the subcontinent.
Printing did not give India a literary civilisation. What it eventually gave that civilisation was scale.
According to the Government of Goa’s Department of Printing and Stationery, the first printing press in India was established by Jesuit missionaries in Old Goa in September 1556, at the College of São Paulo.
1556.
I love pausing over that date because it reminds us just how long the history of print in India actually is. But the transformation print would ultimately produce was much larger than the arrival of a machine.
One manuscript can preserve an idea. A printing press can multiply it. And multiplication changes everything.
An idea that exists in one copy has a certain power, but an idea that can be reproduced hundreds or thousands of times, transported, translated, discussed, rejected, defended and passed from one reader to another has another kind of power entirely.
Publishing makes thought portable. And once thought becomes portable, controlling it becomes considerably more difficult.
When Reading Became Political
This is the part of publishing history that fascinates me most.
We sometimes think about books as finished objects. Someone writes a manuscript, somebody edits it, a publisher produces it and eventually a reader buys it.
But historically, publishing has often been much more consequential than that.
Publishing creates circulation. One person formulates an argument. Someone prints it. A hundred people encounter it. One of them translates it. Another discusses it with somebody who cannot read it. A newspaper quotes it. Another publication attacks it. Somebody writes a response.
And suddenly, what began as one person’s thought has become part of a public conversation.
That was enormously important in colonial India.
As print expanded, newspapers, journals, books, political tracts, literary works and pamphlets allowed questions to travel across geographical and linguistic boundaries.
Questions about colonial rule. About education. About caste. About social reform. About religion. About women’s rights. About representation. About who possessed the authority to govern India. And eventually, about whether Indians should be governed by Britain at all.
Print did not create every one of these debates. But it gave them infrastructure.
The Most Revealing Evidence? The British Tried to Stop It
Whenever we talk about the influence of books, somebody inevitably asks whether literature can really change anything.
History has a rather interesting answer to that.
Look at what governments choose to censor.
The National Archives of India preserves a remarkable collection classified as “Proscribed Literature,” publications that the British government banned because of their connection with the freedom movement and their potential to arouse patriotic sentiment.
The collection includes prose, poetry, pamphlets and posters in languages including Hindi, English, Urdu, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada and Bengali.
That list of languages matters enormously because the freedom movement was not simply an English-language intellectual conversation occurring among a tiny political elite. Ideas were moving through Indian languages. They were being localised, translated, reinterpreted, made emotionally immediate to different communities, and some of those words frightened the colonial establishment enough to be banned.
The National Archives continues to preserve material from this proscribed literature collection; its own publications include selections from banned Urdu short stories and poetry associated with the political climate of British India.
Think about the implications of that for a moment. A government with an army, a police apparatus and the machinery of an empire was still concerned about poems. Pamphlets. Stories. Printed pages. Because ideas are extremely difficult to contain once people acquire language for what they are experiencing.
The moment you can name injustice, you can begin to discuss it. Once you can discuss it, you can discover that somebody else has experienced it too. And once enough people discover that their supposedly private dissatisfaction is actually shared—you have something much larger than a reader holding a book.
You have consciousness.
Publishing Made Distance Smaller
India presents a particularly fascinating case because of its scale. We were, and remain, a country of extraordinary linguistic, religious, regional and cultural difference.
Long before social media gave us the illusion that everybody is perpetually in the same room, communication across those distances was slower, more physical and much harder won.
Print mattered partly because it allowed ideas to escape geography. A speech is extraordinarily powerful when you are standing in the crowd. But if you were not there, the speech is gone. Print changes that equation. Print can leave the room. It can travel on a train. It can cross a province. It can sit in somebody’s home. It can be read tomorrow. It can be translated next month. It can be rediscovered years later. It can be read aloud to somebody who never possessed the original publication at all.
This is why I think describing publishing simply as “making books” dramatically understates what publishing actually does. At its most powerful, publishing is an infrastructure for the circulation of thought. And nations are built, in part, through circulating ideas.
There Is Another Important Part to This Story: Readers
We understandably celebrate writers. We remember journalists. We remember editors and political thinkers. We remember the people who ran presses and founded newspapers. But publishing requires another participant before any of this works.
The reader.
Someone had to open that newspaper. Someone had to buy, borrow or secretly obtain the pamphlet. Someone had to read the poem. Someone had to pass the publication on. Someone had to decide that the argument printed on those pages made sense. And perhaps someone then repeated it to somebody else.
That is where publishing becomes almost impossible to trace historically.
We can preserve the book. We can catalogue the newspaper. We can record the circulation figures when they survive. But how do you measure the conversation that happened afterwards? How do you count the number of minds altered by a sentence? How do you quantify the moment someone encountered an idea they had never previously considered possible?
You cannot.
And yet history repeatedly shows us that those moments really matter.
Freedom Had to Exist as an Idea Before It Could Exist as a Country
This, perhaps, is the part I find most moving.
15 August 1947 did not suddenly introduce the concept of freedom to India.
Political independence became reality that day because generations of people had already imagined, argued over, written about, organised around and sacrificed for that possibility.
Before freedom could become political fact, it had to become intellectual possibility.
And publishing helped make that possibility reproducible.
The colonial government evidently understood this. Why else ban a poem? Why confiscate a pamphlet? Why worry about what people were reading?
Because words can make people imagine arrangements other than the one they have been told is inevitable.
And once another future becomes imaginable, the present begins to lose some of its authority.
That may be one of the greatest powers publishing has ever possessed.
Not to dictate what somebody should think.
But to make another thought available.
And This Is Only the Beginning of the Story
There is another fascinating chapter here, because some of the most important figures in India’s freedom movement understood publishing extraordinarily well.
Gandhi, particularly, did not merely make speeches and lead political movements.
He edited, wrote and published relentlessly.
He understood that a political argument needed something more than an audience.
It needed circulation.
And that deserves an article of its own.
For now, though, on Independence Day, I want to remember an aspect of India’s freedom struggle that is very close to my own world. The writers. The journalists. The translators. The editors. The printers.
The people carrying pamphlets.
And the readers who opened them.
We often picture revolutions happening in streets.
Sometimes, they begin much more quietly.
With one person reading a sentence— and discovering that the world does not necessarily have to remain as it is.
Before India was free, freedom was already being printed.
Coming next in this series: Gandhi Was Also a Publisher: how Mahatma Gandhi used journals, newspapers and print as part of his political strategy.
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