How Unorthodox Printing sought to transform Colonial Mithila?

Abstract

My research unravels the history of Maithili chapbooks in South Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After the publishing boom in the 1860s and 1870s, the printing of chapbooks was relatively inexpensive, especially when they consisted of just a few gatherings. Maithili chapbooks were popular in the traditional strongholds of Maithil communities in Bihar, Bengal, Assam, United Provinces and Rajasthan. Some early printers were firmly grounded in Indic traditions and often printed chapbooks with a view to popularizing Vedic and Sanskritic literature among the emergent Maithili readerships. A minority of Maithili chapbooks were experimental in nature. In addition to critiquing preexisting Hindu norms and traditions, they embraced new genres and pedagogies from adjacent cultural spheres in the hope of reforming and rebuilding Maithil communities. As attractive as the chapbook format was to Maithil printers, their commercial infrastructure was not as secure yet, and their attrition rate was still quite high. Furthermore, the chances of survival of chapbooks in private collections in colonial Mithila were abysmally low for a variety of reasons: harsh weather, annual floods, frequent famines, fluctuating family fortunes, and cultural apathy, among others. Insofar as chapbooks frequently deploy low-stake and low-brow literary content, these printed ephemera are usually considered unworthy of critical attention, as something akin to “literary trash.” In contrast, my paper elaborates upon the power of unorthodox printing through a detailed study of the oldest extant Maithili chapbooks that focused on instructing and reforming religious communities in colonial Mithila.