‘…Of real use to the people’

Abstract

This article throws light on the self-consciously modern attempt on the part of Raja Serfoji II (r. 1798–1832) of Tanjore, South India to establish a Devanagari press in 1802–07 for the dissemination of ‘useful knowledge’. Adopting a social constructivist approach, this article concerns itself with the locality, materiality and the historical contingency of knowledge production, thus opting for a highly detailed case study of the Tanjore press. It focuses on people, objects, knowledge, technologies and labour that flowed along short- and long-distance networks connecting the local and the global in the early nineteenth century, to produce the printed book in the ‘locality’ called Tanjore. The article argues that the superior and elegant Devanagari types cast for Serfoji were not simply ‘crafted out’ of a European template, but were the result of a five-year long typographical experiment funded and directed by the Tanjore court involving several kinds of expertise that cut across geographical and cultural boundaries. Serfoji’s celebration of the social and intellectual uses of this piece of European technology so early in the nineteenth century is indeed a remarkable historical episode, and a reflection of the nature of enlightened modernity he wished to articulate through the vernacular printed book.