Religious print cultures in Punjab

Printed parts and wider networks

Punjabi religious printing reached beyond Punjab’s borders. William Carey University’s Carey Center catalogues Punjabi New Testament and Acts items from the Serampore Mission Press in 1811. These are records of particular printed parts, alongside later items with uncertain dating or missing title pages. They distinguish a publication’s language, production place and surviving form: a catalogue of parts cannot establish a complete first Bible.[1]

Scribes within an industrial press

Lahore’s print economy also depended on people skilled in handwriting. Amanda Lanzillo describes an April 1935 strike involving workers at Zamindar, the Mansur Steam Press and the Muslim Printing Press. Many scribes worked by the piece and sought steadier work and payment; machine workers joined complaints about wages and delays. Lithography preserved a role for copying texts even inside industrial workshops. The printer’s world included scribes, machine operators, ink makers, stone wipers and binders. These occupations could cooperate during a dispute while retaining different skills and social positions.[2]

Lanzillo connects this labour history with Muslim scribes’ accounts of their craft as religious knowledge. Manuscript expertise and printing developed alongside each other. The presses consequently belonged to histories of employment and technological adaptation as well as religious writing; their workers’ interests cannot be reduced to the views of a publisher or newspaper editor.[2]

Printed scripture and material care

Kristina Myrvold’s 2007 study describes another relationship between print and religious authority. At the Amritsar publisher Bhai Chattar Singh Jivan Singh, her account distinguishes the ordinary outer bookshop from an inner showroom for religious books and ritual objects. Customers removed shoes and covered their heads. A prospective custodian could receive a demonstration of a scripture’s print, binding and format before a supplication and a carefully arranged departure. Her description also distinguishes the complete scripture in one volume, requiring installation and daily ministration, from divided volumes. Here manufacturing many copies did not make the text an ordinary commodity. Receiving and caring for a printed Guru Granth Sahib remained connected to ceremony, recitation and the capacity of its new custodians.[3]