Strange Bedfellows: Battala Print and the Bengal Renaissance—Suchintan Das

The word ‘Battala’ evokes a range of meanings. Literally, it means ‘under the banyan tree’. Historically, it has been both a metonym of commercial print culture as well as a misnomer for obscene and vulgar vernacular literature in nineteenth century Calcutta. It is difficult to pigeonhole what was connoted by Battala print and literature during its heyday and how it came to be perceived following its decline in the twentieth century. The signifier ‘Battala’ was used variously as an indicator, a marker, a tendency, a symptom, and a symbol of cultural location, social standing, economic class, individual mentality, and common taste, respectively. The conventional historiography of Battala, however, has been overly preoccupied with creating a dichotomy between the bhadraloks (gentlefolk) and the chotoloks (low-lives). It has been variously argued that the creation of Calcutta as a colonial cosmopolis involved disciplining of the latter by the former, in all aspects, including print. In this narrative, Battala is sought to be portrayed as a subaltern response, a kind of self-expression and assertion by the chotoloks, a popular challenge to bhadralok cultural hegemony, elitism, refinement, and sophistication. The problem is that the history of Battala cannot be comprehended in such a neat formulation. The overlaps, collusions, and confusions between elite and subaltern, high and popular, print and oral, Sanskritic and Perso-Arabic, public and domestic, all shaped the discourse around Battala in some way or the other.

The nineteenth century in the history of Bengal was a century of contradictions. British colonial rule, mercantile capital, and western education brought about a socio-cultural awakening coupled with large scale religio-legal reforms. This phenomenon had been termed as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’. It was argued that what Italy had been to Europe in the 14^th-15^th centuries, Bengal was to India in the 19^th. Bengali Literature flourished, receiving impetus from the writings of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Michael Madhusudan Dutt. The house of the Tagores at Jorasnko emerged as the cultural hub of a rising urban intelligentsia in Calcutta. However, this rosy picture of a blossoming springtide of high culture doesn’t tell us the full story of that time. Ribaldries and revelries associated with kada-kheur (obscene songs ritually sung on the penultimate day of worshipping the goddess Durga), kobi-gaan (verbal duels comprising mockeries and farcical songs), jatras (an indigenous form of theatre performed with melodramatic overtones), panchalis (ballad songs with rural themes), sawngs (pantomimes with songs and dances), and jhumur (an indigenous dance form that came to be performed for public entertainment) constituted the popular cultural matrix of Bengal.

There is no reason to suppose that there was an overt conflict or competition between this popular cultural backdrop and the high culture that was sought to be espoused during the course of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’. On the contrary, as the Battala print culture and literature would show, elite patronage, indiscriminate consumption, and western inspiration was hardly unique to either of the cultural traditions. The making of nineteenth century Bengali print culture would involve braiding both these strands and knotting them with relics from pre-modern cultural forms. This process would eventually not remain a neat cultural dialogue but result in a polyphony of entangled traditions. The arrival of print in nineteenth century Bengal had coincided with an increased flurry of missionary activities. William Carey had established the Baptist Mission Press at Serampore in 1800 with the purpose of disseminating the Bangla translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. Prior to this, Sir Charles Wilkins along with Panchanan Karmakar had invented the Bengali typeface. Soon, however, the Serampore Press began to churn out textbooks and magazines instead of just the God’s words. One of the press-workers here, Ganga Kishore Bhattacharya went on to become the first Bengali printer and publisher in his own right.

Indigenous entrepreneurship found a suitable avenue for testing prospects in the world of print. Revd. James Long, who had prepared an authoritative catalogue of vernacular books in Bengal, discovered that forty-six presses were operating in Calcutta in 1858. This number would almost double in a decade or so. Long would further identify that a great number of the books printed in the vernacular were ‘beastly equal to the worst of the French school’ and constituted the category of ‘street literature’. These were printed at the rather inexpensive presses (comprising more than half of the contemporary Indian printing enterprises in Calcutta) located in the Chitpur-Garanhata-Shobhabajar area of the colonial cosmopolis. The printed works however, would transcend linguistic and geographical boundaries to surface in book-markets as far off as Patna and Lucknow. The Battala presses supplied printed copies on demand. They traded in wholesale. Their annual production ranged from 8000 to 47000 copies depending on the size of the presses, which were mostly run by entrepreneurs from the smith and artisan castes. Patronage to Battala literature, however, also came from elite quarters. Former banians of the East India Company, who had made their fortunes through grants of land and by acting as mercantile intermediaries apart from running their own private trades, rose through their ranks to emerge as the infamous babu class—known for their cultural chauvinism, moral hypocrisy, prodigal expenditure and decadent lifestyles, often invested in, patronized, and disseminated Battala literature. These were consumed not just by the literate lower-middle classes but also by the educated bhadraloks and more interestingly, by the womenfolk in their households.

Contrary to popular perception, Battala presses did much more than just printing cheap chap-books en masse. Erotica like Beshyarahashya, Hemlata-Ratikanta, Kaamshashtra, Shringar Tilak, Ratibilash, Rasamanjari comprised only one genre of Battala Literature. These did not emerge in isolation. Poet Bharatchandra Raygunakar’s (author of the famous Annadamangal) classic, Bidyasundar was dramatized in various editions and popularized by the Battala print industry. Reputed authors who were otherwise known to be of high social standing, like Madanmohan Tarkalankar, Akshaykumar Dutta, Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, and Bhubanchandra Mukhopadhyay also wrote for the Battala readers. In fact, Bhubanchandra popularized the genre called gupta-kathas (secrets) which derived direct inspiration from JMW Reynolds’ pulp The Mysteries of London and The Mysteries of the Court of London (which, in turn, derived inspiration from Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris). Salacious scandals of the time like the Tarakeshwar affair and murder in Sonagachi prompted the composition of Battala texts which would go on to become the precursors of the first detective and crime fiction works in Bangla, influenced by the European whodunit genre, like Pachkari Dey’s Hatyakari Ke? and Priyanath Mukherji’s Darogar Daptar.

Battala presses also printed mythological dramas and prahasans (farces) for production by the jatra groups in and around the locality of Chitpur and what James Long had referred to as ‘Muslim-Bengali’ literature, that is Perso-Arabic classics (including romances and fantastic tales) like Yusuf-Zuleikha, Hatem Tai, Golevakaoli, which contained less of Sanskrit loan words (tatsama shabdas) and more of Perso-Arabic terms. Notwithstanding all these, the most popular (and profitable) product of the Battala print industry was the almanac. The almanac came out in different editions and forms and best depicted all that Battala stood for: cultural hybridity and unabashed marketing of a range of products. The inevitable companion for ritual purposes was therefore interspersed with mundane advertisements. The illustrations were printed using wood-cut blocks (which preceded the era of lithographs that was soon to begin) and variously resembled the Kalighat pats in both form and content.

Battala featured at the centre of the public discourse on ‘obscenity’ in nineteenth century Calcutta. The Society for the Suppression of Public Obscenity was formed with the purpose of countering the ‘malice’ of Battala and to shield the womenfolk of the bhadralok households from its ‘distasteful’ enticements. In the social memory of Bengal, ‘Battala’ came to denote pornography in print. Yet, this narrative peddles a half-truth. The impact of Battala print industry and its widely accessible literature was strongly felt in the mofussils and within the domestic confines of the bhadralok households. Battala literature was read but not talked about because it exposed the cultural anxiety of the bhadraloks. Battala print was the necessary Other of the Bengal Renaissance, yet they made strange bedfellows. For the high culture of Bengal Renaissance to be glorified, popular culture of Battala had to be vilified. It could be cast away but not ignored. It was the bastard child of the Bengali bhadralok class. It was the site where the bhadraloks cohabited with the chotoloks, where their self-fashioning was not just parodied but thoroughly unmade. Notwithstanding the consternations of missionaries and reformers, Battala blurred the distinctions between the parlour and the street, between bourgeois refinement and bawdy humour, between the power over print and the power in print.

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