The legendary press was a small, rickety kingdom of iron and sweat under a banyan tree. Men with ink-black thumbs moved between composed type and a trembling paper pile; a boy carried bundles of woodcut blocks to the man who’d carve the next image of a goddess or a hero. Around them, the narrow lanes of Chitpur braided into a single, constant clamor of hawkers, ritual drums, the river fog lifting off the Hooghly. This was Battala — the market of prints, chapbooks and cheap devotion — and here, in the first decades of the 1800s, Calcutta’s reading public began to take shape.
Evan Cotton’s history of the city (1907) paints Calcutta as a city of layered voices, the fortified white town, the native quarters, the ghats where people gathered. Into this already noisy city, the mechanical whisper of printing presses introduced a new public rhythm of texts that could be bought, passed, argued over, burned and treasured in equal measure. For the European administrator, the press meant governance and textbooks; for the missionary, the conversion of scripture into Bengali and other tongues; for the compositor-turned-printer, the chance to sell a thousand cheap tales to a hungry, curious public. The presses did not simply reproduce words — they set a new cadence for city life, the cadence of pages changing hands.
The Battala trade specialised in the quick, the cheap and the sensational. Chapbooks (thin, inexpensive booklets), woodcut prints and oleographs catered to diverse tastes spanning devotional narratives for the pious, romances and moral tales for family reading, bawdy verse for private amusement. A bold woodcut of a goddess or a dramatic scene could sell a hundred copies where plain text might sell ten. Battala’s goods were cultural nodes that carried stories into neighbourhoods, inns and river ghats, shaping how people talked about themselves and each other.
The Presses, the People, and the Transfer of Craft
Missionary presses and institutional demands brought metal type and wooden blocks into the region; training and standardisation followed. The Serampore Mission Press at the turn of the century printed textbooks, Bible translations and Bengali editions of epic and devotional literature — work that both standardised Bengali print forms and trained a generation of local compositors, cutters and binders. Many of those skilled workers later left missionary establishments and carried the craft into Calcutta’s bazaars, setting up independent workshops and presses.
Out of Serampore and the Fort’s institutions emerged local entrepreneurs. Printers and compositors who learned the new craft went on to found indigenous presses within the city, relocating technology from institutional workshops into marketplaces where ordinary customers could purchase a small devotional booklet, a moral tale, or an illustrated ballad. Men who began as compositors became printers and publishers; craftsmen who carved woodblocks became illustrators for the mass market. In doing so they transformed reading from the privilege of learned households into a popular habit.
If you walked Battala in the 1810s–1830s you would have seen the meeting of three currents. These were missionary presses and Fort William’s demand for textbooks; indigenous compositors and entrepreneurs translating that craft into commercial ventures; and a public whose tastes — devotional, romantic, satirical — shaped what was printed next. Fort William College’s efforts to teach and publish in vernacular languages fed the need for primers and grammars; the missionary presses supplied type, training and models; Battala presses answered the appetite for cheap, immediate print. The result was an ecosystem in which literacy, image and commerce pushed each other forward.
There are human scenes that linger: a compositor blotting his hands on his apron, a woodcutter smoothing an engraved block, a widow buying a small book of devotional verses to tuck into her sari, a student memorising arithmetic printed on a single sheet. These small gestures — hands stained with ink, folded pages tucked into pockets — were everyday acts of cultural production and consumption that rewrote the city’s daily life more quietly than any proclamation from the Club in white town.
Tensions, Transformations, and Why it Matters Now
Cheap prints carried tension. Colonial officials and some metropolitan literati viewed the Battala press with suspicion — worried about obscene or subversive content and uneasy about the loss of control over public opinion. The presses, however, argued back in ink: they proved the vernacular public wanted its own texts, its own images, and its own explanations of the world. In that tug-of-ink, boundaries between religion, commerce and criticism blurred: a devotional tract might be a bestseller; a romantic puthi could be adapted into a street drama; a political rumour could be printed, copied and amplified by traders who moved between river and market.
Tracing the press from missionary and institutional workshops to Battala means tracing the first lines of a larger story. Bengal’s later literary efflorescence — the newspapers, reform movements and debates of the nineteenth century — did not arise from nowhere. It grew out of a material culture in which cheap prints, school primers and popular illustrations normalised reading and debate for many classes of people. The battalions of readers who first learned to buy a chapbook under a banyan would, within a generation, be the readers and writers of newspapers, pamphlets and novels that reshaped modern India. The tale of print and bazaar is a small, intimate history — of how technology, craft and appetite met and, in the process, taught a city to read itself.
References
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Cotton, Evan. Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City. W. Newman, 1907.
Das, Suchintan. “Strange Bedfellows: Battala Print and the Bengal Renaissance.” StudyCircle Lokayata, 6 May 2020, https://studycirclelokayata.blog/2020/05/06/strange-bedfellows-battala-print-and-the-bengal-renaissance-suchintan-das/?utm_source=chatgpt.com. Accessed 7 Dec. 2025.
Gupta, Abhijit. “Popular Printing and Intellectual Property in Colonial Bengal.” Thesis Eleven, vol. 113, no. 1, Dec. 2012, pp. 32–44. doi:10.1177/0725513612456994.
Moitra, Swati. “The World of Battala Print.” Sahapedia, https://www.sahapedia.org/the-world-of-battala-print. Accessed 7 Dec. 2025.
“From Under the Banyan Tree to the World: The Story of One of the Earliest Indian Printing-Presses.” Google Arts & Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/from-under-the-banyan-tree-to-the-world-museum-of-art-photography/VwUBj8rAy6wqIw?hl=en. Accessed 7 Dec. 2025.
“Serampore Mission Press.” Banglapedia, https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Serampore_Mission_Press. Accessed 7 Dec. 2025.
Arup K. Chatterjee 