In this wonderful monograph, which brings together the analytical insights of social history with the kind of nuance (and some wit!) that only cultural history can provide, historian A. R. Venkatachalapathy consolidates years of research on a subject on which he is undoubtedly the scholarly authority today: the world (and worldview) of Tamil print and publishing. Towards the tail end of the work, and writing of the emergence by the 1930s of the “book review” in Tamil literary and scholarly circles, the author recalls the noted writer Pudumaippithan's warning that this novel genre would “end up disappointing enthusiastic readers and ultimately kill the nascent reading habit” (p. 233). Pudmaippithan's astute warning notwithstanding, my goal in participating in this “misleading” genre by writing this review—in the limited space of 800 words!—is to alert the uninitiated reader to the importance of this work, which should be read widely, and not just by scholars interested in modern Tamil literature or history.

At its core, this book is concerned with what the author calls Tamil's “tryst with movable type” (p. 5) and especially with its materialization in that ubiquitous, even universal, object that we call “the book.” The historical importance of charting “the province of the book” in the Tamil country—which bears highlighting from a comparative and global historical perspective as well—is that the first printed book outside the European context (albeit produced outside the geographical boundary of the Tamil country, in Goa, in 1577) was in Tamil. The author flags other “firsts” that followed from this moment: the first complete translation of the New Testament in an Indian language (in 1714/15), the first full translation of the Bible (1796), the first extended lexicon (1912–36), and the first modern encyclopedia (1954–68) (p. 244). Given this history of “firsts,” the author feels compelled to ask what sustained Tamil publishing as he traces the long arc of its “tortuous” passage from an older system of patronage (largely in the hands of landed gentry, religious institutions, and caste leaders) to the modern market propped up by an emergent “middle class” (chapters 1–2).

In the course of this treatment, but especially in chapters 4 and 7, he tracks the emergence of new kinds of subjects created by the work/world of moveable type: the author, the publisher, the printer, and the (silent) reader. Chapter 3 is a delightful exploration of the role of the novel in democratizing the reach of the printed object and is counterpoised by the equally valuable excavation in chapter 5 of printed materials that circulated outside the interests of the middle class in chapbooks and ballads. Finally, chapter 6 analyzes the interventions of the colonial state in policing the realm of print for largely moral and political reasons, reaching the conclusion that pronouncements and even intentions to the contrary, the regulation of the book world was rather limited, even “an epiphenomenon” (p. 19). The research that sustains these conclusions is impeccable, demonstrating especially to the historian of colonial India tethered to the documentary archives of the colonial state the scholarly gains to be made by immersing oneself in non-English and non-statist words and worlds.

Venkatachalapathy's canvas is both broad and nuanced at the same time, so I am loathe to burden this review with the customary raising of questions left unanswered. Yet, in the spirit of a critical review, I pose three that might perhaps be useful for future scholarship in the field opened up beautifully by this work. As the author rightly notes, the Madras Presidency in this period was highly multilingual (about fourteen languages in his reckoning, p.172); hence I would hesitate to endorse “the colonial Tamilnadu” of the subtitle of the work. Something is certainly lost in treating “Tamil” print in isolation in such a multilingual landscape, especially when the author himself presents evidence in passing to the contrary. So we must ask how the world of Tamil publishing operated in a linguistic economy in which books in other languages, particularly Telugu in the city of Madras, were also produced, sometimes in abundance. Similarly, how did Tamil publishing in neighboring Sri Lanka, especially Jaffna, impact the Madras Presidency, at a time when there was considerable traffic across porous literary borders, even though colonial Ceylon was not part of British India? Not least, the author writes that he is interested in a specific and contingent history of the Tamil book, since there cannot be “one universal history of the book” (p. 244). This important agenda—which brings this work in line with other postcolonial efforts to write histories of other parts of the world not as a rehearsal of European history—is, however, articulated too late in the work, and leaves unexamined the fact that the form of the printed book in Tamil India remains tethered to metropolitan forms. Given that by the early years of the twentieth century, other forms for the articulation of knowledge, such as the handwritten palm-leaf manuscript, became obsolete, does print and its primary vehicle, the published book, enable, even sustain, that vast project that we shorthand as the colonization of the (Indian) mind?