(a) "How did easy access to books develop a new culture of reading during the 18^th century?" Analyse.

(i) Printing reduced the cost of books.

(ii) The time and labour required to produce each book came down, and multiple copies could be produced with greater ease making books available easily.

(iii) Books flooded the market, reaching out to an ever- growing readership.

(iv) Access to books created a new culture of reading.

(v) Common people lived in a world of oral culture.

(vi) They heard sacred texts read out, ballads recited, and folk tales narrated.

(vii) Knowledge was transferred orally.

(viii) People collectively heard a story or saw a performance.

(ix) Now books could reach out to wider sections of people.

(x) If earlier there was a hearing public, now a reading public came into being.

(xi) But the transition was not so simple. they had to keep in mind the wider reach of the printed work.

(xii) Even those who did not read could certainly enjoy listening to books being read out.

(xiii) So printers began publishing popular ballads and folk tales, and such books would be profusely illustrated with pictures.

(xiv) These were then sung and recited at gatherings in villages and in taverns in towns.

(xv) Oral culture thus entered print and printed material was orally transmitted.

(b)How did printing technology affect the lives of Indian women? Analyze.

(i) Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways.

(ii) Women’s reading, therefore, increased enormously in middle class homes.

(iii) Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and sent them to schools when women’s schools were set up in the cities and towns after the mid-nineteenth century.

(iv) Many journals began carrying writings by women and explained why women should be educated.

(v) They also carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be used for home-based schooling. But not all families were liberal.

(vi) Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed and Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances.

(vii) Sometimes, rebel women defied such prohibition. We know the story of a girl in a conservative Muslim family of north India who secretly learnt to read and write in Urdu.

(viii) Her family wanted her to read only the Arabic Quran which she did not understand.

(ix) In East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household, learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen.

(x) Later, she wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban which was published in 1876. It was the first full-length autobiography published in the Bengali language.

(xi) Since social reforms and novels had already created a great interest in women’s lives and emotions.

(xii) From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women – about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served.

(xiii) In the 1880s, in present-day Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger.