Literary history of vernaculars in the West has a well-established narrative. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer is considered the “father” of English literature, followed by the other greats of the Renaissance—Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare—and the canon continues. The literary histories of Indian languages, in contrast, do not have such a straightforward lineage.
In his book If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi, Tyler W Williams attempts an alternative method of writing literary history for Indian vernaculars. Focusing on Hindi, a language that was a lingua franca of some enjoying currency between 13th and 17th centuries in India from Lahore to the Deccan region and written in scripts as diverse as Devanagari, Kaithi, Gurmukh and Arabic, Williams turns to the extant material artifacts of manuscript culture to put together a social history of literature. In this history, the main actors are not the individual authors who composed works of literature or scholarship who deserve a fatherly treatment for their contribution to the evolution of the language but the anonymous copyists, copyeditors, notetakers and disciples who identified the material that was worth preserving.
In the process, Williams discovers important relationships that writing or copying had with four elements: genres, note making, scholasticism, and sectarian identities. In exploring these elements, Williams takes the study of manuscript culture far beyond what is known about writing as an aid that weakened the faculty of memory and as an institution of labor that preserved works from disappearing from history and human consciousness. He shows that writing in Hindi was an integral part of social exchanges between ideas and communities with reference to the writing cultures prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries. He writes a literary history that is also a book history in that it points towards the messy history of book formats in India at the intersection of the medieval and early modern periods.
The first example Williams discusses is that of the codex books best described as prem-katha or the romance story. Examples such as Padmaavat by Jayasi of the 16th century (that caused an uproar in India around its Bollywood adaptation in the recent years) belong to this genre. These writing or copying of these love stories led to the invention of a book format: the couplets came to be identified as columnized blocks of texts with shorter couplets going into square boxes, longer couplets going into rhombuses and another kind of shorter couplets going into vertical columns. This calligraphic arrangement contrasted with the conventional format of a block of text running on from one line to another. The illustrations on these manuscripts depict scenes from these romances. After all, a love story deserved to look like a love story. The medium used is paper, an invention that scribes working on Sanskrit texts ignored. The new form blended Persianate forms such as masnavi with Indic stanzaic structures. This universe of love poetry was copied in multiple scripts: Nagari, Kaithi, Gurmukhi and Bengali.
Pothis contained scholarly treatises or long works produced in bhasa (or the vernacular such as Hindi) the pedagogical institutions such as the pathasalas (schools) or mathas (sectarian monasteries): a pothi was a paper version of the unbound palm leaf book, wrapped in a cloth, “a copy of a self-contained, unified work intended to circulate in writing among an imagined community of readers”. However, its folios were not bound and it was meant for reading aloud, much like the norms of reading in medieval and early modern Europe as well as Central Asia and the Middle East. Examples of pothis include Tulsidas’s Ramacaritamanas (the epic), Biharilal’s Satasai (a work of courtly poetry from the seventeenth century), Keshavdas’s Rasikapriya (a late 16th century work of literary criticism). A pothi “served as a token or type of currency in intellectual and social exchanges between intellectuals, pedagogues, students, and representatives of political authority.” Every example that survives reveals that it was a result of highly skilled labor, with the scribes working as copyeditors (rather than just as copyists). They emulated works of Sanskrit as they were seen as prestigious models in the way they were arranged with openings, colophons, headings, and notations.
The third format Williams discusses is that of the gutaka, “a notebook or briefcase of sorts for a religious professional” written in Kaithi (for hymns and narratives) and Nagari (for mantras, spells, and astrological notes). Thes professionals belonged to the nirguna tradition within Hinduism (most examples Williams uses come from this tradition that conceives of God as formless). The notebooks he carried contained the poetry of saint poets such as Kabir, Ravidas, Dadu Dayal, Hairdas Niranjani, and Sundardas, or more accurately, the performers’ notes on the songs attributed to these poets, and worked as an aid for the performance of rituals.
The notebooks do not bear any traces of embellishment: these were meant for personal use rather than circulation. They do not follow any discernible logic of punctuation or marking of refrains within poems as these were not meant for reading at all. They “were literally made to travel”: these were small and had sturdy bindings which made them portable. But these were portable in another sense too: they were not exclusive in the sense of carrying works of any specific poets. They were inclusive in the sense that they did not distinguish between the expressions of nirguna and saguna (the religious tradition that believed in the idea of the Divine as captured in specific forms of deities, powers, or names). One 17th century gutaka has both Kabir and Tulsidas, voices from nirguna and saguna traditions respectively between its pages.
The gutakas could be seen as an invention in opposition to the pothis for their heavy handed pretense to knowledge. These were the little books that registered the dissent by the likes of Kabir who, throughout his poetry, has argued against bookish knowledge and the arrogance emerging out of it. They make knowledge a personal thing, an expression of wisdom, that is unique to individuals, rather than a grand narrative that everyone must subscribe to. While the pothi material stands for a larger than life theory or narrative, the gutaka material privileges experience over knowledge.
The fourth format is that of the sacred book, the vani, which literally means “voice”. It is also known as the grantha, of which the Sikhs’ Guru Granth Sahib is the most well known example. The saints’ followers wrote down the voice or the sayings of the gurus of various sects and the resulting granthas or vanis came to stand for the gurus, and became intertwined with the questions of power: “the establishment of a written scripture could be as much an expression of spiritual and political sovereignty as an attempt to liaise with political elites.” In contrast to the gutakas, which focused on speech, rather than writing, as the essence of wisdom, the granthas demonstrate the fact that writing was taken very seriously, even as an act of faith and devotion. They transformed the followers of the gurus into textual communities, also transforming the book into scripture and an emblem of political sovereignty.
In sketching out the book history of South Asia with the help of these four types of the book, Tyler Williams has changed the way books as material artifacts and as instruments of knowledge and experience should to be investigated. Just as inspiring is his method of investigation and his sources: the huge collection of manuscripts available at the Nagari Pracharini Sabha (the Committee for the Promulgation of Nagari) which was founded in 1893 in Benaras. There are, he notes, millions of manuscripts that need to be studied to understand textual cultures as it emerged in India. But at a deeper level, his material has been hiding in plain sight, and that is why, it makes for a dazzling read. For instance, he touches upon the pothi as held by Saraswati, the Indian goddess of learning, as an example of attitudes towards knowledge and books. In another instance, he points to what is probably the most well known verse in India, known even to school students:
Pothi padhi padhi jaga mua pandita bhaya na koi
Ekai akhara prema ka padhai so panndita hoi
The world could keep reading books (pothi) till it up and died,
and still no one would become learned (pandit).
[But the person] who reads one letter of love–
he will become learned.
How have scholars working on book history in India managed to miss these telling markers of veneration and distantiation from books? In Williams’ work, one furthermore finds newer examples of syncretic traditions of the mingling of Hindu and Persianate traditions of thinking, emoting, writing, and compiling pursuing, providing material evidence for the transformation of erstwhile fluid identities to hardened sectarian ones.