Tyler W. Williams. If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi.

Tyler Williams’s If All the World Were Paper investigates how examining Hindi manuscripts as material texts rewrites the literary historiography of late medieval and early modern north India. In his introduction, Williams proposes that attending to a manuscript’s materiality—including its substrate (palm leaf, birch bark, cloth, paper), genre format (codex kitab, notebook gutaka, loose or bound folios of pothi and granth), and visual elements (script, illustration, impagination, layout)—can offer new insights into the role of vernacular language and literature in mediating the region’s social, cultural, and religious interactions.

Apart from the introduction and a prologue, which considers the Nagari Pracharini Sabhas, a Benaras organization founded in 1893 for promoting the use of Hindi in the Nagari script, each chapter centers on one of four manuscript genres that evolved between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter 1 discusses the romance storybook or pemkatha genre; chapter 2, the devotional notebook or gutaka genre; chapter 3, the liturgical manual or pothi genre; and chapter 4, the sacred scripture also known as vani (or granth). 

The discussion of the romance storybook genre, pemkatha (or premakhyan) begins with Daud’s fourteenth-century Chandayan, the first oral epic from the region to be composed in a vernacular verse form. Adapted from popular folk tales of love and romance, the characters and setting of a pemkatha were recognizably Indic, but the genre’s text appeared in a Persianized Masnavi form. Pemkatha manuscripts pioneered a new narrative genre that elevated books to a courtly art form. Adorned with literary devices from classical Sanskrit and Persian traditions, layered with Sufi symbolism, and inscribed in Perso-Arabic script, they were also lavishly illustrated and illuminated, finely calligraphed, and bound in codex format. In a close reading of a seventeenth-century Nal Daman manuscript copied by scribe Babullah and commissioned by patron Dilir Khan, a noble at the Bijapur court, Williams examines the details of its colophon to offer a fascinating account of elite bibliophilia and the scribal labor practices that went into pemkatha manuscript production. In his elegantly calligraphed colophon, scribe Babullah gushes about the eminence of his “perfumed work of love and yearning” (p. 62) and praises the refined sensibility of his patron who can “savor such delicate delights,” a scribal practice that establishes the value of his work in both monetary and nonmonetary terms. By the end of seventeenth century, the Mughal, Rajput, and Deccani kings who patronised the book arts not only employed a large staff of poets, artists, scribes, calligraphers, and bookbinders, but also owned extensive book ateliers that encouraged and legitimized a courtly culture that valued vernacular reading and writing.

As vernacular reading and writing practices extended beyond royal courts to merchant households, script preferences shifted from Perso-Arabic to Kaithi, Nagari, and Gurmukhi. Chapter 2 investigates the consequences of this shift, which led to the emergence of a new genre: the devotional notebook (gutaka). Householders, as well as monk-scholars from Hindu, Jain, and Sikh communities, used gutaka notebooks as aides memoire for inscribing and copying kathas (short stories), hymns, chants, mantras (incantations), and miscellaneous material from diverse sources. The prevalence of shorthand scripts, musical notations, and innovative use of line breaks in these manuscripts show that gutakas in the vernacular public sphere primarily functioned as textual instruments for oral performance events (singing, sermonizing, teaching). 

The chapter argues that practices of gutaka inscribing and copying demonstrate that writers did not necessarily perceive bhakti (devotion) as a sectarian theology, but rather as a popular performative tradition in which content selection was based on aesthetic and affective resonance rather than theological conformity. In a close reading of a seventeenth-century gutaka notebook of a nirgun devotee, Williams highlights the eclecticism of its content, which included Kabir songs, Haridas Niranjani verses, the epic Dhola Maru, and Jain hymns of Parshvanath. Contrary to previously established narratives, Williams demonstrates that the gutaka’s valorization of orality and performance did not necessarily constitute a repudiation of reading or writing within the medieval bhakti movement. 

Chapter 3 examines the liturgical manual or pothi genre, which appropriated Sanskrit pothi conventions of kavya (poetry) and shastra (treatise) into vernacular writing in ways that encouraged textual experimentation and hybridity. Although the vernacular pothi was modeled on the archetypal palm leaf pothi, its use of paper introduced the possibility of experimenting with different dimensions, sizes, and illustrations. Paper pothis composed and copied during the early modern period enabled the development of a shared corpus of devotional, literary, and scholastic works, which connected people and communities across Mughal and Rajput royal courts, religious maths (monasteries), temples, pathshalas (schools), as well as neighborhood fairs and festivals.

Chapter 4 analyzes the genre of sacred scripture (vani or granth) that emerged in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries as the material symbol of authority through which religious communities could imagine and enact their own polities. The structure and organization of a vani or granth manuscript into bound codices followed strict rules for inscription and transmission, including textual framing strategies for introductory and/or concluding verses, invocations, benedictions, a table of contents, and sections dedicated to individual saints and their compositions. Communities like the Sikhs, Dadu Panthis, and Niranjani Sampraday followed a shared process of anthologizing and canonizing the songs, sayings, and hagiographies of selective saint poets into a discrete and fixed scriptural corpus. The vani or granth functioned as unified material evidence of a guru’s voice and words. Copied in a new script evocatively named Gurmukhi (lit. “from the mouth of the Guru”), such manuscripts elevated holy scripture to the status of a guru and consolidated a religious polity that recognized the scripture as its own sovereign. 

In his conclusion, Williams returns to the subject of archives. He questions modern archival practices of collecting, organizing, and classifying manuscripts based on differences (language, genre, region, religion) rather than relationships or overlapping affinities. This approach, he suggests, produces taxonomies, chronologies, and a literary historiography that remains focused on selective authors, compositions, and genres, while neglecting manuscripts that are crossovers, copies, hybrids, multilingual, and multireligious. Thus many of the manuscript genres he discusses are absent from Ramchandra Shukla’s decisive literary history of Hindi published in 1929 by the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, an oversight that Williams believes needs to be reassessed. In recovering and attending to these lesser-known manuscript genres, Williams offers us a new way of reconceptualizing the Hindi archive and reconstructing a social cultural history of vernacularization during this period. This work would be of immense interest to scholars of South Asia with research and teaching interests in the literary, cultural, and religious history of the medieval and early modern period.

Sonal Acharya, PhD (University of California, Berkeley)