{"id":685,"date":"2016-12-10T09:42:38","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=685"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:36:50","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:36:50","slug":"isabel-hofmeyr-gandhis-printing-press-experiments-in-slow-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/12\/10\/isabel-hofmeyr-gandhis-printing-press-experiments-in-slow-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Isabel Hofmeyr. Gandhi\u2019s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Isabel Hofmeyr. Gandhi\u2019s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading<\/em>. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. 218p, ill. ISBN 9780674072794. US $24.95 (hardback).<\/p>\n

Can we\u00a0really ignore a man whose face keeps appearing on every banknote printed in the Republic of India during the last 69 years?\u00a0More importantly, given Gandhi’s known hostility to the Western ideals of politics and technological progress, can we ignore the nature of contradictions inherent in his use of the printing press as an experimental device for political and spiritual communication?<\/p>\n

If printing, according to McLuhan, was a ditto device which first outlined the contours of the West-European idea of \u2018nationalism,\u2019 the ubiquitous Gandhi face on the Indian banknote is an important reminder of the fact as how that idea was appropriated, reinterpreted, and powerfully reinforced by the medium of print in non-Western societies. The iconic representation of Gandhi on the banknote as the \u2018Father of the Indian Nation\u2019 often makes us forget the Nandalal Bose linocut of a pensive Bapuji<\/em> leading the Dandi March in 1930, a powerful image that\u00a0too\u00a0had been endlessly replicated in print to drive home the idea of Gandhi as anti-colonial liberator who favoured village-based decentralized democracies\u00a0over what was to follow: a\u00a0centralized\u00a0Nehruvian welfare state. Still lesser known is Ramkinkar Baij\u2019s\u00a0powerful\u00a0portrayal\u00a0of another Gandhi, mostly because it\u2019s fairly impossible to technologically replicate its\u00a0desolatory\u00a0feel \u2013 sculpted in the isolation of stone, the pensive Bapuji of the Nandalal linocut reappears in Baij\u2019s\u00a01947\u00a0work as a self-absorbed figure\u00a0stepping on\u00a0a heap of human skulls,\u00a0cemented\u00a0in\u00a0the twilight of the Empire, the Noakhali riots, and the Partition.<\/p>\n

In a world of a million\u00a0political\u00a0Gandhis,\u00a0therefore,\u00a0and a million\u00a0other\u00a0possible\u00a0Gandhian\u00a0simulacra that exist\u00a0with or without reference\u00a0to the\u00a0complex nature of the\u00a0Gandhian corpus,\u00a0the\u00a0person who appears in Hofmeyr\u2019s book,\u00a0thankfully,\u00a0and without any associations of\u00a0guilt or\u00a0pain,\u00a0has\u00a0a\u00a0strong element\u00a0of nostalgia about him.\u00a0Here\u00a0Gandhi\u00a0is a young Gujarati lawyer at work in South Africa, experimenting with a Tolstoyan farm, and trying to run a periodical\u00a0meant\u00a0for a primarily Gujarati readership,\u00a0the\u00a0Indian Opinion<\/em>. And there, perhaps, lies the principal charm of this book. Without the exclusivist\u00a0focus on\u00a0the evolution of\u00a0Gandhian politics,\u00a0and with little interjections on the debates surrounding the later iconic stature of Gandhi, Hofmeyr tries to contextualise the strange corpus of early Gandhian writing by offering a vision\u00a0of a\u00a0man who takes his slow reading very seriously, and\u00a0the processual beginnings of\u00a0an\u00a0imagined\u00a0\u2018Indian nation\u2019\u00a0existing as a \u201cvirtual entity some four thousand miles distant.\u201d\u00a0This\u00a0imagining\u00a0wouldn\u2019t have been possible, Hofmeyr argues, if Gandhi\u00a0was not\u00a0caught up in the production\u00a0cycles of\u00a0this expat\u00a0bilingual Gujarati\u00a0newspaper in the colonial Indian Ocean world\u00a0of the late nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

The usual eyes and eyebrows would be raised at this point: those that practise severe practical criticism by squinting closely at the typographical device called hyphen (which someone famously deployed to link the words \u2018print\u2019 and \u2018capitalism\u2019) while being oblivious to the fact that the hyphen might not have been inserted at all if the compositor had been in more of a hurry and the proof-reader a little less intent on reading page proofs. For those Sauronian eyes, therefore, and particularly for those who dismiss any efforts to study the interconnections between material processes of textual production to the intellectual dispositions of an author encountered in print, Hofmeyr\u2019s book will be another instance of the \u2018technologically deterministic\u2019 vagaries of academic life. For others, however, this might serve as an important eye-opener. Dealing with an author as complex as Gandhi, Hofmeyr makes her points very strongly about the interconnectedness of print to the processes of textual production. Does it shock us, or horrify us, that as a believer in Ruskinian and Tolstoyian ideals, Gandhi continued to identify Africa as an unproblematic non-existent zone while contesting ideals of white civilisation in print? How is one supposed to read his reliance on cheap African labour at Phoenix, Natal, employing \u201cfour hefty Zulu girls\u201d (in Millie Polak\u2019s words) to substitute the donkeys which worked as engines of a decrepit mechanical press? (66\u20137)<\/p>\n

Hofmeyr\u2019s book builds its arguments around a simple proposition: in order to seriously understand M. K. Gandhi\u2019s early forays in the realm of political philosophy and his later expositions on satyagraha<\/em>, we need to locate his role as a publisher, experimental editor, anthologist, and proprietor of a South-African periodical called\u00a0Indian Opinion<\/em>. To a later self-reflexive Gandhi, the\u00a0Indian Opinion\u00a0<\/em>experience constituted almost a medicinal exercise towards spiritual discipline, where his passion for long expositions fought an engaging battle against his soul\u2019s commitment to remove the weeds of superfluity and exaggeration in writing, resulting in direct ethical benefits: the practice of self-restraint. Hofmeyr, however, situates this with the contingencies of running a periodical journal in South Africa which made its niche by, and its identity largely dependent upon, translational summary of texts and \u2018news\u2019 from diverse periodicals: a previously-ignored matrix in which Gandhi\u2019s writing style had been largely forged. It was during these experiments, observes Hofmeyr, that the plain prose style so characteristic of Gandhi\u2019s later writings, the mode of composition where \u201cnot one word more was necessary,\u201d took shape. This juxtaposition of ethical \u201cexchanges\u201d next to \u201cnews\u201d, created a new textual reconfiguration, which Hofmeyr argues, \u201credefined both genres, making ethical discourse \u2018news\u2019 and slowing down news reports to the pace of philosophy\u201d (71). Hence, the beginnings of Gandhi\u2019s experiments in \u201cslow reading\u201d: the rejection of the \u201cdeinstrumentalization of time\u201d across specialized \u201cuneven\u201d reading surfaces of the\u00a0Indian Opinion<\/em>, in opposition to the fast-paced information pouring out of other \u201cmacadamized\u201d newspaper surfaces (91).<\/p>\n

Indeed, by the time one has finished reading this book there is a growing awareness that \u00a0the textual dispensation of Gandhi\u2019s condensed prose writings acquires newer significances once we locate its important moorings in a periodical past which sought to create ethical \u201cexchanges\u201d by abridging, summarizing, and extracting texts from across the world, and juxtaposing them next to \u201cnews\u201d clippings to highlight his ethical visions and also to outline the rough but rigid contours of a continuously re-imagined moral, the \u2018Indian nation.\u2019<\/p>\n

Hofmeyr’s efforts in identifying a Gandhian theory of reading (of \u201cThe Reader as Satyagrahi\u201d) exclusively founded on contextualizing the\u00a0Hind Swaraj<\/em>, in the textual environment of the\u00a0Indian Opinion,<\/em>\u00a0is where retrospective (and nostalgic) judgement weighs most heavy.\u00a0Hind Swaraj<\/em>\u00a0(1909) is one of the most iconic political pamphlets written by Gandhi, but also one of his weakest. There isn\u2019t much by way of explicit politics of\u00a0satyagraha<\/em>\u00a0as anti-imperial resistance in\u00a0Hind Swaraj<\/em>, in fact, in what we have of a resistive \u2018Indian-ness\u2019 in the fictional world of Bankim\u2019s\u00a0Anandamath<\/em>\u00a0(1882), nothing to show quite how Gandhi\u2019s views of political resistance might be evolving, if they were, during the time he was writing it for the Gujarati readers of\u00a0Indian Opinion.<\/em><\/p>\n

Apart from this small issue of consequentiality, this book is largely successful in communicating the understanding that Gandhi\u2019s involvement in the periodical business in South Africa can indeed be connected to his later emergence as an important political journalist and thinker in the Indian subcontinent. Unlike Prince Albert\u2019s efforts to popularize homoeopathy in Victorian England, the practical and medicinal benefits of exercising spiritual restraint in response to the fixed print space mosaic of a periodical were in this case, as we\u2019ve retrospectively come to know, quite ecumenical.<\/p>\n

Deeptanil Ray
\nJadavpur University<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isabel Hofmeyr. Gandhi\u2019s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. 218p, ill. ISBN 9780674072794. US $24.95 (hardback). Can we\u00a0really ignore a man whose face keeps appearing on every banknote printed in the Republic of India during the last 69 years?\u00a0More importantly, given Gandhi’s known hostility to the Western […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1900,1947,1953],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-africa","tag-periodicals-news","tag-publishing"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":686,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}