The machine in the colony: technology, politics, and the typography of Devanagari in the early years of mechanization

Singh, V. (2018) The machine in the colony: technology, politics, and the typography of Devanagari in the early years of mechanization. Philological Encounters, 3 (4). ISSN 2451-9197 doi: 10.1163/24519197-12340051

Abstract/Summary

The decades of 1930s and 40s in which India’s struggle against British rule gained momentum also ushered in critical technological change in the way texts in many Indian languages were materially produced and represented in print. The foremost facilitators of this change were third parties precariously placed in the colonial equation. Focusing on the dilemmas and contradictions of one such concern, the New York-based Mergenthaler Linotype Company and its program for the Devanagari script, this essay examines the mechanics of the power struggle embodied in the process of technological and typographical change. Against the backdrop of India’s independence movement, in deeply contested territories of language and script, the examination of typographical networks that formulated and realized this project throws new light on the richly ambivalent ideological negotiations involved – between popular and academic aspirations, altruistic and commercial enterprises, communal agendas and nationalist politics, and between imperial administration and colonial subjects.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/75684
Identification Number/DOI	10.1163/24519197-12340051
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Arts and Communication Design > Typography & Graphic Communication
Publisher	Brill
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