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The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies
presents:
Picturing Readers and Writers: An Iconography of Book Culture in Indian Lithographic Illustration, 1840s to 1900
Prof. Ulrike Stark
University of Chicago
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Abstract:
Despite recent scholarly interest in lithography in South Asia, the rise of lithographic illustration as a commercial book art in India has remained understudied and underappreciated. This talk brings together questions regarding print technology and visual culture. The first part traces the emergence of lithographic illustration in books produced by Indian commercial presses starting from the 1840s: which genres were selected for illustration, and what do we know about the social identity of lithographic artists and the contexts of what Amanda Lanzillo has termed ‘lithographic labor’? Focusing on a specific subset of lithographic illustrations that depict scenes of reading and writing, the second part attempts a preliminary iconography of book culture, past and present, at a historic moment marked by unprecedented accessibility to printed books, the rise of literacy and education, and the formation of a reading public.
Lithographic illustration in Persian books produced in India borrowed heavily from the Persian manuscript tradition. At the same time, it was firmly embedded in India’s multilingual print economy and formed part of an evolving visual economy that encompassed the traditional book arts of illustration, illumination, and engraving, as well as Company-style painting and photography. In discussing book objects, reading spaces, embodied practices, and categories of readers, listeners, and writers, I seek to move beyond the narrative function of the lithographic image (as discussed by Ulrich Marzolph and others) and explore the aesthetic, iconic, spiritual, and affective dimensions of the depiction of book artifacts and the bonds created visually between material object, creator, and consumer. How did the “look of reading” (Garrett Stewart) evolve during this transformative moment in Persian and vernacular book culture in Urdu, Hindi, Panjabi, etc.? What can the images themselves tell us about the imagined and historical nineteenth-century reader/viewer of lithographed books in South Asia and beyond?
Bio:
Ulrike Stark is professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on modern Hindi literature, South Asian book history, and the cultural and intellectual history of North India in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Permanent Black 2007) and has published widely on South Asian print culture. She is the co-creator and principal investigator of chapakhana, a digital humanities project mapping the spread of print in South Asia. Stark is currently working on a project titled “Majestic Patronage: Muslim and Christian Printing at the Lucknow Royal Press, 1819-1849.”