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CONTENTS
Contextual Alternate
Journal of Communication, Technology, Design, and History
2.00
Titles and abstracts of all the essays in Contextual Alternate (volume 2) are listed below. The complete illustrated essays appear only in print. Please purchase your copy of the journal here or subscribe to lend your support to our efforts. For more information on the subscription options see here.
Volume number: 2 (2022)
ISSN 2755-2764
ISSN 2755-2764
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Paperback with flaps
208 pages · 170×240 mm
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Portraits in L’Inde française and the manner of their taking: when the ‘other’ sometimes gazed back
2.01
This essay examines a richly illustrated two-volume work on South India, L’Inde française, published in Paris between 1827 and 1835, but hitherto strangely overlooked in narratives of European depictions of South Asia during the early nineteenth century. Its 144 lithographed plates comprise iconographic representations of Hindu gods and goddesses, based on the work of professional Indian artists of the mochi caste, as well as religious figures, ceremonies and festivals, races, castes and occupations, topographical views, forms of transport, and portraits drawn by the French amateur artist Monsieur Géringer – all accompanied by biographical and other background information. It is with the twenty-four portraits that this essay is primarily concerned as L’Inde française marks the transition in European representation of Indians from depersonalized ‘types’ to recognized individuals, and challenges the assumption that the ‘other’ was always a passive, subordinate participant in the transaction between artist and sitter.
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The typewriter as protagonist: colonial India in technology’s new age, 1890–1918
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Now largely obsolete, typewriters were special kinds of ‘things’, with a voice, a signature, and a generative power uniquely their own. Powered by what can be described as the twin processes of Americanization and vernacularization, in India they were to be the material, social, and ideological harbingers as well as instruments of a transformative techno-modernity. Despite some resistance, and the often lowly status assigned to the typewriter and the typist, the ‘writing machine’ generated new ways of working, new forms of print culture and new commercialization of education. This essay illustrates the role of the typewriter as protagonist with two case studies that discuss its incorporation into the legal and political life of early twentieth-century India. It examines the manner in which the machine could be used either to subvert state power or, through the use of forensic evidence and expertise, uphold colonial authority.
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Eighth wonder: Linotype and the introduction of mechanical typesetting for Indian scripts
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It was only in the 1930s that mechanical composition (of the linecasting variety) for any Indian script was accomplished – a full three decades after mechanical methods of typecasting and typesetting had been developed and widely deployed in the western world. As a radical departure from various long-established practices of typefounding and type composition, the mechanization of Indian-script typography would go on to reshape aspects of labour, materiality, and visuality of print in South Asia in significant ways – in some cases reifying but in others positing new or unexpected linguistic hierarchies. This essay delves into the history of mechanical composition of South Asian scripts on the Linotype – the machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886, and believed to have been called the eighth wonder of the world by Thomas Edison. Examining the processes involved in design and manufacture, it throws new light on the critical period of mechanization that has remained largely unexamined in the history of typography in India.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
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Graham Shaw is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was formerly Head of the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections at the British Library. Among his many achievements are leading the ‘Collect Britain’ project, the British Library’s largest digitisation initiative at that time, and devising and directing the Endangered Archives Programme for its first five years.
In 2010 Graham Shaw retired from the British Library, having been Head of the Library’s Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections (APAC) for over twenty years. Trained as an Indologist, he graduated in Hindi and Sanskrit in 1969 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS).
For the past thirty years he has researched the history of printing and publishing in South Asia, from the 16th to the 20th centuries. His published works include Printing in Calcutta to 1800 and The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB): Stage-1, 1556–1800.
2.02
David Arnold is professor emeritus in the History department at the University of Warwick, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He previously taught at the University of Lancaster and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where he was Professor of South Asian History. In addition to earlier work on politics and policing in colonial India, he has written extensively on science, medicine, technology, and environment with respect to both British and postcolonial India. Principal works include Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (1993), Science, technology, and medicine in colonial India (2000), Gandhi (2001), Everyday technology: machines and the making of India’s modernity (2013), Toxic histories: poison and pollution in modern India (2016), and most recently Burning the dead: Hindu nationhood and the global construction of Indian tradition (2021). He is currently writing a ‘long history’ of Covid-19 in India.
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Vaibhav Singh is an independent typographer, type designer, and researcher. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture (University of Pune) and a master’s in Visual Communication (Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay). He was awarded the Felix scholarship in 2010 for an MA in Typeface Design, and again in 2013 for his PhD, both at the University of Reading, UK. He is a past postdoctoral fellow of the British Academy (2017–21), and chairman of the Printing Historical Society, London (2019–22). For his research on design, technology, and multilingual typography he has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, the Smithsonian Institution, the Bibliographical Society, the Bodleian, and the British Library, among others.