The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna has an a-historical appeal that cuts across generations, time periods, geo-social spaces and lifestyle choices. The text or the person is not the sole belonging of a particular institution or a group of people. We belong to a generation that is flippant in our habits and our notions of Indian-ness and the world, and we flirt with global cultures. And yet, The Gospel does make sense. One can imagine Sri Ramakrishna, examining us benevolently, and questioning us about our lifestyles; never judging us but engaging with us and having a discussion, so that we ourselves are critically empowered to understand ourselves better. Sri Ramakrishna is obviously enough, not specific to any particular nation or community or religious belief. He embraces all and in this all embracing gesture, reaches out to everyone. His teachings critique the global dominant notion that we have about mainstream Hinduism - where Indian-ness and being Hindu is equated with a repressive concept of moral prudishness. More often than not, Sri Ramakrishna spoke in riddles, and his saying are self contradictory, on the verge of being unsolved conundrums - as if questioning the intelligence of the listener. His guise of an unlettered rustic, poor Brahmin helped him. As a reader, we can be thrown off the track if we fall into that trap.

27 Till as recently as two hundred years ago, India was a manuscript culture meaning that the printed text did not exist. When the transition took place from a manuscript culture to a print one, it seems to have taken place with great ease, implying that the shift was made without much murmurs and complaints from at least the native, elite sections of society. This book looks at the emergence of the first printed newspapers in colonial Calcutta, India (1780-1820).

The emergence of print culture in colonial Bengal, in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, under the East India Company, is largely an untold story. Calcutta would become the capital of the British empire, and the realm of print culture played an important role in maintaining and perpetuating British rights to this colonial territory. The history of how this realm of print culture evolved in Calcutta is central to this book. Ships that sailed from England carried books; printing presses were brought all the way from Europe and with the help of Indians, a realm of imperial print emerged. How do we understand this engagement between the colonizer and the colonized? It would be a more meaningful discussion if we understood power as operating in a more sophisticated manner rather than simply being imposed upon others in a binary fashion. Those Britishers who traveled to India were people who were part and parcel of the Juggernaut of empire making and they were blood and flesh people and not necessarily heinously mean or cruel. The intellectual brahminical elite allowed themselves to be participants in this process, only because they were involved in a new epistemic shift; the tradeoff must have been fair. It is rather simplistic to construe the natives as being overpowered or incapable of resistance of any sort. The realm of early nineteenth century print culture in Calcutta was a heterogeneous one, where natives and colonizers engaged with print in a heteroglossic manner. The sheer fascination with the new-ness of the social and technological aspects of print culture might have been, after all, irresistible.