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 focus in this brief essay-book is to retrieve the voice of a nineteenth century subaltern in Bengal, India, Rani Rashmoni (1793-1861) and the conditions under which she lived. By having a dialogue with a subject from the past, by recuperating a history that has been elided by feminist historians, we are compelled to conclude that Rani Rashmoni was an agent on her own rights. Oftentimes, we have to be willing to venture into documented sources out of the norm in order to create a space from where we can make ethical contact with the subaltern, even if the subaltern seems not to have any agency - complying and conforming to most norms of patriarchy, caste and class. We have to create new interpretative parameters to read within and into the stories which create these social matrices that construct the oppressed female subaltern. More importantly, where do we locate primary or even secondary material about women who lived at this time period? If we, as feminists, are willing to broaden our focus on what texts we are willing to read, then we can sketch out the lives of women who were living at this time period. It is because of Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), the mystic saint of Bengal, that we know so much about the life of Rani Rashmoni but why is it that we hear little about her, or there is little mention of her, outside the works published on Sri Ramakrishna by the Ramakrishna Mission? When the Britishers arrived, towards the end of the eighteenth century, were all native women victims of sati and patriarchy? It is within this premise that I try to understand the life of Rani Rashmoni, who can be considered as actively involved not only in philanthropy but also in business and management. It is at the interstices of the religious interiority of her life, and the public-ness of being a member of the rich elite that we have to deconstruct her life. Was Sri Ramakrishna more a closeted social revolutionary than anything else, and through his politics of allowing for a lower caste woman to be his patron, articulating a position that was socially radical? In the early nineteenth century, through the life of Rani Rashmoni, we do get to hear the subaltern speak, thus problematizing the feminist conundrum - can the subaltern speak? If Rani Rashmoni was after all, a hybrid, westernized female entrepreneur, under the disguise of conforming within the patriarchal mould, she was legitimized within mainstream Hinduism by the presence of Sri Ramakrishna.

In the newly established realm of print culture set up by the Britishers in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, it did not take long for the natives to pick up the new technology, and the English language. This process of exchange and learning was made possible through close interaction. In this book, I have looked at the broader canvas of how natives, in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, were involved in the imperial realm of print as compositors, writers, booksellers, printers, teachers and translators, mastering and replicating all aspects of print culture and technology. My specific focus has been on Rammohun Roy's engagement with this emerging realm of print, thus tracing the transition that took place from imperial print to native print. This process of cultural transmission and exchange did not pass through any phase of mimicry. Here, I argue that the realm of English native print in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century was dominated by the writings of Rammohun Roy. I look at how it was possible for Rammohun to operate within the newly formed communications circuit that specifically targeted the native readers. How did printing take place in Calcutta, and who were involved? How did native entrepreneurs to pick up the new technology? This book is an attempt to recuperate some sort of history of the communications circuit that was established for and by the natives in the early nineteenth century.

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.