Soldiers of Lead, Denizens of Pixels Vaibhav Singh
Toward the end of October 1934, the Indian National Congress was to hold its annual meeting in Bombay. Finding this an excellent opportunity for a trial run, the local offices of the Linotype Company, a manufacturer of typesetting machinery, sought permission from the meeting’s arrangement committee to exhibit the Devanagari Linotype machine at the venue. The machine, then just over a year old, had newly arrived from New York where it had been developed in one of the earliest attempts to compose Indian-language texts mechanically. Though the technology had existed since the late nineteenth century elsewhere, it was the cutting edge of modern machinery for Indian type and typography in the 1930s, complete with a Devanagari keyboard for text input. As it turned out, the Indian National Congress committee in keeping with its ideological position, refused to grant permission for the exhibition of the Devanagari machine at its venue on the grounds that it was a “foreign invention.” However, with “an admirable carelessness for logic,” the committee permitted its manager to have the machine installed outside of the venue for the printing of English and Hindi material officially required for the meeting. As exemplified in this ambivalent response, the question of technology—even when “foreign”—was a negotiable concern within the rhetoric of nationalism, but also had interest in its utilitarian benefits. In an anticlimactic turn of events, however, after all the arrangements had been made, the sole Devanagari keyboard operator in the employ of the company—sent from Calcutta to Bombay for this purpose—could not, owing to his slow typing speed, compose the texts on the machine within the available time. Thus, the work was ultimately completed by about fifty compositors at a local press using the age-old method of hand-setting: putting little pieces of metal together manually and collectively. Harvard South Asia Institute 13