Question

The beginning of the printing press led to the growth of the idea of a ‘Nation’ as an ‘imagined community’. Comment as suggested by Benedict Anderson.

Answer 1

• The first modern mass media institution began with the development of the printing press.
• The fist attempts at printing books using modern technologies began in Europe. This technique was first developed by Johann Gutenberg in 1440. Initial attempts at printing were restricted to religious books.
• With the industrial revolution, the print industry also grew.
• The first products of the press were restricted to an audience of literate elites. It was only in the mid-19th century, with further development in technologies, transportation and literacy that newspapers began to reach out to a mass audience.
• People living in different corners of the country found themselves reading or hearing the same news. It has been suggested that this was in many ways responsible for people across a country to feel connected and develop a sense of belonging or ‘we feeling’. The well-known scholar Benedict Anderson has thus argued that this helped the growth of nationalism, the feeling that people who did not even know of each other’* existence feel like members of a family. It gave people who would never meet each other a sense of togetherness. Anderson thus suggested that we could think of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.
• In the 19th century, social reformers debated and wrote in newspapers and journals. The growth of Indian nationalism was closely linked to its struggle against colonialism. It emerged in the wake of the institutional changes brought about by British rule in India. Anticolonial public opinion was nurtured and channelized by the nationalist press, which was vocal in its opposition to the oppressive measures of the colonial state. This led the colonial government to clamp down on the nationalist press and impose censorship, for instance during the Ilbert Bill agitation in 1883. Association with the national movement led some of the nationalist newspapers like Kesari (Marathi), Mathrubhumi (Malayalam), Amrita Bazar Patrika (English) to suffer the displeasure of the colonial state. But that did not prevent them from advocating the nationalist cause and demand an end to colonial rule.