Paper and the Community Formation in India

Paper and the community formation in India Richard M. Eaton I will explore several horizons respecting the introduction of paper in India, and the implications each had for various kinds of community formation. One of these is the introduction of paper in 15th century Bengal and its association with Islamic teaching and Islamic culture. Inasmuch as Bengal would become home to one of the world's largest Muslim communities, I wish to understand the connection between a technology of reading and the formation of a faith community that would call itself the ahl-i kitab, or “People of the Book.” A second instance is the introduction of paper in an administrative capacity in 16th and 17th century Deccan, where paper used in judicial decisions facilitated the proliferation of local law courts. These courts in turn constituted new arenas where villagers experienced direct, face-to-face contact with one another in their vernacular languages. Judgments recorded in decrees called mahzar were issued in paper. The end result was the emergence of new communities that coalesced around the vernacular languages in which these encounters occurred. A third instance returns to the association between paper and religious communities – this time, Christianity among pre-literate peoples of India's mountainous northeastern sector in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Here, it was not just paper, but also the technology of printing that facilitated the diffusion of scripture, and again, of new communities that were formed around that scripture.