A Typeface Named “Bhilai”: Indo-Soviet Friendship Through Fonts

Many scholars of the global Cold War recognize Bhilai as the name and site of the Soviet Union’s first major industrial, economic aid project in India. Completed in 1959, the Bhilai Metallurgical Plant was heralded as the key to India’s economic advancement and the beginning of a historic Indo-Soviet friendship based on mutual aid and cooperation. But this paper explores the history of another Bhilai: the steel plant’s eponymous Devanagari typeface for printing in Hindi. Bhilai-Tagirov, which takes the second half of its name from its lead designer, was developed at the Soviet Institute of Printing Engineering as part of a Cold War-era program to equip Soviet typesetting machinery for mechanized, hot metal composition in Asian and African scripts. Viewing these contemporaneous Soviet development projects — steel plants and typefaces— within a unified analytic frame, this paper argues that Bhilai-Tagirov and the other Indic and Arabic faces developed at the institute’s experimental laboratory for “scripts of special graphical form” offered equally fertile ground for the strengthening of economic and cultural ties between the USSR and India.