Serampore College, where the first printing press of the country came up. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Serampore municipality goes to the polls the day this column appears, and this newspaper has done due diligence in the past week on the erstwhile glories of the city. But while it has referred in glowing terms to the library and newspaper begun by the Baptist missionary William Carey, it overlooked the printing press he set up which managed to print in a small matter of 40 languages in the first three decades of its life. Most missionary accounts celebrate the efforts of the trinity of Carey, Marshman and Ward -and rightly so — but there was another trinity in their shadows, creating and casting the font for printing in all those languages. This instalment of Brief Lives remembers the youngest of them, the so-called “Hindoo genius” Krishnachandra Karmakar.

It was in the summer of 1847 that magazines on both sides of the Atlantic were full of accounts about a “Hindoo genius”. Littell’s Living Age of Boston, Mechanic’s Magazine of London and the famous Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal all quoted a report from the Calcutta Gazette, about a blacksmith who had originally been a cutter of punches but had now “manufactured an iron press… and set up a printing office, at which he has commenced printing for the country at large”. The original report did not bother to name the smith-turned-pressman, but waxed eloquent about his entrepreneurial skills.

In 1846, he printed a “native almanac” which had become an instant bestseller, and followed it up by making lead engravings of Hindu gods, of which tens of thousands were printed, and sent into the countryside with itinerant hawkers. “There are few villages”, commented the Gazette, “in which the cottage of perhaps the poorest individual is not supplied with the veritable effigy of one of the popular gods”.

Not content with possibly being the first-ever purveyor of posters of gods and goddesses, our blacksmith now turned to the world of English books. Most of the English books available in Calcutta at that time bore the imprimatur of the Calcutta School-Book Society, but were regarded as too highly-priced. He cast his own type, printed his own books and was able to completely undersell the presses in Calcutta.

Three years later, the name of this pioneer was revealed in an obituary notice of the Friend of India (which subsequently became The Statesman). He was the son of none other than the legendary Manohar, who had cut type in nearly 15 languages at the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore, where he had worked for nearly 30 years. Manohar, in turn, was the son-in-law of Panchanan, the Gutenberg of Bengal, who cut the first-ever fonts in the Bengali language. History has since contrived to forget the three generations of Karmakars, a lineage unparalleled in the history of print anywhere in the world.

The writer teaches English at Jadavpur University