What did the spread of print culture in nineteenth Century India mean to:
The poor
The poor: With the spread of print – culture very cheap small books, were brought to markets in the nineteenth century and sold at crossroads, allowing poor people traveling to markets to buy them. Public libraries were set up to expand the access of books. From the late 19th century, issues of caste discrimination began to be written about in many printed tracts and essays. Jyotibaphule wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his famous book Gulamgiri in 1871. This helped in bringing these issues to the forefront of public consciousness.
Workers in factories lacked education to write much about their experiences. But some workers took initiative to write stories about their conditions. Like:
Kashibaba, a Kanpur mill worker wrote and published Chhote aur bade ka sawal in 1938 to show the links between class and caste exploitation.
The poems of another Kanpur millworker under the name of sudarshanchakr between 1935 and 1955, were brought together and published in a collection called Sacchi kavitayan. So worker’s problems also came to the fore.