Munshi Naval Kishore: The Caxton of India
Soon after the British took hold of Awadh, young Munshi Naval Kishore arrived in Lucknow and on November 23, 1858 established Asia’s oldest printing and publishing house, Munshi Naval Kishore Press. On November 26, the first issue of ‘Awadh Akhbar’, an Urdu weekly (edited by the Munshi himself) which later became a daily, was published. These were the pre-news agency days. A landmark publication in Urdu, ‘Akhbar’ was a modern enterprise in the sense that it had correspondents in most major towns of India.
Its wide coverage of issues and news attracted leading Urdu writers like Pandit Ratananath Sarshar (his ‘Fasana e Azad’ was serialised in ‘Akhbar’), Abdul Haleem Sharar, Mirza Ghalib (his article Jang-e-Afghanistan/ April 22, 1862) Amir Ulla Taslim, Hadi Ali Rashq, Qadr Bilgrami ...... Akhbar’ became the forum for the development of modern Urdu prose.
The feat was emarkable considering Lucknow had its first printing press ‘Matabe Mohammadi’ since the times of Ghaziuddin Haider and by 1958, had fourteen large and small presses. Born in 1836 Munshi Naval Kishore was a journalist, a visionary publisher, a patron of littérateurs and one of the makers of modern Lucknow. Knowing the British rule meant subjugation of indigenous knowledge, he bought rare, old manuscripts to India, that otherwise would have ended up being lost. He got them edited by knowledgeable scholars; he also had the oral storytelling tradition of dastangoi, curated and documented. Making heavy investments in typeface in different scripts, he also published Islamic classics including the Quran and the Hadith in Nastalik script; Ramayan, Mahabharat and Bhagvadgita in Devnagari script and Gurugranth Sahib in Gurmukhi script.
At its peak, the Naval Kishore Press had branches in Lahore, Patiala, Kanpur and Jabalpur; it published more than 2600 books focused on oriental learning including rare Persian history texts like ‘Ain-e-Akbari’, ‘Akbarnama’, ‘Tawareekh-e-Farishta’ along with Urdu translations. Another very important contribution of Munshi was the publication of Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hindi dictionaries and thesaurus which found demand in the Islamic countries all over Asia.
Integral to the intellectual and social life of Lucknow, he was nominated as the first Indian member of the first Municipality of the city in 1875 and remained on board till 1893. For his services the government conferred on him the ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’ medal and later he was made a C.I.E. He passed away on February 19, 1895. The Government of India commemorated this great man with a postage stamp in 1970.
(The writer is an awardwinning author)