Print Culture and the Modern World

a) Lives and feelings of women were written with intensity. This increased the number of women who took to reading. Liberal husbands and fathers started educating their womenfolk at home and some sent them to schools. Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why women should be educated. They also carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be used for home-based schooling.
There was also a negative side to the introduction of books were women were concerned.
Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed.
Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances.
Social reforms and novels created a great interest in women's lives and emotions. Women's opinions and views were slowly considered and respected. Stories were written about how about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served. Stories about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows also appeared in print. These stories paved the way for the liberation of the suppressed Indian woman.
b) Very cheap small books were brought to markets in nineteenth-century and sold at crossroads, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy them. Public libraries were set up from the early twentieth century, expanding the access to books.
Libraries were usually located in cities and towns.
Caste discrimination was a major topic discussed in the print media.
c) During the early nineteenth century, there were intense debates on religious issues. Changes within the colonial society were debated in different ways, and religious beliefs were interpreted differently. Some criticised existing practices and campaigned for reforms, while others opposed reformers. These debates were carried out in public and in print.
Printed matter and newspapers spread the new ideas and the public were now more involved in state matters as they were more knowledgeable now.
As more people started reading about the controversies between social and religious reformers new ideas were born. The Hindu orthodoxy over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry was discussed and soon social reforms were born, championing the cause of the down trodden.