When he sets the carry bag down on the floor you hear the clang of metal. You see delicate files and the looping spring of the handheld type caster or hand mould apparatus (the kind used by Gutenberg) peeking out of the torn plastic. When he spreads them out on the table and hands the objects around for appreciation, you wonder how long they will survive. These are tools used by the pioneering type casters of our country two centuries ago, now roughing it out in a plastic bag.
You can’t really blame Biman Mullick. While his preservation techniques could be improved, the fact remains that if he hadn’t clung on to these family heirlooms, we might not have even had the chance to see these objects today.
The 69-year-old Mullick is a fourth-generation descendant of Panchanan and Gadadhar Karmakar, the teenage brothers who stunned the East India Company by creating Bengali types for use in Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s A Grammar of the Bengali Language , which was published in 1778 at John Andrew’s press in Hooghly.
Creating metal types
Those were the times when missionaries and traders alike were trying their best to understand the social, religious, historical, legal, economic and cultural coordinates of the land they hoped to control. Panchanan and Gadadhar proved to be invaluable to the Orientalist printer Charles Wilkins of the East India Company and the Baptist missionary and polyglot William Carey, both of whom had a common interest in Asiatic heritage.
Under their guidance, the two Karmakar brothers and Manohar (Panchanan’s son-in-law) created new metal types for the first-ever printed books in 40 languages including Chinese, Burmese, Javanese, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odiya, Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, and others.
Palm leaf manuscripts.
The British had thought it would be easy to recreate the Bengali type in England’s foundries, but their attempts failed miserably. Wilkins and John Andrews decided to seek out local engravers, and that’s how they met the Karmakar brothers.
The success of Halhed’s book prompted Warren Hastings to ask Wilkins to set up a Company press in Calcutta in 1781, and that’s where the two brothers came to work. In the 1780s, the brothers were living in a shack at Serampore’s Batthala. Some 25 years later, they had built their house and workshop there. And that is where their descendants now live, in apartment buildings that have come up in the place of the old house, once Asia’s largest type foundry in the early 1800s. In a room in one of these buildings, we examine the tools.
I have seen videos on YouTube that demonstrate how types used to be made with hand moulds of the kind used by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. But it is quite another thing to see them first-hand.
Wilkins, founding member of the Asiatic Society, was a trained printer and had the added assistance of Joseph Shepherd, a gem and seal engraver. The Karmakar brothers picked up a lot of technique from them and when Henry Colebrook’s Cornwallis Code was published in 1793, the type is said to have been smaller and finer.
Bengali font arrives
For the Baptist mission press, the duo created types of 42 languages. Panchanan supplied the Bengali font for Carey’s Bengali translation of the New Testament in 1801, and in 1803 the Devnagari script for Carey’s Sanskrit grammar. They also helped produce fonts for the first Bengali weekly and monthly newspapers Dig Darshan and Samachar Darpan.
In fact, even after the missionary press closed down, the foundry continued as Adhar Type Foundry right until 1997, with an office on Keshab Chandra Sen Street.
Tools used by type casters two centuries ago; Bengali types, and palm leaf manuscripts.
Mullick quickly sweeps the punches, moulds and types back into his plastic bag. “A lot of these have been thrown away, sold as scrap, and lost, like the original house that was torn down,” he says. “In the old days, the office and workshops were arranged around a large courtyard. The Bhatpara pundits used to sit in our courtyard writing out the panji or Hindu almanac on palm leaves with all their astrological diagrams. These were translated into metal types and engraved images,” says Mullick, taking out a bunch of palm leaf manuscripts from between a sheaf of old newspapers. “Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar came here to get the joined types made for his Barnaparichay ,” he says proudly.
Pirate attacks
Today, all that remains of the outer house is an inner wall with niches for oil lamps. Mullick opens one of the rooms where he stores old machinery, like a rare type-casting machine from the 1800s. He says around 20 such machines had been ordered by Panchanan to help them cope with mounting orders, but the ship carrying them was attacked by pirates and the machines were lost. Manohar sent for a fresh order and 12 machines arrived in 1809.
We photograph four of them in their rusty glory. “There would have once been a fire here to melt the lead and there were chimneys,” explains Mullick. But when we want to see more things, he clams up. He is extremely secretive about his possessions, and shows only a “sample” of his treasures, enough “to make people understand”. He refuses to share them with other experts or give them to museums for safekeeping and display. “Earlier, I was a fool, I showed everything to everyone. They stole my manuscripts, types... Nobody really cares. They all want to make money.” Then, a moment later he adds, “If I give these away, what will I be left with?” This worry has prevented him from accepting offers by the Ramakrishna Mission to create a special gallery on Panchanan Karmakar. Some scholars from a Japanese university were likewise turned away.
Mullick doesn’t allow us to photograph the hand mould. He refuses to show “the only extant photograph of Panchanan and Gadadhar Karmakar, which no one has ever seen.”
Perhaps someday Mullick will be able to put together a museum of the rare objects he possesses. It seems a pity that nobody has been able to assuage his fears and help him do something to restore and conserve this little bit of fascinating history.
The Kolkata-based writer is passionate about the arts, past and present.
