Final Project Blog

Works D'Cuhna, Noel. “[Goanet-News] Goanet Reader: Printing in Goa: Back to the Future .” The Mail Archive , 17 Mar. 2009, https://www.mail-archive.com/goanet-news@lists.goanet.org/msg01331.html. Fontes da Costa, Palmira. “Geographical Expansion and the Reconfiguration of Medical Authority: Garcia De Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563).” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A , vol. 43, no. 1, Mar. 2012, pp. 74–81., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2011.09.015 . Kakar, Bhavna. “Print Making: Story and History.” Art Concerns , 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20101015225613/http://www.artconcerns.net/2007jan1/html/essay_Printmaking1.htm. Naik, Pratap. “Goanet  .” Goanet , 4 Sept. 2006, https://www.mail-archive.com/goanet@lists.goanet.org/.  Suarez, Michael Felix, and H. R. Woudhuysen. “The Indian Subcontinent, the Technologies of Print.” The Book: A Global History , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.  Verghese, Babu K. “From Palm Tre...

Suarez, Michael Felix, and H. R. Woudhuysen. “The Indian Subcontinent, the Technologies of Print.” The Book: A Global History , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.  Michael F. Suarez is a professor at the University of Virginia. He is 62 years old and graduated from Bucknell University and pursued further education at the University of Oxford according to his LinkedIn . H.R. Woudhuysen has been the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford since 2012. Before, he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London. The book is a highly credible source because it is peer-reviewed, academically published, and carried by our library. This has been the most useful source and has lots of information on the printing press's origin and the printing press in Goa. It also discusses the culture surrounding Goa at the time the printing press was introduced. Fontes da Costa, Palmira. “Geographical Expansion and the Reconfiguration of Medical Authority: Garcia De Ort...

The examples above show how the Goa printing press was able to impact a wide range of cultures and fields in the region. This is especially thanks to the Goa press printing in various forms of Indian Type. However, a time would eventually come when it was ordered for native groups of the region to give up their language in favor of Portuguese. The order was made in 1684, and when it was carried out, the initial multilingual purpose the Goa printing press had was gone. Consequently, converting native people through their original languages was no longer needed, and “printing came to a standstill in Goa…another century and a half was to pass before it would reappear, in 1821” (Suarez, Woudhuysen 556). Another reason for the eradication of the press in Goa was due to the failure to convert a meaningful number of native people through prints of their own dialect. The press consequently lost its main purpose and was no longer used (Naik). By then, printing presses had begun to pop up in m...

Many of the early prints from Goa were created almost entirely for the purpose of converting native Indian groups like the coastal inhabiting Tamil people to Catholicism (Suarez, Woudhuysen 556). Thirteen books were printed between 1556 and 1588 (Kakar). The first-ever book published by the Goa printing press was titled Conclusões e outras coisas published in 1556. Like many of the first books printed by the Goa press, no copy remains today (Suarez, Woudhuysen 556). It was the first book printed in India. To most effectively convert native regions, it was initially thought that prints had to be done in Indian languages:  “The first Indian language rendered in the medium of print was Tamil. This might appear odd, given that the lingua franca in and around Goa was Konkani. But the Jesuits, led by Francis Xavier, who died in Goa in 1552, had established an extensive network of Jesuit missions along the Coromandel coast and had baptized more than 10,000 Tamil-speaking Parava fishe...

Portuguese settlers were responsible for the expansion and the creation of the city’s printing press, so it seemed unlikely that the initial technology from China ever made its way down to Goa. Yet, the creation of paper had reached India before the Portuguese in the sixteenth century through the Turks. Note that the Turks did not present any form of printing, only the invention of paper itself. Still, even paper had a hard time catching on. Stacked piles of leaves forming books called “Writing Palms” was the traditional and more sacred method (Suarez, Woudhuysen 554). The printing press in Goa would add a dimension, but not fully eradicate “writing palms” until centuries after it was first introduced to the region. In 1556, we arrive at the introduction of the Portuguese Jesuits to India. A group of missionaries was sent by King João III to occupy Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) and to bring with them a printing press. Their ship first stopped in Goa, and when they got there, word h...

The first time printing was actually done on paper of any kind was likely by Johan Gutenberg with a hand press dating somewhere around 1450 (Suarez, Woudhuysen 132). The actual printing press mechanics were inspired by Roman screw presses that were used to get the excess liquid out of anything from grapes to paper itself (Suarez, Woudhuysen 134). The technology of the printing press then stayed relatively stagnant, besides minor improvements, up until the nineteenth century. The process of using a printing press is described next:  “Type was made by hand and was set, formed by hand into words, lines, and pages. Presses were operated by hand at a rate that did not–indeed could not comfortably–exceed a certain speed. Paper was made, sheet by sheet, by hand: the maximum width of the mould, and therefore of the sheet it made, was limited by the maker’s natural arm span, typically about 30 [inches]” (Suarez, Woudhuysen 135).   The printing press of Goa falls right into the m...

In China, sometime during the third century, paper was first created out of “mulberry bark, hemp, and rags” (Suarez, Woudhuysen 131). Due to its easy production procedures, paper became more popular and replaced the remaining competition. Its primary purpose back in third-century China was to be used to write documents. The use of paper stayed steady in the east in the following centuries, but it took some time before this innovation reached the west. The first known paper mills in Europe were set up in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a millennium after paper was first created. It is still uncertain as to when the technology from the east made its way over between the third and thirteenth centuries. (Suarez, Woudhuysen 131). 

Goa, India was a new, growing city in the sixteenth century. Understandably, the story of the printing press in Goa is not centered around innovation regarding the press itself. Rather, it is centered around the innovation in ideas the books printed gave to the expanding region. So, knowing that the region of Goa will not offer me the most extensive history of printing presses in general, I thought it would be useful to look back in time and find the origins of the printing press first. From gathering this knowledge, a clearer picture would be painted allowing me to see how a printing press first ended up in Goa.