Doctoral Fellow in Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

April–September 2025

Between Literate and Literary: Transnational Print Networks and Practices of Reading Aloud

Reading as a literary phenomenon is often studied by prioritising the textual experience. While this textuality is usually a performative act involving looking at the printed text, touching and holding the book, reading it aloud or alone, listening or immersed in the process – the haptic and the temporal resonances between the human and non-human print agent remain underexplored. This project attempts to look closely at the earlier forms of transition from the spoken, written and printed word to understand how the printed book was introduced and reading was performed in newly literate societies of colonially-ruled expanses of Southern India. The project explores the coming of print media in missionary-mediated locales through reading aloud practices, the formation of early readers and the setting up and authorisation of reading spaces in the Malayalam-speaking region of Kerala in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Conversing with other missionary print ventures from the subcontinent and Western worlds through visual and literary archives, the project studies how people read differently from each other, to envision a model of social history of reading aloud prior to a novel-driven, silent-reading public coming into formation. 

The research intends to understand how a 'reading people' and 'reading region' are conceptualised in a society already stratified in caste inequalities, restricted access to public spaces and caste pollution denying the untouchable the right to listen, learn or even touch the text. The project historicises the reading act to ask how the Protestant missionary print ethic materialised its purposes in a largely illiterate or newly literate society. How does it unsettle our current standards of measuring literacy? And how did reading shift from its religious origins to secular print networks and sanitised reading formats?

Sulthana Nasrin is a PhD Candidate and UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She holds an MA in English Literature from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and a BA from St. Stephens' College, University of Delhi. Her research deals with the cultures of reading, practices of print and the coming of the book in Malayalam variants from nineteenth and twentieth-century Kerala. She is interested in questions of literacy, translation and working with oral-aural sensations in print archives of the southern country. She is the recipient of Inlaks Research and Travel Grant 2023.