Indo - German Cultural Life

Did you know that German Technology Shaped Ritual Dynamics in India ?

The technique of lithographic printing was one of the greatest German inventions. This new technology did not only revolutionise mass production of visual imagery in Germany and Europe as a whole, but it also had a major impact on the religion and the independence movement in India during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Lithography allowed cheap and fast reproduction of multi chrome -imagery on a large scale, as compared to the earlier tedious process of copying by hand or by woodcuts. Alois Senefelder, an innovative playwright from Bavaria 1771 - 1834, invented this technology using a special stone plate (litho) and refined this printing method, named lithography. By 1797, it had spread like wildfire all over the world. And, soon, India became the greatest consumer of its products, so much so that the most popular medium quality of the limestone schist, the only stone that can be used in the process which was quarried in Solnhofen in Bavariam was dubbed 'India'.

The mass produced chromolithographs, oleographs and picture postcards that were printed in Germany for the Indian market during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had played a major role in shaping the religious, social and political developments in India. Before the arrival of German prints, the majority of Indians had no experience of possessing visual images of their deities. Indian miniature paintings belonged to royal families or temples, and were accessible only to a few. Printed religious and mythological pictures brought about a democracy of the visual image and opened up Hinduism and other belief systemsto a much larger group of their adherents across class and caste divisions, which changed the nature and manner of worship. The lure of these brightly coloured German lithographs and oleographs depicting Indian subjects was so great that some entreprising Indians imported German printing machines and technicians to India and began to produce these prints, then often labelled 'Printed as Germany'.

This period also coincided with India's nationalist and independence movements. No other single factor as the printed images of gods and goddesses, as well as of nationalist leaders and martyrs played a role in shaping the independence movement and providing a visual homogeneity to the 'idea of India'. A majority of this imagery had much to do with the German printing industry. Black and white photographic postcards were printed by thousands in Saxony for circulation in India. India took over this lithographic technology like fish to water, so that already in early nineteenth century , a large number of such printing presses were operational in India, the most famous being the ones set up by the renowned Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma ( 1848 - 1906) in Bombay, Malavli and Karla Lonavla areas. He had employed entreprising German technicians, Fritz Schleicher and P. Gerhardt, to run his lithographic presses. Schleicher later on acquired the ownership of the Ravi Varma presses.