5 CHAPTER 5: ESTABLISHING THE FIRST MALAYALAM PRINTING PRESS (1821)

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Understand the technological and logistical challenges of establishing a printing press in early 19th century Kerala

• Trace the journey of the press from England to Kottayam

• Explain the significance of the CMS Press as the first Malayalam printing establishment

• Analyse the impact of printing technology on a society previously dependent on palm-leaf manuscripts

5.1 The Vision for a Vernacular Press

When Benjamin Bailey arrived in Travancore in 1816, he carried with him not only the evangelical convictions of a CMS missionary but also the practical knowledge of a trained printer. The convergence of these two identities—evangelist and artisan—would prove to be of historic importance for the Malayalam language and for the society that spoke it.

The vision for a vernacular press in Travancore emerged from the CMS’s broader strategy of translation and distribution. The Society’s leadership, influenced by the example of William Carey at Serampore, believed that the printed word was a uniquely powerful instrument of evangelism. A preacher could address a congregation of dozens or hundreds; a printed book could reach thousands, across distances and generations, without distortion or decay. For a missionary society committed to the spread of biblical Christianity, the printing press was not merely a useful tool but an essential technology.

Bailey understood this vision in his bones. He had spent years in a Yorkshire print shop, learning the craft of transforming manuscript into printed page. He knew the feel of type in a composing stick, the resistance of a hand press’s lever, the smell of ink and the texture of paper. When he spoke of establishing a press in Travancore, he spoke not of abstract aspiration but of concrete, practical steps: procuring a press, casting type, training workers, sourcing materials. This combination of vision and practicality would be essential to the press’s success.

The need for printed materials in Malayalam was urgent. The existing mode of textual reproduction—copying by hand onto palm leaves—was laborious, expensive, and limited in output. A skilled copyist might produce a single manuscript in weeks or months; a printing press could produce hundreds of copies in days. The implications for education, for literature, for religious dissemination, and ultimately for the democratisation of knowledge were profound.

Bailey began advocating for a press almost immediately upon his arrival in Travancore. His letters to the CMS headquarters in London repeatedly urged the dispatch of a printing press, type, paper, ink, and other supplies. He argued that a press would enable the mission to produce scriptures, schoolbooks, and tracts in quantities that manuscript copying could never match. The CMS, convinced by his arguments and by the broader strategic logic, agreed to fund the enterprise.

5.2 Procuring the Printing Press: Journey from England

The press that would become the first Malayalam printing establishment was procured in England and shipped to India in 1820. The journey of this machine—from a London workshop to a mission compound in Kottayam—is a story in itself, revealing the global networks of material and knowledge on which the missionary enterprise depended.

The press was almost certainly a wooden hand press of the type that had been standard in European printing since the time of Gutenberg. Such presses consisted of a heavy wooden frame supporting a flat bed on which the type was placed, a platen that pressed the paper against the inked type, and a screw mechanism operated by a long lever that provided the necessary pressure. They were simple in principle but required considerable skill to operate effectively, demanding precise adjustment of pressure, even application of ink, and careful handling of dampened paper.

Along with the press itself, the shipment included the components necessary for creating Malayalam type. Unlike English, which uses 26 letters, Malayalam required a much larger character set—hundreds of individual sorts to represent the consonants, vowels, conjunct consonants, and other elements of the script. Each of these had to be designed, engraved onto steel punches, struck into copper matrices, and cast into metal type. This was skilled work, requiring the services of professional typefounders.

The CMS engaged the services of a London typefoundry to produce the initial Malayalam types. The process would have involved providing the typefounders with specimens of Malayalam writing, from which they attempted to create punches. The results, as Bailey would discover, were imperfect—the complexities of the Malayalam script were not easily captured by craftsmen who had never seen the language written—but they provided a starting point from which Bailey could work.

The press, type, paper, ink, and associated materials were loaded onto a ship bound for India, packed in crates designed to protect them from the ravages of a long sea voyage. The journey around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean took months. When the crates finally arrived at the port of Alleppey, they had to be transported inland to Kottayam—a journey of some fifty kilometres by canal boat and bullock cart, over roads that were often little more than tracks.

The arrival of the press at Kottayam in 1821 was a momentous occasion. Bailey, who had been waiting and preparing for years, now had the tools he needed to begin the work that would define his legacy. But between the arrival of the equipment and the production of the first printed page lay months of challenging, painstaking labour.

5.3 Establishing the CMS Press, Kottayam

The building that housed the CMS Press was constructed on the mission compound at Kottayam, adjacent to Bailey’s residence. It was a modest structure by modern standards—a single room, perhaps, with windows to admit light for the compositors and space for the press itself. But within these humble walls, a revolution in Malayalam culture would begin.

Setting up the press required Bailey to draw on every aspect of his training and experience. The press itself had to be assembled and adjusted, its mechanism tested and calibrated. The type had to be unpacked, sorted, and arranged in cases that allowed the compositor to find each character quickly. The ink had to be mixed to the right consistency for the tropical climate, where heat and humidity affected how it behaved on paper. The paper had to be prepared, dampened to the correct degree to receive a clean impression without tearing or wrinkling.

All of this was standard printing practice, but Bailey faced an additional challenge: he was working with a script that had never before been printed. The Malayalam types cast in London were, as he quickly discovered, imperfect. Some characters were poorly formed; others were missing entirely. The spacing was awkward, the alignment inconsistent. Bailey would spend years refining and improving the type, eventually designing and casting his own sorts to supplement and replace the initial set.

The physical environment posed its own problems. The heat and humidity of Kerala were unkind to metal type, which corroded if not carefully maintained. Termites threatened the wooden components of the press. Paper, shipped from England at great expense, was vulnerable to damp and insects. Every aspect of the printing operation required constant attention and adaptation.

Yet Bailey persevered. He understood that the press was not merely a convenience but a necessity—that without it, the mission’s educational and evangelical goals could not be achieved at scale. The challenges were real, but they were challenges that a skilled printer, with patience and ingenuity, could overcome.

5.4 Technical Challenges: Malayalam Typeface Design

The creation of a usable Malayalam typeface was perhaps the most significant technical challenge Bailey faced—and one of his most enduring achievements. The Malayalam script, like other Brahmi-derived scripts of South Asia, is structurally quite different from the Latin alphabet. Understanding these differences is essential to appreciating what Bailey accomplished.

The Latin alphabet, like English, uses separate characters for consonants and vowels, arranged sequentially along a line. The Malayalam script, by contrast, is an abugida: each consonant character carries an inherent vowel sound, which can be modified or suppressed by the addition of diacritical marks. Vowels that begin a word or follow another vowel use distinct characters. When consonants combine without an intervening vowel, they form conjunct characters that can be visually quite complex.

The practical implication for printing was that Malayalam required many more individual sorts (pieces of type) than English. A complete English font in the early 19th century might contain 100-150 sorts; a Malayalam font required several hundred, and a truly comprehensive set might run to over a thousand. Each of these had to be designed, engraved, cast, and arranged in a type case that the compositor could navigate efficiently.

The initial types supplied from London were based on specimens of Malayalam writing provided to the typefounders. Without firsthand knowledge of the script, the London craftsmen made errors. Some characters were malformed; the proportions were awkward; the conjuncts were often constructed by placing smaller versions of characters next to or on top of each other, rather than creating true ligatures that reflected the way the script was actually written.

Bailey, working with Malayalam-speaking assistants who understood the script’s aesthetics and conventions, set about correcting these deficiencies. He learned to cut punches himself—a highly skilled craft that involved engraving the mirror image of each character onto the end of a steel rod. The punch was then struck into a copper blank to create a matrix, into which molten type metal was poured to cast individual sorts. This was laborious work, requiring patience, precision, and an artistic eye.

Over the years, Bailey refined the Malayalam typeface through successive iterations. The “Bailey Malayalam” type that emerged from this process was not perfect—later typographers would further improve the design—but it was a remarkable achievement for a self-taught punchcutter working in challenging conditions far from the centres of the printing trade. It made Malayalam printing possible, and it established standards that influenced subsequent typeface design for the language.

5.5 Training Local Compositors and Press Workers

A printing press cannot operate without skilled workers, and Bailey could not do everything himself. From the earliest days of the CMS Press, he began training local men—primarily from the Syrian Christian community—in the crafts of composing, inking, and presswork.

The role of the compositor was particularly demanding. The compositor had to be literate in Malayalam, able to read the handwritten copy and translate it into the correct sequence of type. He had to know the layout of the type cases intimately, locating each character among hundreds of sorts without hesitation. He had to understand the conventions of spacing, justification, and page makeup. And he had to work with speed and accuracy, for the economics of printing depended on productivity.

Bailey trained his first compositors patiently, drawing on his own apprenticeship experience in Yorkshire. He showed them how to hold the composing stick, how to select and place type, how to tie up a completed forme with page cord, how to proofread and correct. These men, whose names are mostly lost to history, became the first generation of Malayalam printers—the founders of a trade that would grow into a major industry in Kerala.

The pressmen, who operated the press itself, required a different set of skills. They had to ink the type evenly, position the paper precisely, and pull the lever with consistent pressure. Too little pressure, and the impression would be faint; too much, and the type might be damaged. The rhythm of presswork—ink, position, pull, release, remove—became second nature with practice, but mastering it required patience and attention.

The training of local workers was not merely a practical necessity; it was also consistent with the CMS philosophy of building indigenous capacity. Bailey and his colleagues believed that the mission’s long-term success depended on developing local leadership and local skills. The printing office became a training ground where young men learned a trade that offered economic opportunity and social mobility. In this sense, the press was not only producing books; it was producing a new class of skilled workers who would carry the printing revolution forward long after the missionaries were gone.

5.6 The Significance of Being First: Printing vs. Palm Leaf Manuscripts

To appreciate the revolutionary impact of the CMS Press, we must understand the system of textual production that it displaced. Before Bailey’s press began operation, the reproduction of texts in Kerala depended almost entirely on handwritten palm-leaf manuscripts.

Palm-leaf manuscripts were produced by inscribing text onto dried and treated palm leaves using a metal stylus. The leaves were then strung together on cords, creating a book that could be read sequentially. The process was labour-intensive. A skilled copyist might produce a few leaves per day, and a substantial text could take months to complete. Errors were common, and each copy introduced new variants. The cost of manuscripts was high, limiting access to wealthy individuals and institutions.

The limitations of this system had profound social implications. Knowledge, embodied in manuscripts, was scarce and expensive. Literacy, while valued in certain communities, had limited practical utility for most people, since there were few books to read. Religious texts, legal documents, and literary works circulated in narrow circles of elites. The idea that ordinary people might own and read books was, in the early 19th century, almost unimaginable.

Bailey’s press changed this calculus fundamentally. A single printing of a book could produce hundreds of copies at a fraction of the cost per copy of manuscript reproduction. Texts that had been rare became common. Books that had been accessible only to elites became available to anyone who could read. The economics of knowledge shifted from scarcity toward abundance.

The first book printed at the CMS Press was Cherupaitangalku Upakarardhamulla Pusthakam (A Book for the Benefit of Children), which appeared in 1824. It was a small volume—a children’s reader, designed for use in the mission schools—but it marked the beginning of a new era. For the first time, a book had been printed in Malayalam, on a press located in Kerala, by workers trained in Kerala. The symbolic importance of this event was immense, even if its full implications would take decades to unfold.

The shift from manuscript to print did not happen overnight. Palm-leaf manuscripts continued to be produced alongside printed books for many decades. But the trajectory was clear. Print was faster, cheaper, and more accurate than manuscript copying. It enabled standardisation of texts and dissemination on a scale previously impossible. It created the conditions for mass literacy, for the development of a reading public, and for the emergence of new forms of literature and discourse.

In establishing the first Malayalam printing press, Benjamin Bailey set in motion a process that would eventually transform Kerala into one of the most literate and print-saturated regions of India. It was an achievement that grew directly from his unique combination of skills: the printer’s craft, learned in a Yorkshire workshop, applied to the linguistic and cultural context of Kerala. And it was only the beginning.

The First Printed Page: A Moment of Transformation

We can only imagine the scene when the first satisfactory proof was pulled from the press. Bailey, ink-stained and tired, examining the impression under the tropical light. His assistants, gathered around, watching the foreigner who had brought this strange machine to their town. The fresh ink, sharp against the paper—Malayalam characters that had previously existed only in handwriting or palm-leaf incision, now crisp and uniform in printed form.

What did they feel, those witnesses to this moment? Pride, perhaps, in having mastered a difficult new craft. Wonder, at the machine’s ability to reproduce text with such speed and consistency. And maybe, for the more far-sighted among them, a dawning awareness that something fundamental had shifted—that the world of handwritten manuscripts was giving way to something new, something whose implications stretched far beyond the mission compound at Kottayam.

Bailey himself, characteristically, was probably already thinking about the next task: the corrections to be made, the improvements to the type, the long list of books waiting to be printed. But even his practical mind must have paused, however briefly, to register the significance of what had been achieved. The first Malayalam printing press was no longer a vision or a hope. It was a reality, and it had begun its work.

Key Takeaways

• The CMS Press at Kottayam, established in 1821, was the first printing press in Kerala and the first to print books in the Malayalam language.

• The press was procured in England and shipped to India, arriving after a journey of thousands of miles by sea and overland transport.

• Bailey faced significant technical challenges, particularly the design and casting of Malayalam type, which required hundreds of individual sorts for a complete font.

• Local workers, primarily from the Syrian Christian community, were trained as compositors and pressmen, forming the first generation of Malayalam printers.

• The shift from palm-leaf manuscripts to printed books revolutionised the economics of knowledge, making texts cheaper, more abundant, and more widely accessible.

• The first book printed, a children’s reader published in 1824, marked the beginning of Malayalam print culture.

Discussion Questions

1. Why was printing technology particularly revolutionary in a society where texts were previously reproduced through palm-leaf manuscripts?

2. What specific skills did Bailey bring from his Yorkshire apprenticeship that enabled him to establish the CMS Press?

3. Consider the challenge of designing the first Malayalam typeface. Why was this more complex than printing in European languages?

4. What was the significance of training local workers rather than relying entirely on European printers?

5. How might the availability of printed books have changed the social dynamics of knowledge and literacy in Kerala?

Primary Source: Bailey on the Arrival of the Press

“The press arrived at last, after many delays, and I have spent the past weeks in setting it up and preparing the types. The work is more difficult than I anticipated, for the types sent from England are imperfect and must be corrected. Yet I am greatly encouraged, for I see in this press the means by which the Word of God may be spread among this people in their own tongue. Pray that the Lord would bless this work and make it fruitful.”

(CMS Archives, C I1/M4, Bailey to Secretary, 15 August 1821. Spelling and punctuation modernised.)

Further Reading

Blackburn, Stuart. (2003). Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India. Permanent Black. (For the broader context of print culture in South India.)

Kesavan, B. S. (1985). History of Printing and Publishing in India, Vol. 1: South Indian Origins of Printing. National Book Trust. (Contains detailed discussion of early Malayalam printing.)

Priolkar, A. K. (1958). The Printing Press in India. Marathi Samshodhana Mandala. (For the all-India context of early printing.)