**Learning Objectives**<\/p>\n
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
\n– Understand the role of the CMS Press as both a religious and secular publishing enterprise
\n– Analyse the economic dimensions of the press, including employment and skill development
\n– Trace the distribution networks that carried printed materials across Travancore
\n– Evaluate the press’s role in technology transfer and the growth of an indigenous printing industry
\n– Assess the legacy of the CMS Press for Malayalam publishing and Kerala society<\/p>\n
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### 11.1 The Press as an Economic Enterprise<\/p>\n
The CMS Press at Kottayam was, from its founding, a religious institution. Its primary purpose was to produce Bibles, tracts, and educational materials in service of the mission’s evangelistic goals. But a printing press, whatever its spiritual aims, is also a material enterprise. It consumes resources\u2014paper, ink, type metal, labour\u2014and it produces goods that have economic value. Bailey, with his practical Yorkshire background, understood this better than most missionaries. He managed the press not only as a ministry but as a business that needed to sustain itself.<\/p>\n
The economic dimension of the press was essential to its survival. The CMS provided some funding, but the mission’s resources were stretched across many fields. If the press was to grow and thrive, it needed to generate income. Bailey pursued this goal through several strategies: selling printed materials to those who could afford them, taking on commercial printing jobs, and producing publications for the Travancore government and other clients.<\/p>\n
The pricing of printed materials reflected a careful balance between accessibility and sustainability. Bibles and educational texts were priced as low as possible, sometimes below cost, to ensure wide distribution. Other publications\u2014those aimed at wealthier readers or produced for government clients\u2014were priced to generate a surplus that could subsidise the mission’s core publications. This cross-subsidisation model, familiar in modern publishing, was a practical response to the challenge of making essential texts available to poor readers while keeping the press financially viable.<\/p>\n
The press also generated economic benefits for the local community. It employed compositors, pressmen, binders, and other workers, providing stable employment with wages that supported families. It purchased supplies\u2014paper, ink ingredients, binding materials\u2014from local and regional markets. It created demand for related services, such as transport and retail. The economic multiplier effects of the press, while impossible to quantify precisely, were real and contributed to the development of Kottayam as a commercial centre.<\/p>\n
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### 11.2 Training and Employment Generation<\/p>\n
The CMS Press was, among other things, a training institution. The young men who entered Bailey’s workshop as apprentices learned skills that would serve them throughout their working lives. They learned to compose type, to operate the press, to mix ink, to prepare paper, to bind books. These were transferable skills, valuable in any printing establishment. The press created Kerala’s first generation of skilled printing workers, and these workers would go on to staff the presses that multiplied across the region in the later 19th century.<\/p>\n
The training was practical and hands-on. Apprentices learned by doing, under Bailey’s supervision and that of more experienced workers. The standard of work expected was high\u2014Bailey was a master printer who took pride in his craft and expected others to do the same. Workers who trained at the CMS Press acquired not only technical skills but also a professional ethos: attention to detail, commitment to quality, pride in work well done.<\/p>\n
Employment at the press offered economic security and social mobility. In a society where occupation was largely determined by birth, the printing trade offered an alternative path. A young man from a modest background could, through apprenticeship and diligent work, become a skilled artisan with a steady income and respected status. The press, like the mission schools, was an engine of social change, creating opportunities that the traditional caste-based economy did not provide.<\/p>\n
The workers at the press were not merely employees; they were participants in a shared enterprise. Bailey’s correspondence reveals genuine affection and respect for his workers, and the long tenure of many press employees suggests that the working environment was reasonably congenial. Some workers spent their entire careers at the CMS Press, progressing from apprentice to journeyman to master, training subsequent generations in their turn. The press became a community of practice, a place where skills and values were transmitted across generations.<\/p>\n
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### 11.3 Secular Publications: Government Orders, Notices, and Literature<\/p>\n
While religious publishing was the press’s primary mission, Bailey recognised the importance of secular work both for financial sustainability and for the press’s integration into the wider society. The CMS Press took on a variety of non-religious printing jobs, establishing itself as a general printer serving the needs of the Travancore community.<\/p>\n
Government printing was a significant source of revenue. The Travancore administration needed proclamations, notices, forms, and reports printed. Before the establishment of the CMS Press, such materials had to be handwritten or printed outside Travancore. Bailey’s press offered a local, reliable, and high-quality alternative. The relationship between the press and the government was mutually beneficial: the government got its printing done efficiently; the press gained income and official goodwill.<\/p>\n
Commercial printing jobs also came to the press. Merchants needed invoices and receipts. Landholders needed notices and records. Organisations needed announcements and programmes. Each of these jobs, however modest, contributed to the press’s economic base and to its integration into the fabric of Travancore society. The press was not an alien institution, serving only the missionaries; it was a local resource, meeting local needs.<\/p>\n
Bailey also printed secular literature that contributed to the development of Malayalam literary culture. Works of poetry, grammar, and traditional learning that had previously circulated only in manuscript were printed and made available to a wider readership. This aspect of the press’s work is sometimes overlooked in accounts that focus on its religious output, but it was significant for the preservation and dissemination of Malayalam literary heritage.<\/p>\n
The press’s secular publications demonstrated that printing was not merely a missionary tool but a general-purpose technology with applications across all domains of life. By demonstrating these applications, Bailey helped to normalise printing in Kerala, paving the way for the growth of a commercial printing industry that would serve diverse markets and purposes.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
### 11.4 The Press Network: Distribution Across Travancore<\/p>\n
Producing books is one thing; getting them into the hands of readers is another. The CMS Press developed distribution networks that carried its publications across Travancore and beyond, ensuring that printed materials reached their intended audiences.<\/p>\n
The mission’s network of schools and churches provided a ready-made distribution infrastructure. Books could be sent to village schools, where they served as textbooks. Bibles and tracts could be distributed through congregations and evangelistic outposts. Missionaries and catechists, travelling through the countryside, carried printed materials with them, selling or giving them away as circumstances permitted.<\/p>\n
The press also developed relationships with booksellers and merchants who sold printed materials alongside other goods. As literacy spread and demand for printed matter grew, a commercial book trade emerged in Travancore. The CMS Press was at the centre of this emerging market, supplying books to retailers who reached customers the mission could not directly access.<\/p>\n
The distribution of printed materials was not merely a logistical operation; it was an extension of the mission’s evangelistic strategy. Every book, tract, or periodical that left the press carried a message\u2014sometimes explicitly religious, sometimes implicitly so. The printed word could travel where missionaries could not go, reaching readers in remote villages, in upper-caste homes that were closed to evangelists, and in private moments of reading where the reader was alone with the text. This capacity of print to cross boundaries and enter private spaces was one of its greatest advantages as a medium of mission.<\/p>\n
The geographical reach of CMS Press publications extended beyond Travancore proper. Books printed at Kottayam circulated among the Malayalam-speaking populations of Cochin and Malabar, and even reached the Malayali diaspora in other parts of India and overseas. The press’s output contributed to the formation of a Malayalam reading public that transcended political boundaries, creating connections of language and literacy that linked Malayalis across the region.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
### 11.5 Technology Transfer and Indigenous Adoption<\/p>\n
One of the most significant long-term impacts of the CMS Press was its role in transferring printing technology to Indian hands. Bailey did not seek to maintain a European monopoly on printing; on the contrary, he actively trained Indian workers and encouraged the development of indigenous printing enterprises.<\/p>\n
The workers trained at the CMS Press carried their skills into the wider economy. Some left the press to establish their own printing shops, becoming entrepreneurs who served markets the mission did not reach. Others were hired by Syrian Christian churches, government offices, or commercial firms that were establishing their own printing operations. The diffusion of printing skills from the CMS Press into the broader society was a classic case of technology transfer through training and employment.<\/p>\n
By the middle of the 19th century, printing was no longer a foreign technology in Travancore. Indian-owned presses were operating alongside the CMS Press, producing newspapers, books, and commercial printing. The industry that Bailey had pioneered was becoming indigenised, taking on a life of its own beyond missionary control.<\/p>\n
This process of indigenisation was exactly what Bailey and the CMS had hoped for. The mission’s goal was not to create permanent dependency but to build indigenous capacity that would continue after the missionaries were gone. The printing industry that grew from the seeds planted at Kottayam was a realisation of this vision\u2014an Indian industry, staffed by Indian workers, serving Indian markets, but owing its origins to the press that Bailey had established.<\/p>\n
The technology transfer extended beyond printing itself. The skills associated with printing\u2014literacy, precision, mechanical aptitude, business management\u2014had applications in other domains. Workers who had been trained in the disciplined environment of the press carried habits of punctuality, attention to detail, and systematic work into whatever they subsequently did. The press was, in this sense, a school of modernity, preparing its workers for participation in an increasingly complex and interconnected economy.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
### 11.6 Legacy: The Benjamin Bailey Foundation for Printing in Kerala<\/p>\n
The CMS Press continued to operate long after Bailey’s departure from Travancore in 1850. It remained an important printing establishment throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, adapting to changing technologies and markets. But its greatest legacy was not the institution itself but the industry it spawned.<\/p>\n
Kottayam, the town where Bailey established his press, became and remains a major centre of Malayalam publishing. The concentration of printing and publishing firms in Kottayam\u2014producing newspapers, magazines, books, and commercial printing\u2014can be traced directly to the presence of the CMS Press. The skills, the supply chains, the distribution networks, and the culture of literacy that developed around the press created an environment in which publishing could flourish.<\/p>\n
The connection between Bailey’s printing work and Kerala’s subsequent achievements in literacy and education is profound. The press produced the textbooks that taught generations of Keralites to read. It produced the periodicals that gave them material to read once they had learned. It created the economic incentives for literacy by providing employment to those who could read and write. And it demonstrated, by its very existence, the power of print to transform a society.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Bailey is remembered in Kerala as the father of Malayalam printing. His name is associated with the CMS Press, with the typeface he created, and with the first books printed in the language. But his true legacy is larger than any single publication or technology. By bringing printing to Malayalam, he helped to set in motion the process by which Kerala became one of the most literate and print-engaged societies in the developing world. It was an achievement that no one, least of all the young printer from Yorkshire, could have foreseen when the first press was uncrated at Kottayam in 1821.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
### The Press as a Site of Cultural Production<\/p>\n
The CMS Press was more than a factory for books. It was a site of cultural production, a place where texts were transformed into printed objects and where the physical form of Malayalam literature was shaped. The choices made at the press\u2014about typefaces and page design, about bindings and formats, about print runs and distribution\u2014influenced how Malayalis encountered the written word.<\/p>\n
Bailey’s design sensibility, shaped by his English printing experience, left its mark on the visual culture of Malayalam print. The proportions of the type, the spacing of the lines, the layout of the title pages\u2014these design choices created a visual language for printed Malayalam that would influence subsequent generations of printers. The books that emerged from the CMS Press were recognisably products of a particular tradition of craft printing, combining European technical standards with Malayalam linguistic content.<\/p>\n
The press also shaped the rhythms of literary production. The annual cycle of the press\u2014busy seasons when certain publications had to be ready, quiet seasons for maintenance and preparation\u2014structured the work of translators, editors, and writers. The requirements of print\u2014for standardised spelling, consistent terminology, clear organisation\u2014influenced the development of Malayalam prose, pushing it toward greater regularity and clarity. In these and many other ways, the press was not merely reproducing texts but actively shaping the language and its literature.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
**Key Takeaways**<\/p>\n
– The CMS Press operated as both a religious ministry and an economic enterprise, balancing subsidised publications with revenue-generating commercial work.
\n– The press served as a training institution, creating Kerala’s first generation of skilled printing workers and providing paths to economic mobility.
\n– Secular printing jobs, including government and commercial work, integrated the press into Travancore society and contributed to its financial sustainability.
\n– Distribution networks built on mission schools, churches, and commercial booksellers carried printed materials across Travancore and beyond.
\n– The technology transfer from the CMS Press to Indian workers and entrepreneurs seeded a printing industry that continues to thrive in Kerala.
\n– The press’s legacy extends beyond printing to Kerala’s broader achievements in literacy, education, and publishing.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
**Discussion Questions**<\/p>\n
1. How did Bailey balance the press’s religious mission with its economic needs? What tensions might have arisen from this dual identity?
\n2. What role did the CMS Press play in creating a skilled workforce and an indigenous printing industry?
\n3. Consider the relationship between print and literacy. How did the availability of printed materials create incentives for learning to read?
\n4. Why has Kottayam remained a centre of Malayalam publishing? What factors established by the CMS Press contributed to this lasting concentration?<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
**Primary Source: Bailey on the Work of the Press**<\/p>\n
*”The press continues to be employed in the production of the Scriptures and other works for the benefit of the people. We have also undertaken some printing for the government, which helps to support the establishment. The workmen are becoming more skillful, and the quality of the printing improves from year to year. I trust that this institution, begun in weakness, may prove a lasting blessing to Travancore.”*<\/p>\n
*(CMS Archives, C I1\/M11, Bailey to Secretary, 5 September 1839. Spelling and punctuation modernised.)*<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
**Further Reading**<\/p>\n
Blackburn, Stuart. (2003). *Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India*. Permanent Black. (For the broader context of print culture and its social implications.)<\/p>\n
Kesavan, B. S. (1985). *History of Printing and Publishing in India, Vol. 1: South Indian Origins of Printing*. National Book Trust. (Contains detailed information on early Malayalam printing.)<\/p>\n
Priolkar, A. K. (1958). *The Printing Press in India*. Marathi Samshodhana Mandala. (For the all-India context of printing history.)<\/p>\n
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