Mass-Producing The Cosmos by Nur Sobers-Khan

Dr Nur Sobers-Khan is currently Lead Curator for South Asia at the British Library and is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Two Centuries of Indian Print research and digitisation project (2016-2021) that aims to create a digitised corpus the BL’s early printed South Asian book collections.

About the talk: 

While questions of circulation, readership, and translation have been central to the history of print in South Asia, the question of illustration in lithographs and printed works and the relationship of image to text has yet to be examined in great depth. The talk will explore the genealogy of Tilsimat-i Aja’ib texts, a genre with elements of cosmology and divination, in Urdu lithographs of the 19th and early 20th century in the British Library’s collections, examining the illustrative programmes in these texts and positing a continuity with the Aja’ib al-Makhluqat manuscript tradition. In addition to establishing the basis for an empirical study of this genre of Urdu lithographs, we will examine the social use of these texts beyond reading, such as practices of bibliomancy and divination, to create new audiences and new spheres of meaning as mass-produced cosmological images were able to circulate more widely, creating a new popular visual culture. Although the cosmological imagery enjoyed a certain continuity from manuscript to lithography production, it was accompanied by a semiotic shift that imbued new meaning to the mass-produced and widely circulated lithographs adapted in part from the ʻAjāʼib al-makhlūqāt tradition. This shift in reading practices, audiences, and semiotic improvisation complicates the question of how printing technologies contributing to bringing about a colonial modernity resulting in a rupture for Islamic knowledge production; if anything, lithograph production gave new life to forms of premodern knowledge that we would describe as ‘enchanted.’ This adaption of premodern cosmological visual topoi into popular lithographs challenges the notion of a disenchantment of modernity brought about by the spread of literacy and print and the ascendency of Islamic reformism in the print culture of 19th-century South Asia.