Battala

Battala, 'under the banyan tree', is the old printing quarter of north Kolkata around Shovabazar and Chitpur, named after a large banyan where the trade began. It was not one house but dozens of small presses. From the 1820s they turned out cheap Bengali books for ordinary readers: puthi and panchali, almanacs, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, primers, farces, crime stories and Muslim-Bengali romances, sold for an anna or two.

Pictures cut in wood and metal by local engravers were part of the appeal. The Reverend James Long counted 46 Indian-owned presses here in 1857–58 and put almanac sales at about 250,000 copies a year. Educated readers sneered at 'Battala literature', and from the 1850s more serious publishing moved elsewhere, but Battala stayed busy to the end of the century.

A few old firms, such as the Diamond Library and the Mahesh Library, still publish from Chitpur. Banglabazar in Dhaka has been called the Battala of eastern Bengal.

Ask the desk for Battala prints, and we will look for reprints and old copies.