Given the recent queries by McComas Taylor and Harry Spier on the list regarding the study of book history in South Asia and codicological/bibliographical practices, I thought my recently published monograph may be of interest to some members of the list:

If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi
Tyler W. Williams
Columbia University Press
October 2024
336 pages

The 'Hindi' of the title refers, in fact, to the range of literary registers now known as bhāṣā, Brajbhasha, Hindustani, and so forth, and the primary concern of the monograph is to outline a history and methodology for the study of the vernacular book in northern India circa 1300 CE till the advent of print technology. This necessarily includes references to the manuscript cultures from which vernacular book culture drew, namely those of Sanskrit, Apabhramsha, Persian, and Arabic. 

I am happy to report that a paperback edition is already available, and that an additional 20% of the cover price may be saved by using the code "CUP20SM" at checkout.

Additional description and details may be found below.

Best regards,

Tyler W. Williams

University of Chicago

How do writing and literacy reshape the ways a language and its literature are imagined? If All the World Were Paper explores this question in the context of Hindi, the most widely spoken language in Southern Asia and the fourth most widely spoken language in the world today. Emerging onto the literary scene of India in the mid-fourteenth century, the vernacular of Hindi quickly acquired a place alongside “classical” languages like Sanskrit and Persian as a medium of literature and scholarship. The material and social processes through which it came to be written down and the particular form that it took—as illustrated storybooks, loose-leaf textbooks, personal notebooks, and holy scriptures—played a critical role in establishing Hindi as a language capable of transmitting poetry, erudition, and even revelation.

If All the World Were Paper combines close readings of literary and scholastic works with an examination of hundreds of handwritten books from precolonial India to tell the story of Hindi literature’s development and reveal the relationships among ideologies of writing, material practices, and literary genres. Tyler W. Williams forcefully argues for a new approach to the literary archive, demonstrating how the ways books were inscribed, organized, and used can tell us as much about their meaning and significance as the texts within them. This book sets out a novel program for engaging with the archive of Hindi and of South Asian languages more broadly at a moment when much of that archive faces existential threats.

ISBN: 9780231211130
FORMAT: Paperback
LIST PRICE: $35.00 / £30.00

ISBN: 9780231211123
FORMAT: Hardcover
LIST PRICE: $140.00 / £117.00

ISBN: 9780231558754
FORMAT: E-book
LIST PRICE: $34.99 / £30.00