Persianate Print Culture in Late Colonial Modernity: Habl-Ol Matin, and the Making of a Persianate Information Sphere

Pouya Nekouei, University of Texas, Austin

In recent decades, historians of modernity in the Global South have increasingly paid attention to the cultural and material contexts of information creation and dissemination. This paper briefly examines a major Persian newspaper, Habl-ol Matin, published from Kolkata at the beginning of the twentieth century. Focusing on the print culture and news creation, this paper argues for a non-administrative historical approach to understanding the notion of empire and knowledge creation, as well as the “information” creation. As a result, the paper invokes the idea of an “empire of information in low spaces” to explain how the print media and technologies such as the Telegraph, hand in hand, contributed to a proliferating production of information in the Persian language sphere that reflected global politics for a wide variety of readers and audiences across colonial South Asia and Southern port cities in Iran. In this vein, this paper contributes to an understanding of empire as comprising the cultural and material aspects: the print culture of news and its global circulation depended on infrastructures, technologies, writers, and readers, often not confined by the administrative politics of empire. Finally, through an engagement with information and print history, this paper attempts to engage with the histories of capitalism and colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century between South Asia and southern port cities of Iran.

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 Presented in Session 82. Global Modernities and Alternative Epistemologies