Question

NCERT solution of print culture of class10

Answer 1

Q.1. Give reasons for the following :

(a) Woodblock print only came to Europe after 1295. [CBSE 2013]

(b) Martin Luther was in favour of print, and spoke out in praise of it.

(c) The Roman Catholic Church began keeping an Index of Prohibited books from the mid-sixteenth century.

(d) Gandhi said the fight for ‘Swaraj is a fight for the liberty of speech, liberty of the press and freedom of association.

Ans. (a) Refer Q.No. 5 HOTS.

(b) Because it was the printing press which gave him a chance to criticise many of the practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church.

(c) Print and popular literature encouraged many distinctive interpretations of religious faiths and ideas. In the 16th century, Manocchio, a miller in Italy began to read books available readily in his locality. He gave a new interpretation of the Bible, and formulated a view of God, and creation that enraged the Roman Catholic Church.

As a result, Manocchio was hauled up twice, and ultimately executed when the Roman Church began its inquisition, and to repress the therapeutical ideas. After this several control measures were imposed on publishers and booksellers. In 1558, the Roman Church decided to maintain an Index of prohibited books.

(d) Mahatma Gandhi uttered these words in 1922 during the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-1922). Because according to him without the liberty of speech, the liberty of the press and freedom of association, no nation can even survive. If the country was to get free from foreign domination, then these liberties were quite important. If there is no liberty of speech, liberty of press and freedom of association, then there is no nationalism. Nationalism requires these three prerequisites for its survival. Mahatma Gandhi fully knew the fact. That is why, he said so, particularly about these three freedoms. How could one ever think of nationalism in the absence of these three essential conditions ?

 

Q.2. Write short notes to show that you know about:

(a) The Gutenberg Press.

(b) The Erasmus’s idea of the printed book.

(c) The Vernacular Press Act. [CBSE Sept. 2011, 2012]  

Ans. (a) Refer Q.No. 4, Long Answer Type Questions.

(b) Erasmus’s idea of the printed book : Erasmus, a Latin scholar and a Catholic reformer, who criticised the excesses of Catholicism, but kept his distance from, Luther, expressed a deep anxiety about printing. He wrote in Adages (1508) :

‘To what corner of the world do they not fly, these swarms of new books ? It may be that one here and there contributes something worth knowing, but the very multitude of them is hurtful to scholarship, because it creates a glut and even in good things, satiety is most harmful… [printers] fill the world with books, not just trifling things (such as I write, perhaps), but stupid, ignorant, slanderous, scandalous, raving, irreligious and seditious books, and the number of them is such that even the valuable publications lose their value.’

(c) The Vernacular Press Act : The revolt of 1857 forced the government to curb the freedom of the press. After the revolt, enraged Englishmen demanded a clamp down on the ‘native’ press. As vernacular newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government began debating measures of strict control.

In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, on the model of Irish Press Laws. It provided the government with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press. The government started keeping regular track of the vernacular newspapers published in different provinces. When a report was judged as seditious, the newspapers were given a warning and if the warning was ignored, the press was liable to be seized, and the printing machinery could be confiscated.