Eight annas for the coming year, the gist

Eight annas for the coming year

In the nineteenth century the Hindu almanac stopped being handwork and became a printed product with a company's name on it. That fixed some things, thinned others, and quietly took away the one question a reader used to be able to ask of it.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

The first Marathi almanac ever printed came off a press its owner had built himself, in Bombay in 1831, on stones he had collected around the city, using ink he had worked out by trial. It sold for eight annas.

An almanac tells you what the sun and moon are doing on each day of the coming year. People use it to fix the days of fasts, festivals and weddings. In most of India it is called a panchang; in Bengal, a panjika.

For centuries this was handwork. Somebody who knew the arithmetic computed the coming year from a set of tables. A copyist wrote out his answer by hand. Copies travelled to villages in somebody's bag.

Printing changed that. Almanacs turn out to be the first thing new presses in India printed, again and again, because they were the one book everybody bought every year. In Bombay, the first book off the city's first Indian-owned press, in 1814, was an almanac. In Calcutta the almanac became the largest thing the whole book trade did: a missionary counting presses for the government reported that in 1857 forty-six Indian-owned presses printed 571,670 books, and he thought a quarter of a million of those copies were almanacs.

Three things followed.

Everyone in a region could now hold the same figures and check one sheet against another. That is a real gain.

But an almanac is worked out for one town, because sunrise is local. A handwritten one was made where it was used. A printed one is made for one city and sold across a province. And a mistake set in metal type prints itself a quarter of a million times.

And the almanac became a brand. An 1825 printed almanac still says on its opening page which old astronomy book its figures came from. Later ones say instead who published them and where the shop was. Buyers stopped choosing between sets of tables and started choosing between covers.

Words decoded

panchang (पञ्चाङ्ग): the Indian almanac; a yearly book giving, day by day, where the sun and moon are
panjika (पञ्जिका): the Bengali word for the same book
almanac: any yearly book of dates and sky positions
manuscript: a book written out by hand, before or instead of printing
lithography: printing from a flat stone rather than from metal letters, which suits pages full of tables and unusual scripts
anna: an old Indian coin; sixteen annas made one rupee
Battala: the lanes off Chitpur Road in north Calcutta where the cheap Bengali printing trade sat
Surya Siddhanta (सूर्यसिद्धान्त): an old Sanskrit astronomy text; most traditional almanacs were computed from its numbers
observed positions: figures taken from what astronomers actually measure in the sky, rather than from the inherited tables
Nabadwip: a town in Bengal whose scholars were the recognised authority on questions of ritual timing
colophon: the note at the end of an old handwritten book saying who copied it
Calendar Reform Committee: the panel the Indian government appointed in 1952 to look at the country's calendars; sixty almanac makers sent in their work

Why anyone should careWhen two almanacs give different days for the same festival, families argue as though somebody were being careless or unfaithful, when the disagreement is really about which tables the figures were worked from, and is centuries older than print. Knowing that a printed almanac is a product, made by a named house, for a named city, from a named set of tables, hands you back the question you are entitled to ask of it.

Read it properly, 7 min Eight annas for the coming year