Thoughts on Westernization of Devanagari Typography
Evolution, impact, and the awaited potential
As a young design student in India, I first learned about grids, space, and pagination through Jain manuscripts of South Asia. I remember the symmetry of the page structures, the harmony of image and text, and the scribal forms on the pages. Since then, in my 8-year design career, I have yet to design or encounter a real-world project that emulates my early learnings, which were so rooted in the Indian context. I grew up consuming multilingual film titles, printed ephemera, and promotional material. I spent big parts of my youth reading long-form Devanagari content and devouring Devanagari calligraphic forms. However, I never considered all these experiences in the context of ‘good design”.
South Asian design contexts feel theoretical, often without a real-world basis for design excellence. This is clearly not because there is a lack of historic ephemera or visual culture to learn from, nor is it because design hasn’t been prevalent in India. I believe it is simply due to Westernization, Colonization, and a colonial hangover that grips design (amongst other things). In this essay, I will explore some areas of visual communication in which the current state of Devanagari Typography has been affected because of its Westernization.
Type Design
A few years ago, I was interviewing Sahar Afshar — a Type Designer, researcher, and font developer from Iran — for an article I was writing on variable fonts when I used the term “non-Latin script”. Sahar questioned my use of the word and the way it centers the Latin script over every other script in the world. I was shocked at my own ignorance and began thinking about the conditioning surrounding it.
Printing in India was pioneered by Europeans in the 19th century. The first printing press in India was established by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the 1550s. In Ulrike Stark’s words, “The rise of printing in India from the 1830s was paralleled and enhanced by the expansion of evangelical Protestantism. Large numbers of Indians first encountered the printed word through missionary tracts and schoolbooks. Missionaries cast type, perfected fonts, and introduced standards of text production in Indian vernacular languages." The Serampore Mission Press, one of the earliest type foundries established in the 1800s by the Baptist Missionary Society, produced various typefaces in regional Indian languages, including Marathi and Hindi. Stark discusses how the Devanagari fonts produced at the Serampore type foundry were of poor quality, yet missionaries hailed them as the most beautiful of their kind found in India. This was because they were the only Devanagari type available for printing then. While printing technology was brought to and developed in India for missionary purposes, it was essential to print in regional languages for any text to actually reach the masses. However, hot metal type production was developed specifically for Latin script. This means that new developments in font production and typesetting, such as Linotype, made it easier and more efficient for Latin type design and typesetting but did not significantly impact the development of Devanagari. According to Fiona Ross, “Linotype had an early entry into PostScript (Adobe’s page description language) for Indic languages.” Yet, the core technology was built around Latin.
With the advent of digital revolutions and subsequent advancements in digital font production software, all technology change has primarily focused on the Latin script. In contrast, the scripts of the world— which function and read in significantly different ways than Latin—have had to adapt to these technologies. As a result, they are often perceived as more complex or even problematic. This standard is only recently being questioned and revised, creating more space and exploration for all kinds of scripts.
This has impacted the design industry through the limited availability (compared to Latin!) of diverse, high-quality fonts in regional languages. Devanagari remains ahead of many other Indic scripts. However, it still lacks the same options that facilitate optimal expression, legibility, readability, and novelty. Since Devanagari fonts were modernized and Latinized, they lost the crucial time necessary for a phenomenon in its infancy to evolve toward innovation. Imagine a world where the Devanagari script wasn't simplified but instead was nurtured to develop into what it naturally ought to have.
Imagine if technology were designed and adapted around Devanagari rather than the other way around. Perhaps the world would be saturated with Devanagari experimentation on par with Latin. The accessibility of Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Nepali, and the many other languages it supports would flourish in the spaces that need them; with the added result of flourishing literacy—design literacy and otherwise, a growing love and evolution of the languages, and inclusion for speakers.
Typography
Typesetting and font production technologies have always gone hand in hand. These standards around typesetting and that of a beautiful page, alignment, hierarchy, language, capabilities, and contrast were all set based on Latin typography. In his memoirs, Joseph Warren of the American Presbyterian Mission press of Alahbad (India) recounts, “Persian and Arabic characters are both unfit for printing because they contain no full systems of vowels.” Devanagari, Warren considered “superiorcontinually breaking down, leaving letters headless, or tailless or without distinguishing marks, thus frequently changing one letter into another.” This gives us a rather good understanding of the general attitude of missionaries towards Indic typography. According to Ulrike Stark, Europeans sought to homogenize regional scripts through their ‘Romanization’. Even though the reasons were economic, practical, and technical, it shows the early approach to typesetting Indic scripts.
Indian scribal traditions didn’t lend itself well to the structured Roman traditions of letterpress. So instead of understanding the nuances of regional scripts, the regional scripts were stripped of their variations or forced to fit in Latin norms. Indian regional printers, who set up their own presses to print regional newspapers, books, and other material, had to rely heavily on support from the colonial state for capital and innovation.
Devanagari, with vastly different evolutionary tracks than Latin, has nuances of its own that were not considered when setting standards for typesetting and alignment. The baseline and x-height, for example, are important in Latin for horizontal alignment. In Devanagari, the Shirorekha or headline would be visually heavier and apt for horizontal alignment. Devanagari has composites and conjuncts that vary widely in letter widths and construction. This means tracking and kerning work very differently in Devanagri as compared to Latin. Additionally, emphasis tools such as underlining, inlining, or italicizing, don’t work in the same way for Devanagari as they work in Latin to create that contrast naturally. These are just a few Devanagari characteristics that differ from Latin.
Fiona Ross, when talking about developments in Linotype in Devanagari says, “However, the constraints of the Linotype hot-metal machines seriously compromised Indian vernacular typography.” This was during the late 19th century. Similar to type design problems, this has trickled down today to Adobe and other desktop publishing software. There is always that one extra click to just get something to read usually when working with Devanagari. If working across platforms, that guarantee of the click is also gone. Before the type can start building the page, it has to struggle to be readable. Next, it has to adhere to the language and parameters that were meant for its writing system.
During the printing boom in colonial and pre-colonial India, lithographic printing was more popular among Indian printers because it allowed for a closer emulation of traditional scribal traditions compared to the rigid structure of letterpress printing. In contrast, missionaries preferred letterpress for its systematic approach. If lithography had been given the opportunity to flourish, I wonder if Devanagari typography could have evolved into a language as rich as its scribal traditions. Devanagari calligraphy and sign painting in India enjoy a unique position of being distinct, natural, high-quality, and original. They master multilingual typography as well as they employ novelty and quality. It’s the mass-produced, digitally created typography that conforms to different parameters. Instead of conforming to external standards, it would have been beneficial to consider and develop typography based on its original forms.
Publication Design
In the 1850s, Durgaprasad Katare’s Ganesh Press was a lithographic press established in Benaras. The press produced many influential books in Hindi such as Tulidas’s Ramcharitramanus and Kavitt Ramayan. Ganesh Press published books deliberately in the ‘Pothi format’ to resemble the scribal culture of India. While the press later failed economically, the idea of designing for an audience based on their cultural knowledge and understanding was a move in the right direction. The Pothi (loosely translated to books) is an ancient South Asian manuscript-making format where the shape of pages is dictated by palm leaves and stacked together held by strings passed through punched holes. The typical Pothi spread would feature wide columns, symmetric margins with rules and marginalia, and occasional annotations. This is comparable to medieval illuminated manuscripts that evolved into present-day book standards. If the Pothi were given a similar opportunity, grace, and the space to grow, what new modes and methods of production could we have imagined it to grow into?
Like every region India also has its own timekeeping and calendar traditions. This almanac pictured here for instance is for the Hindu year 1871–1872. The vertical shape, the proportional, rhythmic numbers, the loopy low contrast script, and the use of the color red for clarity and contrast make this a stunning piece of graphic design. This level of detail, intricacy, and information is unique to calendars. There is so much potential in this calendar to both preserve this knowledge and to inform and enrich contemporary design practice. Present-day Hindu calendars have of course subverted to global ‘standards’ of what a calendar ought to look like.
Ways and means of publishing also determine the kind of knowledge being published and preserved. It may not be a coincidence that India seems to have an archival problem for cultural ephemera. Traditional publishing methods carry not just ways of designing, but they carry an understanding of cultural evolution, ancestral knowledge, and oral and informal histories as well. They reveal material culture as time progresses. The ignorance towards regional publishing methods may have diminished the chance for the material culture of India to flourish in this way.
Impact and the future
We are not strangers to the impact of cultural whitewashing. While a lot of time is lost in adapting and conditioning, Devanagari typography is, I believe, at an exciting time today. Graphic design is a fairly new field, and in that, Devanagari typography is still very much in its defining stage. There are new Type design developments and foundries coming up. This is leading to new typographies centered around Devanagari as it becomes more accessible, expressive, cool, loud, and important! Design all around the world is still coming out of the bonds of being neutral and simple, but post-human design movements force us to look beyond a central point of reference when creating. As we become more multicultural, it is no longer an option to otherize scripts, implying the othering of people, cultures, and languages. Ever-evolving new technologies are building new channels of information and literacy. Consumption is at an all-time high and so is the demand. In a few decades, the 21st century may be looked back on as one of the most pivotal times in the development of new typography for Devanagari. It is also not coincidental that the support for anti-design, DIY, and hand-done approaches, and a new experimental design movement is on the rise.
I am here to watch Devanagari claim its due evolution and growth in its own right.
References and Further Reading
Stark Ulrike. “Benares Beginnings: Print Modernity, Book Entrepreneurs, and Cross-Cultural Ventures in a Colonial Metropolis”. Founts of Knowledge: Book History in India, edited by Abhijeet Gupta, Swapan Chakravorty, Orient Blackswan, 2015
Warren, Joseph, and Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Old School). Board of Publication. A Glance Backward At Fifteen Years of Missionary Life In North India. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1856.
Stark Ulrike, “Making tracts attractive: Missionary print and the small book in nineteenth century rural India”. Contextual Alternate. Volume 1. 2021
Non-Latin Type Design at Linotype, Fiona Ross
Internet Archive
South Asian Rare Book Collection. Almanac for Hindu year -1872. [India: producer not identified, ?, 1871] Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2011432170/>.