Namaskar,
It is easy—and intuitive too—to suppose that Indian copyright law was nothing but British law imposed upon India. Plausible though the assumption may appear, the reality was more meandering and infinitely more intriguing. The deeper one delves, the clearer it becomes how confounding the history of Indian copyright is and how much of its buried past still awaits excavation. In this post, I untangle one of its many threads.
A few months ago, while rummaging through the archives at the British Library, I hit upon a 1901 letter from the University of Oxford, urging changes to Indian copyright law. It piqued my curiosity and prodded me to parse the story simmering beneath its prose. (More details below)
I make no claim to discovery. Dr Rimi B. Chatterjee, who has done some wonderful work on printing in colonial India, had encountered this very document long ago and referenced it in her excellent chapter, “Pirates and Philanthropists: British Publishers and Copyright in India, 1880–1935,” in the edited volume Moveable Type: Book History in India (edited by Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty). Likewise, Professor Lionel Bently—to whose kindness, generosity, and guidance I owe a great many debts—has penned a perceptive piece unpacking the tensions surrounding translation and Indian copyright law.
This post, then, is less an attempt at revelation than a modest effort to extend a conversation already begun by others, and stitch together scattered strands. And, most importantly, to place the document itself before readers. After all, the archive sits suspended between what has vanished beyond retrieval and what historians, toiling with might and main, make of the past’s scattered remains. It is in that uneasy in-between that the archive speaks. So, at the close of this post, I let the document linger and speak for itself.
This post proceeds in two parts. First, I unpack the Oxford letter itself and briefly lay out the colonial copyright landscape against which it was written, drawing on extant scholarship on the matter. Second, I place the letter within the broader story of translation in colonial India—an issue that cuts across commerce, pedagogy, nationalism, and empire. Importantly, I confine myself to this particular document and to the state of Indian copyright law before 1900, when translation remained outside the statute.
What about the Oxford Letter?
This letter is illuminating for several reasons. First, unlike some contemporary positions where the Oxford University Press (OUP) go hard against alleged “infringers,” the 1901 letter seems to have adopted a rather different posture. It appeared to be taking the realities of circulation in colonial India into account and, interestingly, did not seem entirely hostile to the dissemination of copyrighted works in Indian regional languages.
The letter, apparently authored by Thomas Fowler, then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, was a response to an advertisement in Kesari, the famed Marathi newspaper of the revolutionary Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The advertisement concerned “The Deccan Vernacular Translation Society,” established to translate the works of English authors into Indian vernaculars. While I could not find the relevant edition of Kesari (please share if you can), the letter reports that the newspaper carried a long list of works owned by the University.
While Oxford’s stance remained aggressive as usual, given the absence of translation rights in India until the Indian Copyright Act, 1914, there appears to have been at least a prima facie concern for the dissemination of works in India. It clarified that “The University has no desire to prevent the translation of its books into the languages of India,” and was willing to “grant permission under suitable conditions to qualified persons,” as it had done before. It insisted, however, on retaining the “power to forbid a translation” where it was dissatisfied “with the competence of the translator,” to prevent “incorrect and garbled translations which are unfair to the author and misleading to the public.” (Sidenote: Mahatma Gandhi, who regarded copyright as an unnatural thing, took a similar position on the issue of translation, as Prof Balganesh exemplifies in his piece.)
Curiously, though, the letter, written on the Clarendon Press letterhead, speaks on behalf of the University of Oxford. It does not explicitly mention OUP. While Chatterji ascribed this letter to OUP, the matter does not seem that straightforward. As the Oxford Archive webpage shows, the name “Clarendon Press” came to be associated with Oxford’s printing operations after the Press moved to the Clarendon Building in Oxford in 1713. The name endured even after OUP relocated to its present site in 1830.
By the early twentieth century, however, “Clarendon Press” had acquired a more specific meaning, i.e., books published from Oxford appeared under the Clarendon Press imprint, while those issued through OUP’s London office bore the “Oxford University Press” label. The distinction survived until the 1970s, when the London office closed. Now the name Clarendon Press is “reserved for books of particular academic importance.”
Are Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press the same legal entity for the purposes of owning copyrighted works? And how, if at all, did that relationship intersect with works owned by the University of Oxford itself? It seems unlikely that every work owned by the University belonged to Oxford University Press, or vice versa. Given these overlaps and uncertainties, it is worth noting that three distinct institutional designations appear in connection with this letter: Oxford University Press (following Chatterjee and Bently), Clarendon Press, and the University itself (as referenced in the letter).
While it may be reasonable to infer that OUP owned the works that Kesari sought to translate, foregrounding these distinctions helps avoid potential mischaracterisation and remains faithful to the institutional language employed by the historical actors themselves.
Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that Oxford University Press was only one of several British publishers seeking to reshape Indian copyright law; others included Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, Longman, and Methuen. Each deployed different strategies, pressures, and persuasions to intervene in and mark its dissatisfaction with the existing state of the Indian law.
Indian Copyright Act, 1847 and the trouble of Translations
While some form of regulation of books and printing already existed, India received its first formal copyright statute in the Indian Copyright Act of 1847, modelled on the British Literary Copyright Act of 1842. As Bently notes (p 1184), the legislation emerged largely from demands for local protection against piracy and from concerns over the expense of registering works in London — issues strongly raised by the Bengal British India Society, particularly by its then president, Baboo Ramgopaul Ghose (also known as Ram Gopal Ghosh), a prominent member of the “Young Bengal” movement and an influential businessman. The Society may also have viewed the Act as a potential means of advancing one of its broader institutional ambitions: establishing a reference library. (See the parliamentary discussion on the 1847 Act, here)
However, despite its formal resemblance to British law, the Act served different purposes across different regions and social groups within colonial India.
In Bengal, Abhijit Gupta argues, the Act was taken up with “gusto, often changing the wording of the act to novel and sometimes irreverent effect” by publishers in the Battala region of North Calcutta. Gupta offers several examples — worth a look! — of how Battala publishers used copyright registration (pp. 39–44). James Long observed, as Gupta notes, that the Act made the composition of Bengali books commercially viable, enabling Indian authors, perhaps for the first time, to derive a regular income from literary production.
By contrast, as Ulrike Stark notes in her brilliant An Empire of Books (pp. 89–90), authors and publishers in North India were initially slower to appreciate or use the legislation. Even by 1874, official reports lamented that the advantages of copyright registration remained “but little known” among Indian authors, with most registered copyrights belonging instead to the Educational Department. This prompted officials such as John Nesfield to campaign to familiarise the public with the benefits of registration — efforts that met with only limited success.
The Act’s utility was often contingent on the specific economic and institutional interests of those engaged in the book trade. For authors, the statute created a mechanism through which copyright could vest in themselves, though rights were often assigned to publishers for a lump sum or through “contract of service” arrangements (something that persists…). Large firms such as the Naval Kishore Press relied on the Act to safeguard commercial investments, particularly in costly translation projects vulnerable to piracy.
Although chiefly concerned with proprietary rights in literary production, the 1847 Act also sat upstream of the later Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867, which—in the wake of the Rebellion of 1857—became an instrument of literary surveillance, monitoring vernacular publications, Indian opinion, and potentially seditious expression.
Concluding Remarks
That, in broad strokes, was the copyright world in which the Oxford letter was written. In the next post, I zero in on the translation issue itself, within which the letter must be understood.
See you in part two of the post, here.
Thanks to Prashant Reddy and Swaraj Barooah for sharing their thoughts on the post.