Presentation details
200 years long
Typographical journeys from India
R. K. Joshi
Saturday 30 September | 12:00 – 12:45
Location: Track 1
Presentation | Theme: Journeys | Duration: 45 minutes
The locations of early printing activities in India (mid 16th to the end of the 18th century) can be traced in Goa on the western coast; Tranquebar on the southern coast; Madras, Calcutta and Serampore on eastern coast and finally Bombay, the industrial capital of India on the western coast. Many religious activists from several foreign missions settled in various parts of India, as did East India Company personnel. Along with their Indian assistants and pundits of the local languages, they shaped early Indian print.
In Goa, the Portugese developed Tamil (Malbar) script which became well established at Tranquebar Press and Vepary Press near Madras. Font designing in Bengali (based on Calligraphic models) and the publication of dictionaries and grammars in many Indian Languages were the early pioneering efforts of the Serampore Press near Calcutta. Early in the 19th Century the Nirnaysagar Press and type foundry in Bombay, set the highest standards of aesthetic fonts in Devanagari script and in the Sanskrit language.
The linear composing technology of text setting from the West had to be adapted to the three tier non-linear structure of Indian scripts. The struggle to apply western technology to Indian scripts left few resources to research Indian scripts, or to experiments in Indian typography. But there has been innovation in Indic typography and my presentation will tell that story with lots of examples in Indian script and languages.
Speaker details
R. K. Joshi B-9 Bakul, M.Phule Society | India
Professor Raghunath K. Joshi (1936–2008): calligrapher, designer, poet, researcher and teacher. After a meritorious 30 year career in the mass communication industry, Prof. Joshi spent 15 years teaching design courses IDC/IIT in Mumbai. He later served as a visiting design specialist at the Centre for Developed of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Mumbai. Prof. Joshi helped develop font design software, Indian language word processing packages and designed series of Indic fonts for Microsoft Windows and Linux. He organized exhibitions, workshops and seminars on various aspects of Indian letterforms and exhibited his calligraphic works at educational Institutes and public places. He also wrote poems, staged multilingual happenings, planned multilingual communication campaigns and undertook the first ever calligraphic research in Indian manuscripts and epigraphic writings. Prof. Joshi spoke on Indian design, calligraphy, type design, compugraphy for ATypI, TDC, Icograda and other organizations. He received numerous awards including the CAG Hall of Fame (1992) and the Ad Club Distinguished Achievement Award (2004). For the past couple of years, Prof. Joshi has shared the duties of ATypI country delegate for India with Rathna Ramanathan. Prof. R K Joshi passed away in San Francisco on February 5th, 2008, at the age of 72. “I’m sure many ATypI members will recall Professor Joshi’s always delightful conference presentations. If ATypI gave an ‘audience choice’ award, Professor Joshi’s presentation in Rome, 2002, would certainly have received it,” said John Hudson, former vice-president of ATypI. A recording of a 2007 interview with Prof. Joshi is available in the TypeRadio archive. An obituary notice has been posted on the C-DAC website.