This talk will discuss how a small-town Newspaper used lithographic technology to cast a significant slice of Urdu journalism conversation as distinctively Muslim. Discussing a chapter of the recently published book Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India, the talk will discuss the development of the newspaper Madinah as an extension of networks of correspondence and kinship in North Indian qasbahs. Distinctive deployment of lithographic technology helped to transform the far-flung qasbah of Bijnor into an imagined "city" both intimately connected to the world and a place set apart from dangerously Westernized cities.
