The germ of an idea for a history book is often sown by a contemporary moment. Coming back to India from east and south-east Asia one time in the later 1980s, I was struck by several paradoxes. In India, a society where literacy still struggled around the 40 or 50 per cent level, there flourished a massive publishing industry working in numerous languages and a vigorous, not to say violent, free press which made its contemporaries in ‘educated’ and ‘technological’ south-east and east Asia look tame and controlled. In this poor society, some forms of political and social knowledge were remarkably widely diffused: apparently uneducated people would come up to one in the bazaar to discourse on the demerits of Baroness Thatcher or Mr Gorbachev, while educated people in east and south-east Asia, let alone Britain, seemed to struggle to understand anything of the external world. Another paradox: an Indian government which was as inquisitive and paper-obsessed as its colonial ancestor was constantly putting its foot wrong because it was seemingly so ill-informed about happenings in the states and localities. This set me thinking about a study of the ‘information order’ of British India, a topic that would occupy the dead ground between what is now a vibrant social history of India and its apparently lifeless intellectual history.

This study is mainly concerned with the Hindi-speaking areas of north India, but it reaches out to other regions when particularly important changes originated there. What was emerging in the nineteenth century was, after all, an all-India information order.