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Print Culture in Late Qajar Iran: the Cartoons of Kashkūl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Shiva Balaghi
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Extract

The significant changes in the social, economic, and political conditions of Iran in the late Qajar era both precipitated and necessitated changes in cultural production. One way to better understand these shifting paradigms is through an examination of print culture. ᶜAbbas Mirza, the governor of Azerbaijan and a Qajar prince, has been credited with promoting and supporting the printing industry in Iran. In 1812, he oversaw the establishment of a printing house in Tabriz, and it was largely due to his influence that Tabriz became an important center of publishing. Jan Rypka noted that the first “printing business” in Iran was set up in Tabriz in the year 1824-25 but he believed the press to have been operational for only a decade before lithography overtook the printing enterprise. ᶜAbbas Mirza sent a group of students to England to study, the most notable being Mirza Salih Shirazi who was a student at Oxford University.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 1-4: Qajar Art and Society , 2001 , pp. 165 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2001

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References

1. Rypka, Jan, A History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968), 337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Avery, Peter, “Printing, the Press and Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, 6, 815–16.Google Scholar Farmayan, Hafez Farman, “The Forces of Modernization in Nineteenth Century Iran,” in The Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East, ed. Polk, William and Chambers, Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 144–45.Google Scholar

2. For discussions of the importance of Aloys Senefelder's invention of lithogaphy in 1798 and its impact on artistic production, see Man, Felix H., 750 Years of Artists’ Litho∼ graphs, 1803 -1953 (London: Heinemann, 1953)Google Scholar; Mueller, Earl G., The Art of the Print (Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 1969)Google Scholar; Intersections: Lithography, Photography, and the Traditions of Printmaidng, ed., Howe, Kathleen Stewart (Albuqurque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).Google Scholar

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5. Curzon, George N., Persia and the Persian Question 2 vols. (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1966Google Scholar; first edition published 1892) 1:464.

6. The dates are given in a biographical sketch by Bamdad. Bamdad, M., Sharḥ-i ḥāl-i rijāl-i Īrān, (Tehran: Kitabfurushi-i Zuvvar, 1347), 4Google Scholar:. Kashkūl is available in the Near East Collection of the Princeton University Library.

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10. When he was transferred to Morocco, Rabino gave his collection to E. G. Browne. Together with information which he acquired from an Iranian publisher named Tarbiyat, Browne went on to produce the first comprehensive and scholarly listing of Persian-language publications in The Press and Poetry of Modem Persia (Cambridge, 1914).Google Scholar

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12. Ibid.

13. See my discussion of these majlises where plays were read aloud (Shiva Balaghi, “The Iranian as Spectator and Spectacle: Theater and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Iran,” in Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East, ed. F. Müge Göçek, forthcoming.) Ami Ayalon and Palmira Brummett have discussed the circulation of printed texts in Arab and Ottoman society, noting the accessibility of these materials to the non-literate through public reading gatherings. (Ayalon, Ami, The Press in the Arab Middle East [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 154–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Palmira Brummett, “New Woman and Old Nag: Images of Women in the Ottoman Cartoon Space,” Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies [Spring 1997], 16.

14. Commenting on the relationship between technical change and cultural innovation in nineteenth century Europe, Eric Hobsbawm opined that “ … perhaps the only genuinely innovatory forms of communication the press revived were cartoons … .” Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 238.Google Scholar

15. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 1, March 30, 1907.

16. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 10, June 15, 1907.

17. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 26, November 23, 1907.

18. For a useful discussion of the political events in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution, consult Keddie, Nikki and Amanat, Mehrdad, “Iran Under the Late Qajars, 1848-1922,” The Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge, 1991) 7:174–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 19, September 15,1907.

20. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 12, July 6, 1907.

21. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 27, November 30, 1907.

22. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 2, April 6, 1907.

23. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 9, June 8, 1907.

24. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 26, November 23, 1907.

25. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 32, February 1, 1908.

26. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 40, May 12, 1908.

27. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 4, April 1907.

28. F. Goldsmid, “A Railway Through Southern Persia,” Scottish Geographic Magazine (December 1890), unpaginated reprint as found in the Goldsmid Papers, Box 3, OIOC.

29. George Curzon, “British and Russian Commercial Competition in Central Asia,” Asiatic Quarterly Review (July-October 1889), p. 456.

30. Whigham, R. J., The Persian Problem (London: Isbisterand Co., 1903), p. 388.Google Scholar

31. See a reproduction of this cartoon in Royal Persian Paintings, The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925, ed., Diba, Layla S. with Ekhtiar, Maryam (New York: The Brooklyn Museum of Art with I. B. Taurus Press, 1998), 281.Google Scholar

32. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 20, September 28,1907.

33. Durand to Lord Elgin, Tehran, April 6,1895, Durand Papers, D727/5, OIOC.

34. See Seton-Watson, Hugh, The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855-1914 (NY: Praeger, 1952), 328.Google Scholar

35. Kazemzadeh, Firuz, “Iranian Relations with Russia and the Soviet Union, to 1921,” CHIr, 7: 343.Google Scholar

36. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 22, October 21, 1907.

37. Kashkūl, year 1, no. 28, April 14, 1908.