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Abstract
This article centers on an Urdu-language manual on lithography, published in 1924 by the Nizami Press in Budaun (United Provinces), to explore how a Muslim printer-publisher in a North Indian qaṣbah tried to reform educational methods in his trade. It introduces the Nizami Press (est. 1905) and compares the manual with similar European and Indian instructional handbooks. How did Indian printers and publishers learn their craft? What were the tools and materials used for lithographic printing in colonial India? And given the popularity of lithography, why were such manuals rarely published in Indian languages? By examining the material and technical aspects of the lithographic printing process explained in the Urdu manual, this article engages with larger scholarly debates revolving around knowledge production, pedagogy, and technological developments in South Asia. Furthermore, it analyzes the manual’s language to demonstrate how printers and publishers were engaged in discourses about nationalism, modernization, and social reform.
Abstract
Travel following religious aims has a long tradition in the Indonesian-Malay Archipelago. Yet mass overseas religious tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon among people in today’s Indonesia. A variety of travel agencies advertise pilgrimage package tours to notable destinations like Mecca and Medina but also to other destinations in the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, and Central Asia. An analytical focus on various images in this context, including their creation and distribution, reveals patterns of prestigious cosmopolitan middle-class imagery among Muslim and Christian Indonesians in the field of religious tourism. This imagery is similar across different religious affiliations and particularly vibrant in online social media. The imagery challenges perceptions of interreligious divisions and hegemonic mappings of the world, ultimately centralizing the local social environment of people and exhibiting national Indonesian pride.