When Ink Was Drawn by Hand in Madras

Before machines learned to set Urdu into metal type, words were shaped by human hands.

In the humid mornings of colonial Madras, when the sea air carried both salt and uncertainty, a newspaper named Mussalman began to circulate—passed from palm to palm in tea shops, mosques, law offices, and student hostels. Its pages were thin, sometimes uneven at the edges, and its letters bore the unmistakable marks of hand calligraphy. Each line was written by a trained calligrapher, transferred to stone, and printed through the lithographic process that sustained much of early Urdu journalism in India.¹

Mussalman was not just read. It was crafted.

In an age before fast presses and uniform fonts, every issue carried the intimacy of labor. The curves of the nastaʿlīq script rose and fell like breath. The newspaper looked almost like a manuscript—half modern, half classical—bridging the world of madrasa learning and political modernity. Lithographed Urdu newspapers of this kind were common across India until the 1920s, particularly in regions where Urdu was not the dominant spoken language.²

For South Indian Muslims—merchants from Arcot, scholars from Vellore, teachers, lawyers, and students—Mussalman offered something rare: recognition. In the Madras Presidency, where Muslims formed a demographic minority, and Urdu functioned primarily as a learned language, the paper insisted that Muslim political and intellectual life in the south mattered.³

Each issue carried the anxieties of its time. Editorials wrestled with questions that had no easy answers: how to reconcile faith and reform, how to resist colonial power without fragmenting community, and how to pursue education as both moral duty and political necessity. Education, in particular, appeared repeatedly—not as rhetoric, but as prescription. Muslim decline, the editors argued, was not fate; it was the consequence of neglect, and neglect could be reversed.⁴

Then the wider Muslim world intruded upon the local page.

When news arrived from Istanbul—of the weakening Ottoman state and the threatened Caliphate—the tone of Mussalman shifted. Through its carefully inked columns, South Indian Muslims encountered the emotional force of the Khilafat Movement. Meetings were announced, speeches summarized, and resolutions printed. For many Muslims in Madras and the Tamil districts, Mussalman served as a principal medium through which the Khilafat agitation became intelligible and urgent.⁵

Yet the newspaper never abandoned the Indian question. British colonial policies were scrutinized with restraint rather than rage. Nationalist politics were engaged, but cautiously. Like many Muslim editors of the period, those behind Mussalman sought to balance participation in the freedom struggle with an insistence that Muslim concerns could not be dissolved into majoritarian narratives.⁶

What distinguished Mussalman was its tone. It did not trade in sensation. It reasoned. It is believed that journalism is a moral trust. Even its handwritten letters seemed to carry ethical weight.

But history does not favor slowness.

By the late 1930s, the conditions that had sustained Mussalman were eroding. The decline of Urdu readership in South India, the high cost of hand-calligraphed lithography, competition from mechanized presses, and the political polarization of the late colonial period all worked against its survival. Younger Muslims increasingly turned to Tamil- and English-language newspapers for education and employment.⁷

Sometime between the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mussalman ceased publication. No final issue has yet been conclusively identified in surviving collections. The absence of a closing editorial—a common fate for minority newspapers of the period—suggests a gradual exhaustion rather than a dramatic end.⁸

Yet silence is not erasure.

Mussalman remains an important reminder that Muslim political consciousness in India was not confined to the north. It flourished in Madras too—through hand-drawn letters, careful arguments, and a belief that even a minority voice, if written with responsibility, could shape public conscience.

In the end, Mussalman was an act of faith: faith in Islam, faith in India, and faith in the power of ink—drawn slowly by hand—to hold a community together while history shifted beneath it.

Archival Citations & References

1. British Library, India Office Records; Urdu lithographic newspapers from Madras Presidency, c. 1900–1925.

2. Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. chapters on Muslim print culture.

3. S. Muthiah, Madras Rediscovered (EastWest Books, Chennai), references to minority presses in colonial Madras.

4. Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Oxford, 1998).

5. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (Columbia University Press, 1982).

6. Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1916–1928 (Manohar, Delhi).

7. C. J. Fuller, Tamil Brahmans and the Politics of Print (comparative context on language shift in South India).

8. Tamil Nadu State Archives, Madras: incomplete runs of Urdu newspapers, press lists, and registration of newspaper records (1930s–40s).