By Team Yo! Vizag
Imagine if the first letters of your keyboard weren’t QWERTY, but something like MNJKYG or YUDFSH. A tool we use every day would suddenly feel alien. Typing this sentence might take five minutes instead of five seconds. Texting a friend would become a chore and writing a single paragraph could take an hour! Like a cog in a well-oiled machine, the QWERTY keyboard is a silent constant in our lives—one we rarely think about but can’t do without. And for that, we have the trusty old typewriter to thank.
A layout that came with the typewriter’s invention over 150 years ago, QWERTY became the keys to a revolution as the typewriter became the new currency of communication. In independent and industrialized India, the livelihoods of of typists, dealers, typing institutes, offices, courtrooms, printing presses, and more flourished around the machine.
As typewriters became available with keyboards in various Indian scripts, they made information accessible to the masses in a swift and efficient manner, language no bar. For a country with 22 official mother tongues, this was a monumental step forward.
Even Telugu speakers found their voice with the development of the first Telugu typewriter. A milestone in Telugu communication, its story is little-known but necessary. Read on as heritage writer and enthusiast John Castellas tells its tale:
How convenient is it to unwrap your new digital flat screen device and select the Telugu keyboard as your preferred language for typing your emails, messages, or reports. There was a time when handwritten script was the only approach and people watched with amazement as the clickety-clack of English language typewriters gained wide-spread use in every government office, business, and street corner in India.
What gunpowder was to warfare, the typewriter was to communication. The first ‘writing machine’ was developed by Christopher Lathan Scholes in 1873 who took his concept to the E Remington & Sons Gunmakers and Sewing Machine Manufacturers, who made and displayed the Remington No 1 typewriter at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Gone were the laborious days of writing by hand and in came the faster, more efficient, and mechanised tool as typewriters revolutionised the field of mass media and communication. In the early 1900’s, Remington offered typewriters in ‘Gujerati, Mahratti, Urdu, Devnagri-Hindi, Burmese, Gurmukhi, and Arabic’ for sale in India. Conspicuous by their absence were the south Indian languages, including Telugu.
The Royal Typewriter Company of Hartford, Connecticut, USA reported that their analysis of Telugu as one of the most important of the Dravidian languages, was one that presented the greater mechanical challenge of the eight languages studied – due mainly to the physical complexity of the characters and symbols – which must be set in three tiers to include accents above and below each main character.
As early as 1894, the Saturday Review reported that Rev Dr Chamberlain, a missionary of the American Madura Mission, outlined his idea of adapting a typewriter to Telugu with 240 characters and keys made in India. Attempts were made to adopt the English keyboard which had 26 characters each with an upper a lower case. Additional keys provided space, numbers and punctuation marks. The Telugu script required 16 vowels and 36 consonants, and inventors of the Telugu keyboard concentrated on using existing English keys to accommodate the range and complexity of the Telugu script.
In 1928, the first experimental Malayalam typewriter was produced in the princely state of Travencore by N Sankaran Pandala (aka NS Pandalai/NS Pandalay), who created a keyboard that could be adapted for a Royal typewriter. In 1933, the government supported this development by purchasing 50 machines from the Royal Typewriter Manufacturing Company of USA.
Also in 1933, the ‘Anantha Keyboard’ was developed by Anantha Subbaraya for the Kannada language and was adapted for the first Kannada typewriter.
At about this time, a German company claimed that it would produce a typewriter in any language whose alphabet could be accommodated on a standard English keyboard. After researching many Indian languages, the company concluded that the compact alphabet of Tamil made it highly suitable to be adapted. It delivered the first Tamil typewriter, which cost Rs 219. It is also claimed that Ramalingam Muttiah of Sri Lanka invented the Tamil typewriter sometime around 1920s.
As early as 1911, YS Prakassarao, proprietor of ‘Prakash Mechanical Works’ at Rajahmundry, registered patent No 48890 for a Telugu keyboard adapted to a Telugu typewriter named the ‘Prakash Mudra Lekhini’ which was invented by them. Two machines were bought by the government for evaluation and not approved. Many years later, a 1983 patent infringement claim stated that the Andhra Government used this keyboard layout to have Remington Rand manufacture close to 10,000 typewriters for the Andhra Government Offices.
In 1936, the Royal Typewriter Company of Brooklyn, New York manufactured 100 machines based on the ‘Telugu Typewriter Scheme’ patented by Raja P Parthasarathy Rayanigar (Raja of Panagal). This keyboard layout was accepted by the University of Madras and considered a contribution to Telugu Orthography.
These Royal Model H typewriters, commissioned by Maharaja Ravu Venkata Kumara Mahipathi Surya Rao Bahadur Garu (Maharajah of Pithapuram), were named ‘Chinnamamba Andhra Mudra Lekhini’ for the India market and became available to the public in 1936 after 13 years of development. It is speculated that the Government of Madras bought the first 100 machines.
Notable among the first users of the new Telugu typewriter were Dr S Radhakrishnan (Vice Chancellor of Andhra University), CR Reddy (former Minister of Education and first Vice Chancellor of Andhra University), V Krishna Row (Madras Government Telugu Translator) and K Nageswar Row (editor of Andhra Patrika magazine).
After India’s Independence, industrialist Naval Godrej pioneered the first “all-Indian typewriter,” made from 1955 to its inevitable death by computers in 2011, when the company stopped production. It was equipped with English, mathematical symbols, Hindi, Marathi, Gujurati, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. It was the first multi-lingual typewriter in the world.
The Godrej typewriter was a complex machine with 2,000 high-precision components, was one of post-Independent India’s earliest instances of self-reliance in manufacturing. It was testimony to a young nation’s capability to mass-produce an indigenous typewriter and take on established foreign brands.
Entire generations of people across cultures and communities – from the office stenographer to the court typist and from the public librarian to the newspaper editor – broke their backs and built their careers on the typewriter. There was no social barrier to using the machine. The typewriter was an equaliser. It defined the Indian workplace more than any other office device. In nearly every commercial enterprise or government office someone or other hunched over a typewriter, either typing from a handwritten document at the side, winding a new spool and occasionally making a mess of it, or rubbing out errors and tearing a hole through the paper or messing one’s fingers with sheets of carbon copy. It was both frustrating and satisfying.
In the 1940’s, at Vizag’s Victor Tutorial Institute, in a tatti covered verandah near the Hindu Reading Room, Master Michael would teach his many young men and women students to touch type and meet the requirements for the Madras Government Certificate in Typing, a pre-requisite for most administrative jobs.
The typewriter sat on the office desk or a roadside table with an equal degree of self-importance. Over chai and gossip, the typewriter did many things at once – it told stories, dictated letters, made rules, typed affidavits, hired people, balanced accounts, prepared invoices, and wrote out inventories. It was also privy to all kinds of information, including secrets and lies. But noisy as it was, the typewriter remained a mute spectator to social history throughout its eventful existence.
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