(i) In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther wrote Ninety Five Theses criticising many of the practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. A printed copy of this was posted on a church door in Wittenberg. It challenged the Church to debate his ideas. Luther’s writings were immediately reproduced in vast numbers and read widely. This lead to a division within the Church and to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. (ii) In India the print started intense controversies between social and religious reformers and the Hindu orthodoxy over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brah- manical priesthood and idolatry. (iii) Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri (1871). (iv) In the twentieth century, B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker in Madras, wrote powerfully on caste and their writings were read by people all over India.