Key skills: Typewriter finds its place despite digital onslaught

New Delhi: It is Friday afternoon and inside a small, dimly lit room in east Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar, a group of young men and women are hunched over old Remington typewriters, practising touch typing--- the skill of fast typing without looking at keys. The only sound one can hear inside is the clickety clack, and the ding as the ribbon reaches its one end and starts on the other.

Their instructor, Ashok Ahuja, is teaching a new batch of students how to position their fingers correctly on the middle line of the keys and apply the right pressure. Ahuja, whose family has been running Ashoka Typing College for the past four decades, says while business dwindled over the years, he still has many students wanting to be trained only on the manual typewriters.

“They believe that typewriting can be best learnt on typewriters, and not on computer keyboards. There is a finger for each key and you tend to forget that while typing on a flat computer keyboard, and consequently your speed and accuracy suffers,” says Ahuja whose institute offers 45-days to 3- months typewriting courses comprising what he calls well-structured lessons for ₹500 a month.

Delhi has many other typewriting institutes, where hundreds of aspirants for various government jobs requiring a typing speed test are trained on old Remingtons and Godrej typewriters, even as laptops and touch screens hold sway. Several southern states such as Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka, which still allow typewriting tests on manual typewriters for various government positions, have thousands of typing training institutes. Many of them get their machines from dealers in Delhi, which restore and sell old typewriters.

Ahuja says manual typewriters are perfect for learning the art and science of touch typewriting, and his students could not agree more.

“On the flat keyboard of a computer, it is difficult to learn the movement of the fingers on the keys. Once you have learnt it on the manual typewriters, typing on a computer keyboard is child’s play. But learning to type on manual typewriters is like learning to play a musical instrument. It is hard work,” says Manisha Meena, a constable in Delhi police who is aspiring for a typist’s job in the Delhi high court as she tries to type, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”— a beginner’s typing sentence that contains all the alphabets in the English language.

“ When I started two days ago, my fingers pained and I thought of not returning to the class ever. But now I love this Remington,” says Meena.

Sitting next to her in the class is Anjali Rawat, 24, who is in the institute to increase her speed and accuracy of typing. “My current speed is 25 words per minute, and I want to make it at least 40 words per minute, and I believe I can do so only on a manual typewriter. Unlike a computer, a manual typewriter allows you to be focused, and you think twice before you type a word,” says Rawat.

The Ashoka Typing College was started by Ahuja’s father and it had over 200 students in the 1990s. Today, the institute has about 40 students. “Before the pandemic, a lot of parents sent their small children to learn typing on manual typewriters during their summer vacation,” says Ahuja.

Until the 1990s, Delhi had over 500 typewriting and stenography institutes, the biggest of them being Pitman Shorthand College in Karol Bagh, which had over 150 students working on typewriters at any given time. In fact, Delhi even had a federation of typewriting and stenographers institutes.

Rajesh Palta, who runs Universal Typewriter Company at Asaf Ali Road in central Delhi, says they supply old, restored typewriters to institutes across the country. “A lot of these institutes bought old computers from us. We bought old typewriters from various government departments at auctions. Even today we supply about 30 old restored typewriters every month to typing institutes across the country. Most of our orders come from south India,” Palta says. The company was set up in 1937 by Palta’s father.

Asaf Ali Road and the area around it used to be the hub of typewriter dealers. Many of them such as Allied Type Writers, Shimla Typewriters, Punjab Type Writers, Associated Typewriters, International Typewriters, have shut shop in the last fifteen years.

The shelves of Palta’s shop have several restored vintage typewriters of brands such as Remington, Godrej, Smith Corona, Halda, Olympia, and Hermes. Outside, half a dozen typewriters are ready to be shipped to a typewriting training institute in Tamil Nadu.

Palta, who has a vast knowledge of the history of typewriters, says that Remington was the first foreign company to assemble typewriters in India in 1950, and Godrej and Boyce, was the first Indian company to make a typewriter in 1955. In the late 1980s, India produced about 200,000 typewriters a year. Godrej, which once advertised its typewriter as a durable machine that “makes a good secretary a great one”, stopped producing typewriters in 2009.

Palta gets nostalgic as he talks about the social and economic history of typewriters, which he says were instrumental in bringing women to the workforce. “ In the 1960s, thousands of women found employment as typists in cities. Those were the days when people made a beeline at typewriting institutes to learn typing. Many considered the skill of typing a key to success in life,” says Palta.

Rajesh Gupta, 69, who runs one of the city’s oldest typewriting training institutes in East Of Kailash, still gets many such students. The institute was started by his father in 1955 at Panchkuian Road, and later shifted to Karol Bagh and then in the 1970s to its current location. Known as Rajesh Gupta Shorthand Institute, today it is one of the most sought-after stenography and typewriting training Institutes in the city, where nine typewriters stay busy throughout the day.

“A lot of my students are those who cannot afford a computer, but then there are also lawyers, doctors and other professionals who believe that good typing speed is a key skill for their personal and professional growth. They want to learn it on a manual typewriter,” says Gupta.

So what is the most important lesson he gives to his wards? “I focus a lot on typing ergonomics. I tell them to keep their posture straight and fingers should be vertical as they press the keys. There is a direct relationship between your posture and the mistakes you make while typing,” says Gupta, who charges ₹1,000 a month. One of his students Sweta Dogra, 27, says though she has a computer at home, she chose to learn typing on a typewriter. “Since there is no word processor or autocorrect on a typewriter, I have drastically improved my spellings by typing on a manual typewriter. Besides, there is no greater joy than seeing a hard copy being produced instantly as you write on a typewriter,” she says.

SK Bansal who runs Anand Type Shorthand & Key Punching College, in Karol Bagh, which has over 50 typing students, agrees with Dogra’s assessment. “Computers can make you intellectually lazy thanks to auto-correction and cut and paste. But, no one wants to use correction fluid on a page typed on a manual typewriter, which exercises both your fingers and mind,” says Bansal.