With the death of Baha’u’llah, Nasiri press was closed down.

Mirza Ibrahim Afnan, a Shirazi merchant residing in Bombay, established the Nasiri press, the first Baha’i press of its kind. Two early publications of the Nasiri press included Baha’u’llah’s Kitab-i Iqan, an apologetic work defending the claims of the Bab, and ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s political reformist text Risalah-i Madaniyah. Both texts had a Muslim audience in mind and made no explicit reference to their authors’ identity. The overwhelming majority of publications were devotional works, including collections of prayers and other scriptures for the consumption of the Baha’i community.

Calligraphers and scribes acted as cultural brokers mediating between the Baha’i leadership located in Palestine and the Nasiri press in India. Since lithography could faithfully reproduce hand-written text, calligraphers and scribes were significant agents in the early history of Baha’i publishing. Baha’u’llah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha dispatched a number of calligraphers and scribes to Bombay, including Mishkin Qalam, Muhammad Husayn Khurtumi, and Jamal al-Din Effendi, in order to engage in a range of tasks related to publishing, varying from delivering manuscripts for publication to preparing lithographed texts. These texts found their way to Iran often through the efforts of these same middlemen. For instance, the itinerant Baha’i scholar Mirza Abu al-Fazl disseminated nineteen lithographed copies of the Bombay Kitab-i Iqan during a trip to Tabriz.

By the mid-1890s, the Nasiri press was at the center of both financial and religious controversy. Presses in India, whether publishing in Persian, Urdu, or Hindi, were rarely successful commercial ventures despite a large potential readership domestically and, in the case of Persian, abroad in Iran and Central Asia. This was especially the case with a Baha’i press whose potential readership was sparse and geographically dispersed. With the death of Baha’u’llah in 1892, the Nasiri press found itself embroiled in the ensuing controversy over succession between ‘Abdu’l-Baha and his half-brother, Mirza Muhammad ‘Ali.

(Farzin Vejdani, Transnational Baha’i Print Culture: Community Formation and Religious Authority, 1890–1921, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 36, No. 4, December 2012)