In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intellectual and cultural life in South Asia was transformed by an imperial postal revolution. Texts, and the news, views and opinions contained within them, began to move across the ocean at an unprecedented speed and in an equally intensified volume. This lecture podcast, originally given as a keynote address to the 2021 Distant Communications conference (https://twitter.com/DistantCommuni1), explores the intellectual and cultural ramifications of this literary transformation on Asian identities, communities and intelligentsia.