Everyday Reading By Aakriti Mandhwani: Hindi Magazines That Shaped Post-Independence Middle Class

When I was growing up in the nineties in a small north-온라인카지노 town, the hey-days of reading and magazines were already long gone. With television as the primary source of entertainment and cable tv just around the corner, reading no longer occupied the place it once had in middle class north-온라인카지노 households.

Sure, you could find a stray copy of Sarita here, of a novel published by Hind Pocket Books somewhere else, but the days when magazines like Sarita, Saptahik Hindustan and Dharmyug could boast of huge circulation figures were in the past. What made these publications so mammoth in their heyday and how did these publications catered to – and created – the tastes of their readers is what Aakriti Mandhwani’s book Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North 온라인카지노 Middle Class is about. 

 Mandhwani’s book stems from her doctoral thesis and, as such, is founded on solid and pain-staking research that she conducted by talking to publishers, librarians, editors and by visiting various libraries and collections that gave her an insight into what the reading scene of the middle-class households was like in the decades after independence.

In the book’s Introduction, Mandhwani defines middlebrow in the post-independent context as “a reading practice that accords equal space to male and female readers for creative expression, focuses on nonnationalist subject matter, instead generating interest in consumption, of the magazine as well as the objects and services discussed or advertised within the magazine.”

These publications also opened new vistas for their readers, be it through their photospreads or through their travel essays and publication of contemporary literature. It is through this lens that she examines publications like Sarita, Hind Pocket Books and Dharmyug along with a few genre magazines like Maya, Rasili Kahaniyaan and Manohar Kahaniyaan. 

 Mandhwani’s chapter on Sarita discusses the magazine’s rejection of certain positions when it came to religion and language, quite in contrast to the publications that preceded it. She talks about the magazine during the 1950s with Vishwa Nath as its editor, giving a detailed idea of what all columns the magazine comprised of, the kind of topics it chose to cover, the advertisements it published, and even the kind of language it encouraged through its publication.

It’s interesting to note how Sarita becomes a magazine that involves the readers by publishing their letters containing critique of the material published in the magazine’s previous issues, letters that ask solutions to readers’ personal problems and even answers to these questions by other readers. Mandhwani also dedicates considerable time and space to discuss the short stories published in Sarita and their impact in creating a new space and raising new questions when it came to women and family of the middle classes.  

 In contrast, Mandhwani’s study of Dharmyug focuses on the relationship between the magazine and its most famous editor, Dharmvir Bharti much more so than the relationship of Sarita with its then editor Vishwa Nath. Mandhwani gives her readers an idea of how the magazine grew and changed shape under the hands of Bharti, in particular the replacement of photo essays that “heavily favoured photos of the Gods” with a greater emphasis on literary features and travel pieces, including essays on existential literature and writers like Soren Kierkegaard. She also emphasises that under the editorship of Bharati, its “religious content was ‘phased out’ in favour of more literary articles” thus creating a different kind of middlebrow readership.  

Her study of Hind Pocket Books, a publisher of affordable paperbacks, begins with a history of the publishing house and how its founder Dina Nath Malhotra made the books so popular and accessible that a woman living in a village in Mithila could use a supposedly literary phrase  like “bhoga hua yatharth” or lived reality in her daily conversation.

Apart from this, Mandhwani also focuses on what makes this publication strictly middlebrow – the genres it excluded such as detective fiction, horror, thriller and pornography, as well as those it included such as romance and melodrama, satire, literary poetry from Urdu, Nayi Kahani and self-help books that were often a translation of books published in the USA. She also makes a special point to mention how the publication’s selection of Urdu poetry “calls into question the rejection of Urdu by the Hindi literary establishment as well as by the state.”   

 Her final chapter before the conclusion delves into the world of low-brow magazines and covers ways in which they were different from – and similar to – their middle brow counterparts.

Through her study of the ‘romanchak’ stories and the advertisements published in these publications and comparing them with those of the middlebrow publications, Mandhwani shows her readers how these publications challenged and subverted the expectations of, for instance, womanhood through their stories; the entertainment value they provided; and the absence of readers’ comments and the lack of a strong presence of editors.

She also shows the paradox of writing for this genre by citing examples of two stories by Manto and Upendranath Ashq, both writers who seemed to flit easily and seamlessly between the generic and the literary. 

Mandhwani’s deep research and academic background is clearly visible in the various examples, quotations and her analyses that pervade the book. However, there are moments when the use of phrases like “I argue”, “I suggest” remind one of the academic origins of the book.

Besides, when one contrasts her chapters on the two magazines, the chapter on Sarita feels meatier as compared to Dharmyug. Mandhwani also omits any mention of Saptahik Hindustan, a magazine by the Hindustan Times group that often vied for the top spot with Dharmyug. Some discussion/comparison between these magazines would have added to the value of the book.    

 Apart from these minor niggles, the book is a treasure trove for anyone looking to know what the middle classes read in the decade immediately after India’s independence and how these readings, in turn, shaped them. The book fills the gap about Hindi readership during a certain era and is sure to introduce many contemporary readers to the rich and thriving reading/publishing tradition in Hindi which, sadly, seems to have become a thing of yore.