‘Women read the magazines as a matter of right’
Aakriti Mandhwani’s ‘Everyday Reading’ is a refreshingly fresh take on the middlebrow publishing and reading practices of the North Indian middle classes in the 1950s and 1960s. Through magazines Sarita and Dharmyug, as well as Hind Pocket Books, the first paperbacks in Hindi, Mandhwani, who is associate professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi NCR, examines the reading habits of a nation newly Independent India and tries to piece together the concerns of the North Indian Hindi-reading middle classes.
How did the idea of this book occur to you? What is it that you had set out to investigate?
I was actually not looking to work on these materials at all — they came to me quite accidentally, when I was writing my MPhil thesis on Hindi pulp fiction king Surendra Mohan Pathak’s decision to market his books differently than they were before, choosing to use better quality paper, typesetting, covers, increasing his book prices price substantially. I then began to trace the history of readers and publications of Hindi pulp and middlebrow publications and found this wealth of material that had not really been critically examined in either Hindi or English language criticism.
How and why did you choose to study Sarita, Dharmyug and Hind Pocket Books? Were these a staple in your own house?
I grew up in a Sindhi-speaking household with an unlettered grandmother who only learnt to read at 60. And the early 1990s were about a different sort of belonging, to English — my father, for instance, was avidly subscribed to Newsweek, India Today and Outlook. But I saw these magazines and paperbacks in my nani’s (maternal grandmother’s) house. I chose to study these materials because of their historical importance. They were ubiquitous in their heyday, the most-read publications of the post-Independence period. It is often repeated that no Hindi reading household could exist without a copy of Dharmyug. Everyone knew and still knows Sarita. The popular, the middlebrow, deserves attention because it was so widespread and well read.
How do you define middlebrow?
I look at these growing middlebrow publications and readers as a response to Independence — the nation had won its hard-earned freedom, suffered the despair of Partition and its rising middle classes wanted to fashion themselves as something apart from being paragons of sacrifice in service to the nation. Therefore, this middlebrow imagined itself on the basis of consumption and not deferral of pleasure. Women especially began to see themselves as more than mothers of and in service to the nation — they actively imagined themselves as non-surreptitious readers of the magazines and objects advertised in the magazines. This middlebrow read genres elsewhere classified as high literary and the lowbrow and also was invested in the need to know about the world in ways the periodicals and paperbacks framed as accessible.
Who were the people reading these magazines and books and where were they based?
These classes are the great middle classes, shaping themselves as the new nation strove to make meaning for itself. These magazines and books give us tantalising clues into where these readers were writing in from. Letters poured in from all over the country (and sometimes even the world!), but more regularly from the Hindi heartland.
Were women mainly the readers of these books? Do we know how widespread education among women was at this time? Because these would be women born in the 1930 and 40s, or even earlier…
Literacy levels in the country were abysmal, and reports tell us that women’s literacy levels even more so. I show in my book that women are not the sole readers of these middlebrow magazines and paperbacks — the entire family reads them. Advertisements for these magazines are geared towards men, women and children; these are framed as digests with something for everyone. But these women read them as a matter of right, framing themselves as reading for pleasure and not just for ennoblement or to produce seva (service). There is also another interesting angle to how people (and women) read. Print historical research shows us that a lot of reading also took place not just individually but communally.
How was Independence shaping up this generation? What clues do the magazines throw?
The magazines I show are quite interested in thinking about citizenship but often outside the confines of duty. Literary historical sources across Hindi and Urdu show us that leading writers are disenchanted with the fruits of Independence, most prominently expressed through the idea of “moh bhang” (“disenchantment”) that questioned if, even after formal independence from British rule, India had achieved any real freedom at all. But this disenchantment is not just of the left/progressive factions, it also spills on to the middle classes’ vision of their worlds. Middlebrow worldmaking shows ubiquitous consumption, often of objects under strict commodity control by the government.
What were the ‘trending’ topics in writing?
All sorts, really! Much fiction focused on the question of female subjectivity within and out of marriage. Writers from all over wrote for these publications. Yashpal and Mohan Rakesh mingled with one-act domestic play writers like Vimla Luthra, now absent from literary history. Lowbrow genre fiction also focused on all manners of questions — melodramatic poverty and unemployment, poor living conditions and the lack of privacy, fissures drawn across religious belonging, desire and the pressures of the joint family. Here, too, Manto, Dostoevsky and Ashk rubbed shoulders with absolutely unknown writers.
On the on hand, there was Sarita — forward thinking, rationalist, indicative of an India eager to march ahead with the world; on the other was Dharmyug with its posters of Gods, indicative of an India that wanted to hold on to the past… In a way, do Sarita and Dharmyug also exemplify the churning/dilemmas India was going through?
Absolutely! The lore goes that Dharmyug was begun to counter the critical energies of Sarita. But under Dharmvir Bharti, Dharmyug also displayed another Hindu India — one which was interested in consuming calendar images of the gods, reading dharm and vrat kathas but alongside hard-hitting fiction by Yashpal and existential literature. We often think of these in terms of either/or binaries, but they comingled in Dharmyug.
What kind of research went into this book? Was the archive readily available, waiting to be explored?
The popular, considered ephemeral and therefore not worth keeping, is not easily found outside of some places that may have forgotten that it has them. Rekhta and Tasveer Ghar are incredible spaces that have digitised some popular material, but unfortunately none of my materials were online! It took a bit of sleuthing and piecing together the archive from a variety of sources. It was a combination of making trips to libraries and archives away from Delhi that are suffering huge financial burdens, access to private collections, along with the goodwill of publishing houses like Delhi Press and Hind Pocket Books, which allowed me access to their own archives.
What would be the heyday of these publications? Did their popularity become a factor in the downfall of Urdu in post-Independence India?
The heyday really is the decades I am looking at, till the television becoming ubiquitous, I suppose. The downfall of Urdu is another interesting matter of study. For instance, the numbers tell us that Urdu popular publications had as many readers as the most popular Hindi magazines, showing us that deterritorialisation of language didn’t take place till much, much later.
