Thammasat University students interested in journalism, media and communications studies, India, publishing, sociology, history, ethnography, South Asian literary studies, gender studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 9 September Zoom book talk on Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India.
The event, on Monday, 9 September 2024 at 5pm Bangkok time, is presented by the School of Humanities, Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures and Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=96221
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of publishing in India.
The event website explains:
Event Details
The Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, presents:
Book Talk – Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India
Speaker:
Aakriti Mandhwani, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR
Respondent:
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU […]
“Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India” captures the significant and yet largely unexplored world of commercially successful print and publishing in post-Independence India. It examines the world of “middlebrow” commercial publishing and practices of reading of North Indian middle-classes in the 1950s and 60s, the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947. While the immediate post-Independence period in India has been studied largely from the perspective of planning, policy, and the partition, the overarching and dominant critical narrative that emerges from the period emphasises sacrifice over personal pleasure, marking each citizen’s unconditional contribution to the nation’s growth. However, it was also a time when middle class selves were being re-imagined, and re-articulated themselves, in multiple ways. Taking as its focus the form and content of a range of bestselling middlebrow magazines and paperbacks in Hindi, “Everyday Reading” constructs an alternative story for the 1950s: one that is marked by consumption. The book argues that the middle classes who read these publications were everyday active consumers who defied the state’s prescriptions, carving their roles outside the logic of the austere nation.
Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include “Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories,” edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction.
With any questions or for further information, students may write to
According to the publisher’s description of Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India,
During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines—like Delhi Press’s Saritā—and the first paperbacks in Hindi—Hind Pocket Books—North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion.
Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices—particularly those of women—Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.
TU students may access this book through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
In 2019, Associate Professor Mandhwani published an article in Modern Asian Studies, Saritā and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader.
Its abstract:
The article discusses Saritā, one of the best-selling Hindi magazines of the 1950s, and the part it played in the establishment of the Hindi ‘middlebrow’ reader. While a rich and vibrant journal culture in Hindi had existed since the nineteenth century, what distinguishes the post-1947 Hindi popular magazine is the emergence of the middle class as a burgeoning consumer. Saritā defied prescriptions of Nehruvian state building, as well as the right-wing discourses of nationalism and national language prevalent in the post-Independence space. In addition, it reconfigured biases towards gendered reading and consumption processes, as well as encouraging increased reader participation. This article argues for Saritā’s role in the creation of a middlebrow reading space in the period immediately following Independence, since it not only packaged what was deemed wholesome and educational for the family as a unit, but also, most significantly, promoted readership in segments, with a focus on each individual’s reading desires.
The Introduction begins:
“Everyday my sister-in-law and I quarrel. She says she’ll read and I say I will. Mother gets very angry at these quarrels. She says, don’t bring books that cause quarrels in the house. You say, one shouldn’t give one’s book to anyone. Should we buy two copies then?”
This letter appears prominently in the January 1950 issue of the Hindi magazine Saritā. In asking this question, Babulal Ahir, the rather distressed reader from Bombay, voices the concern of several households facing a similar tussle for the monthly. In this article, I argue that the middlebrow magazine of the 1950s—as a desirable material object and, consequently, an object of quarrel within the household—is vital to understanding the emergence, nature, and concerns of the Hindi middle-class reader in the post-Independence period.
Academic and literary histories in and on Hindi have largely overlooked contributions made by commercial print and magazine cultures in the decade following India’s independence. Even as vibrant literary as well as popular print cultures thrived concurrently in Hindi from the late nineteenth century onwards, the article argues that the post-1947 commercial magazine marks the emergence of the reader as a bourgeoning consumer. Given this, the article centres on post-Independence middle-class reading—and consumption—practices. I contend that the commercial magazines in Hindi reflected the anxieties immediately following Independence where the pre-Independence rhetoric of nationalism, service, and duty, echoed in the largely nationalist journals of the early twentieth century, could no longer bind together or justify gender roles or hierarchies, relationships, and consumer behaviour. Particularly, if the Nehruvian nation-building narrative rested on an insistence on the deferral of pleasure in service of the nation, I suggest that the archive of the bourgeoning post-Independence Hindi commercial magazine offers an unexpectedly rich entry point to an alternative understanding of the middle classes as everyday consumers who defied the state’s prescription by carving their roles outside the institutional logic of austerity.
The article focuses on Saritā—one of the best-selling Hindi magazines of the 1950s—to demonstrate these anxieties and alternative narratives. Saritā performed the function of a digest, possessing something for everyone in the family, promoting segmented consumption with a focus on each member’s reading desires, with something on offer for each individual, regardless of age, gender, or marital status. The article employs Saritā to understand the post-Independence, particularly the 1950s, increase in individualized acts of and demands for reading, particularly by women, within the space of the family that had, as a unit, begun to covet the magazine as a material object and, most importantly, as can be seen through the above illustration, reference itself in the light of its consumption. Through Saritā, the article will delineate this departure by delving into the emergence of what I term the middlebrow magazine culture that promotes consumption as its primary impulse. I argue that Saritā was one of the pioneering magazines that created a middle ground in Hindi publishing, marketing itself as a viable alternative to literary and highbrow magazines on the one hand and the existing range of lowbrow magazines on the other. Here, the middlebrow as a phenomenon connects practices of reading within the middle classes alone and within a specific kind of literature that is central to the fashioning of class identity. Therefore, while I do not purport to conflate all middle-class reading as middlebrow, I investigate the Hindi middlebrow reading practices in the 1950s as one of the definitive refrains that middle classes used to imagine as well as articulate themselves. The category, hence, becomes particularly useful because of the access it offers in terms of identity construction of the middle classes.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)