E-Paper
Aakriti Mandhwani: “Dissent existed in the middlebrow”
The author of ‘Everyday Reading’ on the print culture that emerged in Hindi in the two decades after India’s independence that allowed for the articulation of alternatives to dominant national narratives
You write that scholars have not examined the middlebrow and lowbrow publications featured in Everyday Reading in either English or Hindi. Why is that the case?
I want to emphasise the period I work on — the 1950s and ’60s. While there is a rich body of work on popular print culture and periodicals in the 20th century in both Hindi and English, the 1950s often gets lost as a moment of analysis. It’s dismissed as a time when the nation is in the making, during which it deserves a pause. And after that, things start happening suddenly. It’s like a stepping stone to later decades. The 1950s is also thought of in terms of the Nehruvian mould and nation-building, which rests on the deferral of pleasure. This idea of the 1950s needs to be punctured — my research showed other aspects of it.
The history of Hindi during this period is overwhelming too. It focuses on Constituent Assembly debates and Hindi’s battle with English as India’s official language. This masks other conversations happening around the language. Besides, a lot of scholarly work focuses on modernist, experimental, or progressive writing and literary magazines. The shadow of Premchand, who died a decade or so before, also looms large on this era.
You touch upon how difficult it was to do archival work for the research. How did you go about it?
Working on popular periodicals is particularly hard because nobody wants to preserve them. They’re ephemeral: they were read and then literally pulped. So, you have to chase materials with all you’ve got.
I got lucky with Hind Pocket Books, which existed as an entity then; it’s now sold off to Penguin. I could access their publications in Noida, though I was held back by whatever they had. I found the Delhi Press archival material in the Marwari Public Library. The library is not only hot and humid, but the joke is that they only allow one fan for a certain number of students — you can’t have two fans running for two students.
The humidity, heat, and exchanges over tea are common to a lot of archival research. When I was doing my PhD, I would longingly look at people getting work done in air-conditioned libraries in London, Delhi, and other centres of learning and archival sourcing. That was rarely the case for me.
The exciting part was that I found sources in the unlikeliest of places. I found lowbrow magazines in the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, a Hindi nationalist organisation interested in conserving the idea of the literary and only a certain kind of Hindi. Yet, there was a librarian somewhere who thought they were worth preserving!
But I tell scholars to get to the material as fast as they can because it’s literally crumbling. In the last chapter, I talk about how I was standing with the librarian at the Bharati Bhavan Library in Allahabad and he pointed to me where Nehru, Malviya, and other luminaries lived. The library is underfunded and in total shambles. Despite their best efforts, the magazines were crumbling in my hands. That is the nightmare of every historian.
You mentioned how you found lowbrow magazines at the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan. Did you go looking for them there?
No. My entire project was initially on middlebrow magazines. I had gone there to look at Dharmyug, which is the most remembered and revered Hindi magazine. If I hadn’t gone there and thumbed through the register, the old catalogue, and library cards — those extinct things — I wouldn’t have found the lowbrow material. I loved what I found. In many ways, it shed much more light on the 1950s and ’60s than middlebrow magazines. That’s the joy of discovering things materially. It’s also an argument against solely digital conservation.
In the chapter Romanch and the 1950s, you write, “no reader responses could be gleaned to substantiate the afterlife of these [lowbrow] magazines.” Were you able to get in touch with readers of some of the other magazines you write about?
Many readers of these magazines are no more. I put out calls on social media, etc., but realised that oral histories were not the way forward. Some people get lucky and find oral histories preserved beautifully in archives and libraries, but that didn’t happen in my case.
I found more and richer work in front of me: readers’ letters. There are also writers’ memoirs, but they remember what they want to remember. They’re not always authentic; there’s usually some culling or sifting through history. So, the magazines themselves were the most reliable sources.
Now that the book is out and about, I get letters from people saying that they wrote letters to Dharmyug in the 1971 issue or that their mother used to read Sarita. It’s meaningful to learn that people are remembering a time when magazines were read.
You use the word lowbrow “primarily to denote publishing practices — low-quality paper, lower price — rather than a particular type of textual production or a segment of readership in a qualitative or derogatory manner”. How did the idea of conceptualising lowbrow as publishing practices come about?
I didn’t start with readymade concepts — that’s never advisable. The materials revealed themselves to me. The word middlebrow came to me after my dissatisfaction with the available terms. Many magazines were called parivarik (for families) or disparaged as mahila upyogi (useful for women). Others were termed cheap, vulgar, or inflammatory.
But the overlaps in readership, the fact that writers were writing across all these magazines, and that the magazines were distinguishing themselves through multiple parameters, such as their content and advertisements, made me resort to a different vocabulary. For instance, lowbrow magazines published only genre fiction and were cheaper compared to middlebrow ones. Space was at such a premium that they placed the table of contents in a corner and didn’t include readers’ letters. They also had long ads without any visuals proffering medicines for birth control and menstruation and sexual problems.
In the 1950s, however, lowbrow magazines were sometimes printed on the same paper as middlebrow ones. So, while interrogating publishing materials can tell us a lot about publishers’ and readers’ choices, looking at just one parameter of publishing practices will not instantly reveal what it denoted. There was stratification among middlebrow magazines too. For example, Sarita, a monthly, cost as much as Dharmyug, a weekly, while the lowbrow Manohar Kahaniyan cost almost one-third to one-fourth.
Middlebrow has had a long life — it was earlier disparaged, but American sociologists and feminist book historians recovered it in the 1980s. Now, it is seen as a category of taste in its own right, not as emulative or trying to go somewhere else.
I also wanted to complicate these categories because I often get questions about how many people were reading. There were advertisements for Dharmyug in lowbrow magazines, which points to overlaps in readership.
What are these magazines’ preoccupations today compared to during the post-independence era you chronicled? How have these magazines evolved?
More than their evolution, I tried to delve into their history. Maya Press was publishing magazines in the 1940s, much before I pick up the story. Many of these magazines were different earlier. Maya, for instance, was more ‘literary’. It had world literature and non-fiction, and discussed social issues, but with time, it completely shifted to genre fiction.
However, I could not draw a linear history because of the absence of archives. There were halting histories. Maybe others will uncover something in the future. There are private collectors, but I did not go through those routes.
Pre-1950 publications are recorded beautifully in several archives. But only nationalist journals and those that focus on service to the nation, family, or mother are preferred for preservation. Last year, I went to the Sapre Sangrahalaya in Bhopal, where passionate and mostly self-taught librarians and archivists were digitising periodicals. They care about and derive their sense of self from working with historical records. They don’t have much money — they might have ₹5 lakh from the State Bank of India — so they have to prioritise. And they prioritise journals that are nationalist or in the service of Hindi. Other journals doing interesting things get left behind.
You write that “working with materials in a language separate from the language one writes and publishes in presents its own existential questions”. What effect did working across languages or writing in English about Hindi publications have on your research?
In Chapter 4, I talk about romanch, the thrill that comes from fear. I found the term useful and could not find any equivalent elsewhere, so it became a conceptual category. That’s the beauty of working between two languages. You have this vast vocabulary and can move beyond Derrida and Foucault (laughs).
Beyond that, any serious academic history should guard itself from being extractive. It shouldn’t write about or translate [Hindi journals] for English readers. It needs to expand scholarship in both languages and traditions. Working across languages requires facility in the languages as well as in research scholarship in the languages. We’re not just reading content to piece together a narrative — we have to be sensitive to the nuances of language and form.
If you’re writing a book about Hindi, it better be in Hindi. I am now rewriting my book in Hindi. But that presents existentialist questions because to write critically in the language, you have to contend with its nationalist history. Alok Rai talks about this concern in his wonderful book Hindi Rashtravad (Hindi Nationalism). How do you avoid the language of Hindi nationalism when writing in Hindi? What words do you include or exclude? Would you expunge words that are considered Urdu now?
Personally, what did you enjoy most about the publications you discuss in Everyday Reading?
I loved the mingling of authors — both high and low, canonical and non-canonical — across periodicals. You have celebrated authors like Manto and Ashk appearing in lowbrow magazines and asking difficult questions. So, are they just magazines you read surreptitiously and draw cheap thrills from? In the concluding chapter, Who’s Afraid of Manmath Nath Gupta, I write about how Gupta, a revolutionary and literary critic, wrote for almost every publication. I find it funny that I keep coming across his writings even now in archives. Authors needed to make money, we often forget about that aspect.
The periodicals also gave me hope in the power of print and the alternate forms of belonging it nurtured. Dissent existed in the middlebrow, so perhaps it could once again.
Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.
