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Saritā and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2019

AAKRITI MANDHWANI
AAKRITI MANDHWANI*
Affiliation:
SOAS, University of London Email: aakriti_mandhwani@soas.ac.uk
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1797 - 1815
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

My sincere thanks to Francesca Orsini for her generous feedback, advice, and support. I also thank Eleanor Newbigin, Rachel Dwyer, and David Landau for their incisive comments and conversations at SOAS. Many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments, and to Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay for reading multiple versions of this article, as well as to Manasi Karthik for casting her eagle eye on the first draft. I thank the Marwari Library, Delhi for their archives as well as the Nath family, who generously provided me with access to the Delhi Press archives.

References

1 ‘Letters to Editor’, Saritā, January 1950, 6. All translations from Saritā are my own.

2 Gupta, Dharmendra, ed., Laghū Patrikāye aur sāhityik patrakāritā (Delhi: Takshila Prakashan, 2000)Google Scholar is a notable exception, discussing Dharmyug and Sāptāhik Hindustān, published by the Times of India in Bombay and the Hindustan Times in Delhi, respectively. However, Gupta primarily only references the two magazines as an indictment of the commercial magazine space, favouring instead the small-scale but literary magazines. Vanshi, Baldev, ed., Delhi Tea House (Delhi: National, 2009)Google Scholar is a collection of essays and writers’ reminiscences on the tea-house culture of Delhi, although, again casting a cursory glance at the commercial print space. In the collection, while some writers such as Mannu Bhandari fondly recall writing for Dharmyug, Kamleshwar's essay in the collection contains the only recorded reference to Saritā, where he mentions how he could sustain himself in Delhi for a period through his translation work at the Delhi Press group, which publishes the magazine (76–78).

3 See Dalmia, Vasudha, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-century Benaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Orsini, Francesca, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar and, most recently, Nijhawan, Shobna, Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere: Periodical Literature in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 This is perhaps most visible in the arguments on government planning around food shortages. Siegel, Benjamin, in his essay ‘“Self-help Which Ennobles a Nation”: Development, Citizenship, and the Obligations of Eating in India's Austerity Years’, Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 3 (May 2016): 975–1018CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues how the developmental policies immediately following the Independence depended on the citizens’ duty to support the nation's food-development goals, where ‘the new state urged its citizens to give up rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed to forward a plan of industrial development’. Sherman, Taylor C., in ‘From “Grow More Food” to “Miss a Meal”: Hunger, Development and the Limits of Post-Colonial Nationalism in India, 1947–1957’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (December, 2013): 571–588CrossRefGoogle Scholar, lays emphasis on the complications arising from what she calls a clash between ‘scientific and democratic development’. She focuses on the ‘Grow More Food’ campaign, pushing the ‘developmentalist’ argument of growing food further, writing ‘the Indian National Congress party and opposition groups were torn over the question of whether development ought to be pursued using the newly acquired instruments of the bureaucracy or through the old mechanisms of popular action outside of the state’.

5 The semi-annual circulation figures provided by Audit Bureau of Circulations archives show that Saritā’s circulation grew from 10,901 subscribers per month in 1952 to 29,002 in 1960. Saritā, however, was not the best-selling magazine of the time. For instance, Saritā’s success in the 1950s was exceeded in Hindi by lowbrow magazines Māyā and Manohar Kahāniyā̃, averaging circulation figures of 45,590 and 44,746 each between 1950 and 1955. Published from Allahabad, Māyā and Manohar Kahāniyā̃ only published fiction and mostly focused on genres of detective fiction, ghost stories, domestic comedies, and romance.

6 In this regard, the magazine archive is significant because of the access it offers in terms of identity construction of the middle classes. I follow Douglas Haynes and Sanjay Joshi in considering the middle classes as a cultural imaginary. Douglas Haynes, for instance, defines how consumption in the late-colonial period is intrinsically tied up with a deliberate construction of a class identity; the parameter by which the new middle classes come into being is not so much through new income levels, but the way in which they choose to spend their disposable incomes and, in doing that, differentiate themselves from the ‘aristocratic’ groups. See Haynes, Douglas et al. eds, Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Joshi, Sanjay, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

7 A large body of work has deeply invested in theorizing, and denigrating, the middlebrow. Virginia Woolf derides the ‘middlebrow’ as people ‘betwixt and between’, ‘the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between’ the highbrow and the low. Pierre Bourdieu, while subtly layering the modern process of cultural production, also defines ‘middlebrow’ as imitation and pretension to the highbrow. The category has only recently been nuanced by cultural theorists like Janice Radway and Joan Shelley Rubin, who delineate the ‘middlebrow’ as a category separate from the lowbrow and imitation; the ‘middlebrow’ comprises the ‘general reader’ or a ‘generalist’ (Radway, Janice, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 93Google Scholar) and is connected decidedly to ‘the current interest in the phenomenon literary scholars call canon formation’ (Rubin, Joan Shelley, The Making of Middle/brow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xviiiGoogle Scholar). See Woolf, Virginia, The Death of the Moth: and Other Essays (London: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942)Google Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Radway, A Feeling for Books; Rubin, The Making of Middle/brow Culture.

8 Saritā’s main competitor in the middlebrow category was Dharmyug, which, at its massive average circulation rate of 57,914, became the most well-read magazine in the late 1950s. Dharmyug followed Saritā’s structure but focused more on essays and photographs of a Hindu/religious nature until Dharmvir Bharti became its editor in 1960, when it increasingly started being viewed as a literary platform. Apart from Dharmyug, other middlebrow magazines such as Kādambini, Sārikā, and Sāptāhik Hindustān also followed similar models of publication.

9 I follow Douglas Haynes and Sanjay Joshi in considering the middle classes as a cultural imaginary. Douglas Haynes, for instance, defines how consumption in the late-colonial period is intrinsically tied up with a deliberate construction of a class identity; the parameter by which the new middle classes come into being is not so much through new income levels, but the way in which they choose to spend their disposable incomes and, in doing that, differentiate themselves from the ‘aristocratic’ groups (Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption, 10).

10 For a debate on the nationalization of Hindi from the nineteenth century onwards, see Dalmia, Nationalisation; Rai, Alok, Hindi Nationalism (London: Sangam Books, 2001)Google Scholar; Sadana, Rashmi, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)Google Scholar. The Government of India yearbooks provide insights into the post-Independence institutionalization of Hindi. The first page of the 1954 yearbook, for instance, is concerned with ‘Development of Hindi’. The entire yearbook, in fact, is largely concerned with Hindi's progress in 1954. For instance, Hindi became mandatory for the Armed Forces: ‘At the joint services wing, all cadets of the three services have to learn Hindi and pass an examination before they are granted commissions. Officers already commissioned in the services have been asked to pass a test in Hindi, and so far 85% in the Army and 50% in the Navy and the Air Force have passed such tests’ (India Yearbook 1954 (Delhi: The Publications Division, 1955), 117Google Scholar).

11 For a broad history of literary movements in the Hindi short story from 1900 until 1950, see Rai, Gopal, Hindī Kahānī kā Itihās: 1900–1950 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2011)Google Scholar. While the Hindi progressive writers movement was not nearly as prolific as in Urdu, Rai has a detailed analysis of ‘moh bhaṅg’ works written expressly in Hindi. For a larger history of the progressives in India, see Jalil, Rakshanda, Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 In fact, Saritā operates to this day, still run by the family-owned Delhi Press. According to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures that I could access, Saritā had an average monthly circulation run of 98,622 subscribers in 2005.

13 I make all observations in this article from my reading of the available issues of Saritā from the decade spanning 1948 to 1958, as well as some issues from 1960.

14 Sharp, Read Joanne, Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)Google Scholar for her analysis of the idea of the magazine as a digest through the phenomenal post-Second-World-War success of Readers Digest in America.

15 Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere; Nijhawan, Women and Girls; and Ravikant, ‘Words in Motion Pictures: A Social History of Language of “Hindi Cinema” (c. 1931 Till the Present)’ (PhD diss., University of Delhi, 2016).

16 Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 25.

17 The Dwivedi period (1893–1918) is a period of Hindi writing named after Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who notably edited the very successful and influential Hindi journal Saraswatī from 1903 to 1920. Read Sujata S. Mody, ‘Literary Self-determination and the Disciplinary Boundaries of Hindi Literature in the Early Twentieth Century’, South Asia Research, 32, no. 3 (November 2012): 233. Supplemental Index, EBSCOhost (accessed 22 September 2015).

18 ‘Saritā Pravāh’, Saritā, March 1958, 141.

19 See Gupta, Jyotirindra Das, Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

20 Saritā, April 1949, 6.

21 Ibid., 143.

22 ‘1001th issue’, Saritā, January 1997, 21.

23 In fact, Vishwanath and other writers’ essays written against organized religious practices were compiled in the form of nine booklets entitled Saritā Muktā reprints. This essay collection is still in print.

24 Ibid., October 1949, 41.

25 Ibid., November 1960, 208.

26 Rai, Hindi Kahāni ka Itihās: 1900–1950, 402. This quote has been translated from Hindi.

27 See Roadarmel, G. C., The Theme of Alienation in the Modern Hindi Short Story (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1969)Google Scholar for an overview of the Nayī Kahānī movement. Also, refer to the introduction by Yadav, Rajendra, Ek Duniyā Samānantar (Delhi: Radhakrishṇa Prakashan, 1996)Google Scholar.

28 Rai, Hindi Kahāni ka Itihās: 1900-1950, 441.

29 Some of the writers published in the 1950s included Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Yadav, and Yashpal. Rajendra Yadav is widely known as one of the founders of the Nayī Kahānī. Yashpal's 1958–60 two-part novel, Jhūṭhā Sach, is perhaps the best-known example of literary ‘moh bhaṅg’, evident from the title itself, which can be loosely translated as ‘Untrue Truth’. Jhūṭhā Sach can broadly be understood as a critique of Indian Independence, which the novel clearly questions in light of the partition. Although Yashpal politically leaned to the Communist Party and saw himself as a Marxist, he never joined the party or the progressive writers association. See Friend, Corinne, ‘Yashpal: Fighter for Freedom-writer for Justice’, Journal of South Asian Literature 13, no. 1/4 (1977): 65–90Google Scholar; Yashpal, , Jhūṭhā Sach (Delhi: Lokbharati Prakashan, 2010)Google Scholar.

30 Saritā, May 1957, n.p.

31 Ibid., May 1949, 61.

32 Ibid., March 1949, 61.

33 For this section, readers’ letters, or the ‘Āpke patr’ section, were consulted from 1948 to 1958. On average, the magazine published at least six or seven letters every month without fail, taking up at least four or five pages at the beginning of the magazine. Many times, a response note from the editor also accompanied the letters.

34 ‘Letters to Editor’, Saritā, June 1949, 10.

35 Ibid., January 1953, n.p.

36 Pratīk was launched in 1947 under the editorship of Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’. Agyeya was one of the leading literary figures of the time who pioneered the ‘Nayī Kavitā’ or ‘New Poetry’ movement. He was also a proponent of the ‘Prayogvād’ or ‘experimental’ turn in Hindi writing. See Rosenstein, Lucy, New Poetry in Hindi: Nayi Kavita an Anthology (London: Anthem Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Rai, Alok, ‘Reading Pratik through Agyeya: Reading Agyeya through Pratik’, in Hindi Modernism: Rethinking Agyeya and His Times, ed. Dalmia, Vasudha (Berkeley, CA: Center for South Asia Studies, 2012), 17–30Google Scholar.

37 ‘Letters to Editor’, Saritā, November 1949, 6.

38 Ibid., Saritā, December 1949, 6.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., February 1950, n.p.

41 ‘Naye Aṅkur’, Saritā, January 1952, n.p.

42 In addition, the vast critical narrative on the Nayī Kahānī does not consider the possibilities of how genre is inflected within the alternative urban space of the magazine, especially since multiple Nayī Kahānī writers wrote for numerous commercial magazines such as Saritā and Dharmyug. Therefore, while one finds snippets of writers associations with magazines, the critical narrative has not yet accounted for the literary writer's space within the commercial middlebrow magazine.

43 A rākhī is a ceremonial thread a sister ties to her brother during the festival of Rakshā Bandhan as a mark of trust who, in return, pledges to protect her.

44 ‘Pāṭhakõ kī samasyāẽ’, Saritā, March 1953, 95.

45 ‘Letters to Editor’, Saritā, June 1949, 12.

46 Ibid., May 1950.

47 Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 270.

48 Ibid., 274.

49 Ibid., 284.

50 Nijhawan, Women and Girls, 18.

51 Ibid., 4.

52 Ibid., 21.

53 ‘Letters to Editor’, ibid., March 1949.

54 Refer to Orsini, Francesca, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009)Google Scholar.

55 The discourse on the period has indeed focused on major constitutional debates raging in the parliament, ranging from the debate over the first amendment in the Indian constitution over the right to free speech in 1951 to the formulation of the Hindu Code Bill that led to B. R. Ambedkar's resignation, again in 1951, and, most recently, through tracing the afterlife of colonial legal practices in the post-colonial period. Refer to De, Rohit, ‘“Commodities Must Be Controlled”: Economic Crimes and Market Discipline in India (1939–55)’, International Journal of Law in Context 10 (2014): 277–294CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Web. 29 November 2014. See Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha, ed. Hardiman, David (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, for his articulation of the complicity of the state archive in projecting the partition experience as inexplicably aberrational stands at the centre of the discourse.

56 See works by Dwyer, Rachel and Patel, Divia, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Vasudevan, Ravi, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Prasad, Madhava, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.