The 20 years or so after World War Two were a time of rapid development in the publishing industry. For instance, the paperback revolution made books more affordable. Book clubs kept up the momentum of reading, discussions, and curation going to sustain, or even expand reading cultures. The easy availability of books by the roadside, for example, turned borrowers of books into buyers.
While these developments have been well researched in the West, much less is known about how this process played out in India, especially with regard to publishing in regional languages. In Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class, Aakriti Mandhwani offers a portrait of the Hindi middlebrow and lowbrow publications—book publishing and magazines—in the 1950s and 1960s. Her research shows overlaps between Hindi publishing and international developments while also suggesting the characteristics of the sector that are rooted in the North Indian socio-cultural fabric.
The players Mandhwani focuses on are book publisher Hind Pocket Books, middlebrow magazines Sarita (‘River”) and Dharmyug (“The Epoch of Dharma”), and genre magazines (which the author equates with lowbrow at least in the context of this discussion) Maya (“Illusion”), Rasili Kahaniyan (“Juicy Stories”), and Manohar Kahaniyan (“Captivating Stories”). Sarita was (and still is) a family magazine content catering to readers’ interests by age, gender and marital status.
Hind Pocket Books curated books for their readers: the readers could refuse or return titles they did not like to the publisher but they could not choose the titles. Dharmyug started out with carrying religious calendar art—something that made the issues collectibles—but went on to publish modernist writing in Hindi along with translations of existentialist writers. The lowbrow magazines offered low quality paper at lower prices but, in contrast to the middlebrow publishing, did bring up issues such as food and commodity scarcity.
The emergence and popularity of these players stands in contrast with what is known about Hindi in general prior to India’s independence in 1947. For instance, the publishing activity before 1947 elevated Hindi as a national language and writing in Hindi as an act of service to the language and the nation. In contrast, this later publishing shows Hindi as a much more “everyday phenomenon”, more interested in consumption and expression of aspirations towards things ranging from world literature (in Hindi translation) to thrilling (“romanchak”) content.
Infrastructural changes accompanied the change in content and tonality. Government subsidies made it easier for books to be published and consumed. A Home Library Scheme encouraged people to build up libraries at home by making books affordable. The Indian Post Office put branches in publishers’ premises because the demand or subscription for their content was high enough for them to merit independent facilities.
Publishers and/or editors of these houses often consciously fashioned their content after Penguin paperbacks and book clubs in the West. Similarly, the metropolises of Bombay and Delhi became hubs of middlebrow publishing while Allahabad (called Prayagraj today) published lowbrow magazines. Although anchored in the local culture, conspicuous by its absence was discussion of caste, poverty, and religious minorities in the content. In other words, while the books and magazines touched aspects of consumption and taste that reflected their readers’ day to day lives, they stayed away from the unpleasant or controversial aspects of their lives.
There is now increasing interest in how content is produced and disseminated in regional languages. Tyler Williams recently wrote about the history of how books came to be in Hindi. Mandhwani’s research about publishing in modern times deserves to be followed up by observations about other time periods in the language’s dissemination of reading materials.
At a time when death of books and publishing houses is routinely declared, these histories can produce perspectives on how young or old publishing is, what its previous avatars have been, and where it is likely to go in future.