How the Hindi magazine ‘Sarita’ cultivated new reading practices and redefined the Indian citizen

Launched in 1945 by the Delhi-based printing-turned-publishing house Delhi Press, Saritā was among the widely read Hindi monthlies of the 1950s. Munshi Thakur Das established Delhi Press in 1911 exclusively as a printing press, and Vishwa Nath, his great-grandson, was the first in the family to begin publishing with the launch of the English language magazine Caravan in 1940, which, along with Saritā, he edited through the 1950s. Saritā was priced at one rupee, and an average issue ran over one hundred pages and sometimes even around two hundred pages. Saritā catered to a variety of readers, made evident from its structure.

Saritā comprised separate sections not only for different such fictional genres as short stories and one-act plays (ekāṅkī) but also for the more “serious” nonfiction articles (lekh), averaging four to six pieces of each genre. A self-help or assorted section usually followed, including advice columns on how to solve small household problems. The serialised novel (dhārāvāhī) was next; then came all the regular columns: Āpke patr (readers’ letters), Chañchal Chhāyā (film reviews), Nayā sāhitya (book reviews), and Varg pahelī, a Hindi crossword competition with cash prizes. Later, sections added included those on “Photograph,” cooking, and knitting; Pāṭhakõ kī samasyāẽ (Agony Aunt, added in November 1951); Priya mitr (Pen Pal, added in December 1949); and Bāl Saritā (children’s literature). Saritā thus provided everyone in the family something to read.

The magazine as an artifact that offered something to everyone was not novel. Widely read pre-independence journals like Sarasvatī, Mādhurī, and Chā̃d (Moon) had similar intentions and formats. However, as Francesca Orsini argues, these journals articulated reading and writing in terms of “service” (sevā) to Hindi and to the nation (rāṣṭrasevā, or “service of nation”). Saritā, on the other hand, used familiar formats and structure to highlight very different questions from the ones that the pre-independence journals asked. Therefore, although these journals articulated a seamless, unhesitating agreement between “service of literature” (sāhitya sevā) and the nationalist framing of “women’s duty” (strīdharma) and “service of nation,” the pages of Saritā told a different story, ignoring or reconfiguring the concerns that had animated journal cultures and, by extension, the public sphere. In fact, it was by distancing itself from classic questions of nationalism that Saritā came to define what I term the “middlebrow magazine.” For instance, Saritā did not carry any sections on nationalist poetry. Essays on imagining either an ideal nation or idealised subjects in the service of the nation were notably sparse: the monthly did not, however, completely isolate itself from the realities of the new nation, carrying a recurring section on the Indian Constitution and discussing varied contemporary concerns like language policy and the Nehruvian government’s stand on communism. At the same time, the exclusion of the discourse of nationalism, so soon after independence, is remarkable precisely because of its emphasis in the pre-independence journals.

This can also be seen at the level of language politics: again, Hindi was one of the primary concerns of pre-independence magazines, but Saritā did not champion or defend any particular form of institutionalised or literary Hindi. By contrast, in an editorial in the March 1958 issue, Vishwa Nath began, “Hindi – or should we call it Hindustani – because it includes both Hindi and Urdu . . .” This editorial declaration is significant, especially given the wide promotion of Hindi as national language in pre-independence Hindi periodicals in general. This choice, preferring “Hindustani” to Hindi or Urdu, also comes from a drawn-out, decades-long public debate. Saritā, therefore, did not prioritise service to an institutionalised, nationalised Hindi. Vishwa Nath categorically argued against a homogenised nationalist imagination, advocating language syncretism instead.

Saritā’s writing style on the whole followed this avowal, deploying words from the shared language bank. This sentiment was also visible in the magazine’s script itself, which employed the diacritic marks, termed nuqtā to denote Urdu phonemes. In acknowledging the nuqtā, rather than erasing or avoiding it, Saritā directly linked the script with Hindustani rather than Hindi, registering a protest against the deterritorialisation of language.

Saritā addressed not only the Hindi-Urdu debate but also the prominent one between Hindi and English, the subject of heated arguments in the parliament regarding India’s official and national language. When an irate reader complained to Saritā about its use of what he called an “English” full stop, recommending that Saritā “return” to the “Hindi” punctuation style of the pūrṇa virām to mark the end of each sentence, Vishwa Nath responded, “If other punctuations such as , ; — can be used in Hindi, then why take issue with the ‘full stop’? Also, the English ‘full stop’ takes up less space compared to the Hindi ‘pūrṇa virām.’” Saritā argued for practicality, functionality, ease, and syncretism, both at the level of words themselves and of the script.

Vishwa Nath also addressed the debate around the possibility of Sanskrit becoming mandatory in schools. He argued that Sanskrit was no longer in common currency and, historically, could never be given its Hindu upper-caste connections. Instead, he advocated English as the lingua franca: “If it is a question of the country’s equality and literature, then no other language can lead it apart from English . . . because the unity that exists because of English today cannot be obtained through any other language.” In proposing English as a unifying national language, Vishwa Nath showed that Saritā did not partake in the Hindi nationalist anxieties vis-à-vis English. This stance, in turn, built its reputation as a middlebrow magazine that fed its readers’ imaginations as being an all-knowing, unbiased, and confident space that was also, at the same time, easy to understand, approach, and, if needed, apprehend. Another constituent of the middlebrow emerges from this discourse: just as it did not centre its concerns around the rhetoric of nationalism, the magazine followed a similar practice when dealing with the subject of Hindi as the national language. It addressed the question for its readers but, at the same time, refused to defend it.

In addition to his opposition to the nexus between Hindi and the Hindu nationalist idea of India, Vishwa Nath took a consciously “anti-religious” stand, and for this reason, Saritā often became embroiled in lawsuits. For instance, Arvind Kumar, one of Saritā’s editors, wrote a poem called “Rām kā Antardvand” (Rām’s dilemma). Kumar wrote the poem from the point of view of the Hindu mythological King Ram and his doubts about his morality. Ram asks himself: To test her faithfulness, should he have subjected his wife Sita to a terrible trial by fire (agnīparīkṣā)? This provocative question ultimately resulted in a court case and ban on Saritā’s July 1957 issue. Saritā also periodically produced several polemical essays criticising the ritualistic practices of Hinduism. For example, the May 1949 edition of the magazine carried an article titled “In the name of religion!” (“Dharm ke nām par!”). The writer, Indu Shekhar, wrote in the style of a social reformist text, arguing that although he did not consider religion itself a problem, what needed examination was how it was being misused to cause oppression. Here, the writer spoke forcefully against inequitable religious practices, naming both the perpetrators of violence as well as the groups of people suffering from discrimination in the name of caste and gender. The article’s tone borrows from the language that was deployed to speak about caste and gender reforms by social reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article can also be read in terms of Nehruvian secular ideology and can, therefore, be understood as a continuation of the social debates of the 19th and 20th centuries reflected in the body of the magazine.

Critiques of religious practices, however, were not always so weighty. The article “The importance of makeup in a woman’s life” (“Nārī jīvan mẽ ṣṛngāra kā mahatva”) is one such example. Here, Parvati Mishra holds forth on why women should wear makeup and has some things to say about Hindu marriage conventions. Mishra casually declares that the sindūr, the Hindu vermillion mark that married women are obligated to put in their hair, is rather unnecessary: “The Sindūr is deemed necessary for married women, but there is no point to doing this. How correct is it that women carry around a signboard to declare that they are married? There is no grace in wearing red sindūr (sic) in black hair. It is another thing that it is a conventional practice (rūṛhi).” The English word “signboard” is used to protest this patriarchal marking of territory. The article reinforces the notion that if a woman wishes to commoditize herself through the act of makeup, she needs to step outside the bounds of how beauty has been defined for her by convention (rūṛhi).

Although Saritā’s and Vishwa Nath’s views on religion can perhaps be read as conforming to Nehruvian secular vision, this becomes complicated by Saritā’s blatantly open antiestablishment, anti-Nehruvian, and, in many instances, anti-Congress stance – visible, for instance, in cartoons lampooning Nehruvian tactics to rally public opinion and obtain votes. For instance, a cartoon advised Nehru to establish more new cabinet ministries in the government so as to employ (even) more Congress ministers, as well as “a hundred, two hundred representatives, superintendents, section officers and clerks removing India’s unemployment utterly so that they [Congress] can secure some more votes in the next election.” Here, Vishwa Nath openly satirised Nehru’s overstaffed cabinet and bureaucrats.

This critique did not only emerge from Nath’s pen. In the article “Income from Above” (“Ūpar kī Āmdanī”), the writer Santosh Narayan Nautiyal adopted a moral tone in discussing Congress’s state of corruption. Nautiyal criticized the figure of the freedom fighter who, when found guilty of corruption, used his past sacrifices to deflect attention: “Nowadays another kind of corruption is rampant. A Gandhi cap (topī) and the sentence ‘we had gone to jail . . .’ (‘ajī ham to jail gaye the . . .’). Going to prison should be indicative of your patriotism, sacrifice, etc., and not the ability or qualification for a particular position.” Through these illustrations, we can see that the Congress Party was portrayed as manipulative and duplicitous rather than idealistic and egalitarian, and Nehru himself is caricatured as power-hungry rather than as the revered leader of the nation.

Thus Vishwa Nath’s pronouncements on religion should not be read as merely Nehruvian or secular but, I argue, further in another, well-established Hindi literary tradition of the 1950s: the discourse of moh bhaṅg. Loosely translated as “disenchantment,” moh bhaṅg questioned if, even after formal independence from British rule, India had achieved any real freedom at all. This “official” freedom, it was argued, was merely nominal. This sentiment was particularly strongly expressed among the progressive leftist writers affiliated with the Progressive Writers’ Association. Literary historian Gopal Rai writes, “At that time, critiquing the Congress, the Communist party declared 1947’s freedom as an ‘untrue freedom.’” This, however, was not the only disillusioned faction. While the progressive-communist literary faction focused on literary representations of the lower classes and championing collective struggle, another literary formation, labelled the Nayī Kahānī or the New Story literary movement, focused instead on the individual, subjective disenchantment. Given this, the Nayī Kahānī movement coined the slogan “felt experience” (bhogā huā anubhava), which meant that the writers’ and their characters’ personal, individual, independent experiences were necessary if one were to articulate and write of experience in fiction. That experience was one of loss, alienation, and disenchantment. Against this backdrop, I argue that Saritā articulated its own sense of disenchantment. The magazine regularly published Nayī Kahānī as well as such Progressive writers as Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Yadav, and Yashpal. Readers and editors were familiar with these movements and their ideas. But while publishing their stories, Saritā found ways to express disenchantment without privileging the Progressive emphasis on poverty and collective struggle. Similarly, Saritā also expressed disillusionment with the Nehruvian ideal nation without favoring individual alienation of the Nayī Kahānī.

In fact, Saritā’s moh bhaṅg uniquely blended practical and consumer concerns within its fabric. This combination can be best demonstrated through Vishwa Nath’s interpretation of the term “service to literature,” which he connected to the need for readers to support magazines by buying individual copies for each family member: “How long will writers be able to do service to literature if they remain starving? If they do not ask for anything, is it right for us to escape from their service (sevā) and try to rob them? The development of literature can only be undertaken if literature lovers buy more and more magazines and books. If these do not sell, then publishers will suffer and creations will remain limited to the writers.” Again, the “service to literature,” plucked from the well-established vocabulary of the pre-independence period, is creatively adapted and deployed in the context of middlebrow publishing, with the ostensible aim to support writers by encouraging readers to buy more magazines. Moh bhaṅg, here, acquires another strain and trajectory. Disenchantment is expressed not only through a rejection of nationalism and language politics but also, rather ingeniously, by moulding ideas such as “service to literature” to sell more magazines.

Excerpted with permission from Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India, Aakriti Mandhwani, University of Massachusetts Press.