Exercises in redrawing the contours of the ‘public sphere’, to borrow from German theorist Jurgen Habermas, come with as many possibilities as with risks. This is more often the case when the frames are historical and the gaze is directed at examining the public sphere of an era through a limited prism – such as a certain kind of print publication. 

Now, such attempts are often besieged by key questions. For instance, to what extent did such publications shape the public sphere of the time? And to what extent were these publications shaped by other elements?  

There are no easy answers to these lines of inquiry. But they offer riveting material and valuable insight. 

That’s what makes scholar Aakriti Mandhwani’s book, Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class, an important work of interpretive depth. Published by Speaking Tiger, it studies ‘middlebrow’ magazines and books in Hindi in the first two decades after India’s independence. While Mandhwani’s scrutiny might be hemmed in by the frames she uses, the rigour of a print historian stands her in good stead. 

Mandhwani tries to select post-independence evolutionary strands – the attitudes of aspirational readers, their ideological outlook, the pragmatic impulses of editors, and the market sensitivity and response of publishers. She does this by digging through archives from the 1950s and ‘60s of three Hindi specimens in the middlebrow space: Sarita from the Delhi Press group, Dharmyug from the Bombay-headquartered Bennet Coleman & Company Ltd, and a Delhi-based paperback publishing house named Hind Pocket Books.

More remarkably, Mandhwani also compares the orientation of the middlebrow space with uncovered grounds of interest, questions and romanch that was to be addressed by ‘lowbrow’ publications. Detouring from her key theme, she examines three lowbrow magazines – Manohar Kahaniyaan, Maya and Rageeli – that present an alternate moral universe. In her meticulous scrutiny of the melodramatic content of the fiction published in these three magazines, she notes that they offered space to impulses and concerns that escaped the attention of the somewhat insular, if not guarded, middlebrow space.

At the outset, Everyday Reading raises the question of how to define middlebrow as a publication category. It probes some formulations for this, including that of influential French thinker Pierre Bourdieu. The book, however, settles for a fluid way of looking at these forms. Based on its empirical gaze at the Hindi print space of the period, it is less regimented in its view of such categories.

But this sort of conceptual engagement is missing in how Mandhwani approaches the ‘middle class’ as a readership group. It comes across as a gap in the book’s terms of reference even if it’s deliberate and probably borne out of methodological constraints. The amorphous nature of the term – with its varied economic, social and cultural applications in India – has meant there are conflicting claims on being identified as middle class.

So, in the two decades following independence, what exactly is the segment the author has referred to as middle class? Even if it’s implied to be economic, a conceptual note could have clarified whom the author is referring to within the Hindi reading public of the 1950s and ‘60s.

To find a social register of the period through publications, Mandhwani looks for clues in archives. In Sarita, she decodes the yearning for the democratisation of the Hindi language in how readers’ letters asked for simplified and everyday articulation. This, she argues, was a demand for generalistic and eclectic reading for pleasure which, in turn, unsettled the ivory tower ideas of ‘literariness’. 

She also looks at a section of readers writing to the editor as a sociological device to infer the agency of readers, particularly women whose interventions on the letters’ page and agony aunt columns mirrored their consumerist urges and aspirations. In the post-independence era, this is seen as an assertion of individuality and as a cultural taste that is autonomous of the nationalist ideal. It also goes beyond the imprint of the service of literature to values of Indian womanhood that was seen in pre-independence publications.

At the same time, political discourse of the time didn’t seem completely absent. In Sarita, despite an occasional critique of Nehru’s policies, the rubric of the broader secular consensus could be seen in its pages. 

This could raise certain questions: Did such editorial outlook lack authenticity in reflecting how the middle class within the Hindi public space really felt? Was it a case of elite modernisation percolating its ideas in the Hindi public sphere, making the middle class in the Hindi heartland hesitant about its home-cooked, everyday religiosity? 

The author doesn’t consider these. But sociologist Shiv Vishwanath noted that the rise of the right-of-centre stream in Indian politics could be attributed to a backlash of a later generation that felt “elite modernisation was a hypocritical affair conducted by groups which used words like ‘secular’ to dismiss the thought processes rooted in religion”.

In recounting the transformative effect of Dharmvir Bharti in changing  Dharmyug from a calendar art magazine, earlier replete with images of divinity, to a contemporary general interest magazine catering to wider literary and partly journalistic features, Mandhwani views “middlebrow cosmopolitanism”. Perhaps this was also reinforced by its window to the world in which its journalistic accounts and photo essays had a favourable view of liberal America in the Cold War phase. 

That, however, doesn’t explain its exclusionary approach to certain questions, particularly its reticence on issues that bordered on middle class morality. For a magazine coming out of Bombay – a city which saw a survey of the sex habits of its middle class conducted by Professor G S Ghurye as early as 1938 – the fact that a leading publication stayed away from such themes in the ‘50s and ‘60s showed its guarded, if not prudish, ideas of what it thought was “mainstream”. To an extent, such questions also surface in looking back at the titles that Hindi Pocket Books stayed away from, despite fewer constraints from the Hicklin test and valid commercial pulses.

Finally, if Everyday Reading was looking for general readership and not just academic reception, the formality of its academic articulation could have made way for more flowing prose. The clutter of jargon could also have been reined in for the benefit of the average reader. In different chapters, expressions like the formalistic “I suggest” and “I argue” get repetitive, and set the tone of a dissertation rather than an ‘everyday’ read for everyone.

These minor quibbles apart, Mandhwani’s book offers a significant social register of the middle class Hindi-reading public of the first two decades of post-independence India, with the subtext of the assertion of a readership that was keen on expressing its individual self and navigating its ideas of consumption. That the book examined these historical strands from the standpoint of its own time and space is an important scholarly achievement. In sticking to the milieu of the period, and shunning the advantage of hindsight, this slice of print history stands the test of what Cambridge historian FW Maitland prescribed for chroniclers of all forms – “what is now in the past was once in the future”. 

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