Everyday Reading: Uncovering Middle-Class Musings

There have been many attempts to both analyze and historicize the Indian middle class. Works by Pavan Varma (The Great Indian Middle Class, 1998) and Aseem Prakash (The Indian Middle Class, 2016) come to mind. In Everyday Reading, Aakriti Mandhwani explores this class in the decades after independence, but through an offbeat, little studied lens: that of popular, widely circulated, middlebrow Hindi magazines and paperbacks.

She does this without disparaging either the producers or the consumers of these publications. Unlike Virginia Woolf who unfairly dismissed the middlebrow as “the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between” the highbrow and the lowbrow.  Since then, with questions raised by cultural theorists like Janice Radway and Joan Shelley Rubin, middlebrow studies has gained legitimacy. Everyday Reading is a critical addition to the field.

Mandhwani highlights how significant these magazines were in formulating an emerging consumer culture.  Just as many women readers have argued against the disparagement of romance novels as “chick lit”, Mandhwani posits that the centrality of these magazines and books to women’s lives make them an essential repository of memory and feeling – of the texture of those everydays to folks living through those times.

Rebellion in Reading

While Nehruvian India expected citizens to defer pleasure to serve the state, these magazines seem to indicate a deliberate yearning for pleasure. Not just in citizens’ reading habits, but also by tweaking their households, by improving themselves, by learning new recipes, by buying new things. Through their subscriptions and ongoing engagement with other readers, citizens seemed to rebuke the government’s plea to sacrifice their own indulgences for an abstract entity – the nation. As Mandhwani puts it, “Everyday reading habits offer clues into both active and nonactive resistance processes of the reading public.”

Inside tightly-knit family units, these magazines were enabling new forms of freedom. “[I]ndividualized acts of reading,” allowed for the formation of personal opinions and different tastes. Such reading did not entail a passive absorption of information or stories flowing from the magazine. Readers interacted with pieces, dashed off letters to the editor, submitted their own articles or stories, wrote to or became Agony Aunts, critiqued fiction, argued against opinion columnists et al. They were involved in fashioning the magazine as much as these magazines were shaping their thoughts, identities and personal spaces. Mandhwani is also careful not to lump the readers or publications into  homogenous categories, “there are as many kinds of middlebrow publications as there are middlebrow readers.”

Shaping Taboos and Tastes

Some of the magazines Mandhwani studies include Sarita (a monthly), Maya, Rasili Kahaniyaan, and the wildly popular Dharmyug. She also delves into Hind Pocket Books, that published cheap, book-club model paperbacks. She dips into the origin stories of the proprietor-publisher-editor (who were sometimes the same person) of these works. Many were family-run businesses based out of Delhi and Mumbai. Unsurprisingly most owner-editors were male, who were paradoxically or otherwise, molding a largely female audience.

These publications – while both showing objects of desire and discussing how to use them, skirted nationalist discussions. And also abjured other topics: poverty, religious affiliation, caste or anything slightly prickly. In particular, Muslim belonging was never discussed. Other topics avoided in these magazines– like horror, romance, thrillers, detective fiction – were addressed in lowbrow mags. Which also advertised some of these middlebrow mags, proving that there were readership overlaps.

Sarita: Breaking Boundaries in Simple Hindi

Sarita was groundbreaking in the way it addressed women as writers and readers. Its publisher and editor, Vishwa Nath, did not subscribe to religious beliefs. He didn’t push any particular ideology, or try to rope his readers into some grand mission, focusing instead on their concerns and interests.  In addition to Sarita, he launched magazines like Caravan and Women’s Era in English, and Mukta and Champak in Hindi.

Deliberately avoiding the formal, Sanskritized Hindi found in other publications, Sarita deployed a more accessible Hindustani that blended Hindi and Urdu. Vishwa Nath strongly advocated for language syncretism, rejecting a rigid nationalist vision. When debates emerged—such as whether to use the Hindi purna viram instead of the English full stop—he defended the more practical English punctuation. He felt that English, rather than Sanskrit, could bridge the linguistic divide between North and South India. Socially progressive, Sarita published articles on taboo topics like sexual and reproductive health and critiqued religious rituals that perpetuated caste and gender inequalities.

Sarita: Remaking Womanhood

In one memorable article, titled The Importance of Makeup in a Woman’s Life, a writer argues (maybe snarkily!) that Indian women should wear makeup not just to impress men but to look good for other women. She questions the practice of sindoor, asking why married women should be marked with a “permanent signboard.” Through stories and articles, Sarita also captures a disenchantment with the national project and the lingering unfreedom felt by many after independence. But its primary mission was simple: “to serve readers.”

Readers actively shaped the magazine’s direction, voicing a preference for “simpler” Hindi over the highbrow language of radio. They wanted content that reflected their lives, written in a language they could easily understand. In their letters, they asserted the right to read for enjoyment, rather than for a lofty purpose. Sarita also addressed questions about beauty, relationships, and social conventions, like whether it was acceptable to marry someone if they had previously tied a Raakhi on his hand (the answer: “Yes”). One unmarried woman questioned why single women should be discouraged from wearing makeup, as if their worth depended on marriageability. Unlike the typical nationalist narrative that reduced women to roles like “mother of the nation,” Sarita treated them as individuals with complex tastes, desires, and opinions—and a right to define their identities.

Sarita’s fiction often explored the dynamics between couples in love or at odds, typically with endings that reinforced the value of a harmonious marriage. Nuclear families took center stage over joint families, reflecting a societal shift. As author Nirmala Verma once noted, “There is no word for privacy in Hindi because Indian families have never felt any necessity for it,” but in Sarita’s stories, privacy was becoming a felt need.

Female sexual desire found a place, though with certain caveats. While the magazine depicted a range of women’s experiences, its world remained somewhat insular, focusing on stories that resonated within a middle-class context.

Hind Pocket Books: Pages for the People

Priced at just INR 1/- each, Hind Pocket Books matched Sarita’s affordability while bringing a revolution to Hindi readership across genres—novels, poetry, science, health, and self-help (including general self-help, jivan upyogi, and self-help specifically for women, sthri upyogi). Dina Nath Malhotra sparked this “paperback revolution” for middlebrow Hindi readers by carefully choosing what genres to include and exclude. The explosion of readership was fueled by his inventive Home Library movement, or Gharelu Library Yojana, along with books sold at railway platforms and on roadside pavements. With enticing deals like “six books for the price of five” delivered monthly, Hind Pocket Books accorded readers a curated selection that introduced them to genres they might not have picked up otherwise. These selections, as Malhotra hoped, created “a wide-ranging and eclectic library at home.”

Malhotra’s success in tapping into this middlebrow market was remarkable. At its height, Hind Pocket Books had around 600,000 subscribers, shipping out 40,000 book packets each month. The demand was so high that a post office was set up within the publisher’s compound to handle the volume.

Hind Pocket Books: Redefining Literary Reach

In his memoir, Dare To Publish, Malhotra reflected on his approach, on choosing not to cater solely to intellectuals. Inspired by Penguin paperbacks—Malhotra had even met Sir Allen Lane, Penguin’s founder—he established a distinct look and feel for Hind Pocket Books, creating a recognizable brand. Every book cover, back cover, and spine followed a standard design, making the books instantly identifiable even before a reader opened them. Malhotra was the first to recognize the importance of “volume and reach,” believing that a book’s literariness was also a function of its accessibility and popularity.

Drawing from the American “Book of the Month Club,” Malhotra’s Home Library Scheme was both imaginative and quirky. By mixing older classics with new works, he offered a diverse selection, though readers could never choose books for themselves. This curated approach shaped the tastes of a generation, offering Hindi readers a singular but also boxed (as in, approved by Malhotra) view of the world.

As much as they told stories, these works also proffered spaces where women, in their own small ways, could break free from tradition.

References

Aakriti Mandhwani, Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class, Speaking Tiger, 2024