Abstract
Aakriti Mandhwani, Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2024), 223 pp.
Aakriti Mandhwani’s Everyday Reading is an elegantly written contribution to a growing scholarship on print culture, reading practices and social history of Hindi in twentieth-century India. Focusing on the two decades after independence, Mandhwani reconstructs the vibrant world of Hindi middlebrow magazines and paperback publishing through a close study of Sarita, Dharmyug, Hind Pocket Books and genre magazines such as Maya and Manohar Kahaniyan. The result is not merely a history of publishing. It is also a history of aspiration, consumption, domesticity and the changing textures of middle-class life in north India. The 1950s and 1960s in India were marked by contradictory energies: trauma of Partition, shortages and inflation, building of democratic institutions and emergence of new middle-class aspirations. Historiography on this period has largely focused on nationalism, Nehruvian planning, constitutional debates and Partition. Mandhwani intervenes by shifting attention to everyday reading practices. Her central argument is persuasive, that is, commercially successful Hindi magazines and paperbacks fostered new forms of reading, pleasure and selfhood that cannot be understood solely through the framework of nationalist austerity and developmentalism.
One of the book’s strengths lies in the seriousness with which Mandhwani treats pleasure in post-independence Hindi print culture. She argues that magazines and paperbacks opened spaces where readers could imagine themselves not merely as citizens obligated to the nation, but also as consumers, desiring individuals and members of aspirational families. This is especially visible in her nuanced reading of Sarita, which fashioned itself as a magazine for the entire family, while simultaneously cultivating women as active readers and contributors through letters, advice columns, domestic discussions and advertisements. Sarita formed a vital part of the emotional rhythms of domestic life, and one is reminded of mothers and aunts eagerly waiting for its latest issue, passing it around within households, discussing its stories and columns. Mandhwani captures this texture of anticipation and intimacy. At the same time, she shows how Sarita balanced respectability, entertainment and mild social critique. Her discussion of editor-publisher Vishwa Nath’s preference for an accessible Hindustani register over Sanskritised Hindi is suggestive, revealing Hindi not simply as a nationalist language, but also a flexible and commercially viable medium.
Equally fascinating is the chapter on Hind Pocket Books, which charts the emergence of inexpensive Hindi paperbacks and the democratisation of reading through postal subscriptions and the famous ‘Gharelu Library Yojana’. Mandhwani shows how Dina Nath Malhotra transformed the paperback into a desirable modern object, making books accessible to drawing rooms, railway journeys and small-town households. Noteworthy is her analysis of how Hind Pocket Books combined literary seriousness with market logic, publishing canonical authors alongside translations, romances, self-help manuals and popular fiction. The book also highlights how magazines and publishing houses became inseparable from the influential editorial personalities who shaped them. Dharmvir Bharti at Dharmyug, Vishwa Nath at Sarita and Dina Nath Malhotra at Hind Pocket Books became important public figures, whose editorials, commentaries and intellectual personas attracted loyal readers. An emphasis on eclecticism runs throughout the book. Mandhwani shows that the Hindi middlebrow was neither culturally narrow nor intellectually provincial. Readers encountered a varied range of material in these publications, including existentialist thought, travel writing, romance, detective fiction, domestic advice, translated world literature, devotional imagery, political reportage, stories, poems and discussions of world affairs. A striking feature of these magazines was precisely their non-compartmentalised character. This diversity created a reading culture in which readers moved simultaneously across multiple literary, political, emotional and cultural worlds.
Her chapter on Dharmyug under Dharmvir Bharti illustrates this well. The magazine simultaneously circulated Hindu imagery, modernist literary writing, glossy photographs and a cosmopolitan curiosity about the wider world. Mandhwani perceptively shows that middle-class Hindi readers were not insulated from global modernity and engaged with it through vernacular routes. Though the book’s primary focus remains the 1950s and 1960s, readers of the 1970s would also remember Dharmyug and Sarita for their important social and political journalism. Dharmyug, for instance, carried substantial reportage on the Bangladesh Liberation War and the JP and student movements of the mid-1970s. Unlike Dinmaan, which cultivated a more elite and intellectually dense readership, Dharmyug successfully combined popular journalism with a broader social purpose. Sarita too increasingly acquired a reputation for socially reformist and issue-based coverage, alongside its family readership.
The final chapter on genre magazines such as Maya, Rasili Kahaniyan and Manohar Kahaniyan is equally lively. Here, Mandhwani explores sensational fiction, romance, crime and erotically charged narratives often dismissed as ‘lowbrow’. She approaches these magazines with an archival openness and without condescension. The chapter demonstrates that popular print culture frequently addressed themes and desires absent from more respectable middlebrow publications.
At the same time, the categories of ‘middlebrow’, ‘lowbrow’ and ‘highbrow’ occasionally become unstable in the book. Many ‘canonical’ writers circulated across these supposedly distinct spaces. Readers, too, moved fluidly between genres and publications. In practice, thus, the boundaries between respectable middlebrow reading and sensational popular culture were often porous. Mandhwani herself is attentive to these overlaps, yet at times the analytical categories threaten to become more rigid than the reading practices they seek to describe. Similarly, one occasionally wishes for a fuller engagement with the social exclusions within this print universe. The book brilliantly reconstructs the aspirations of the Hindi-reading middle classes, but questions of caste, poverty and minority readership remain relatively muted, partly because the magazines themselves marginalised these concerns. Yet this absence is also historically revealing. The world of the Hindi middlebrow emerges here as a space invested in consumption, domestic stability and aspirational modernity, often at the cost of confronting structural inequalities.
What finally distinguishes the book is the richness of its archival material and the emphasis on everyday reading practices, often ignored in literary histories. The book reconstructs the tactile world of reading: arrival of magazines by post, excitement around affordable paperbacks, intimacy of readers’ letters and circulation of magazines across homes and small towns. It also speaks meaningfully to contemporary concerns. At a moment when the decline of reading cultures is frequently lamented, Mandhwani reminds us that reading publics are historically produced through networks of affordability, circulation, aspiration and technological change. She compels us to rethink Hindi not merely as a language of nationalism or linguistic politics, but as a language of leisure, consumption, fantasy and modern everyday life. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Everyday Reading is an important intervention in histories of print culture, Hindi publishing and post-independence India. It will be of interest not only to scholars of literature and history, but also to anyone interested in how ordinary readers participate in shaping our modern cultural worlds.