1. Your book is titled ‘Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Classics’. For readers new to your book, could you explain "middlebrow" as you use it?
 

The middlebrow has had a long history in Eurocentric critical traditions. Early uses of the term included mocking a “middling” category of people who were disparaged as being nothing more than being failed imitators to high culture. The term was rescued by American feminist sociologists and book historians in the 1980s to denote a type of consumption practice rather than a degree in taste hierarchy. At present, it is a fairly well-established critical field of enquiry.

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I deploy “middlebrow” to think about a set of publications, publishers and readers of Hindi that flourished in the immediately post-Independence period. The middlebrow foregrounded consumption as its first impulse. It was rooted in the right to read for desires quite apart from nationalist battle for independence, and consequently, deferral of pleasure in the service of the new nation. Women as informed and non-surreptitious readers are an important constituent of this middlebrow readership – the materials I discuss in the book were read by everyone in the family. Again, here, women’s reading is not only just directed towards service of the family and the nation. Women are addressed as consumers and also actively contribute to these publications.

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The middlebrow also demanded a simpler language, one that is quite distinctly placed from the Hindi nationalist agenda of many predominant periodicals in the late colonial period. Also, in terms of thinking about the literary, the middlebrow took and read widely across what would elsewhere be categorised high literary and the low. This isn’t to say that the middlebrow was an egalitarian all enveloping category - it decidedly constructed itself as upper caste Hindu, and minorities find very little representation in middlebrow magazines and paperbacks that I study.
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2. Can you further explain what the terms ‘North India’ and ‘Classics’ refer to in the context of the books that were being circulated? Do they mean literature (and language) that is rooted, produced or defined by a certain geography and cultural milieu?
 

Hind Pocket Books often used the term “classics” for some of their publications. This was a way for the publisher to acknowledge consecrated books and, also, to consecrate certain books, to enshrine them as classics. But more excitingly, it also speaks to the publisher’s innovation, as it were, to get around the problem of genre naming. In this way, a novel critical of Nehru by the progressive writer Krishan Chandar could be coded “world-famous” or “classic” instead of the very clear political and intellectual currents that it was actually part of. Same goes for the revolutionary writer Yashpal who was termed, somewhat vaguely, an “extremely effective” writer. This way, the publishers could publish a wide range of genres and materials. Genres were often not defined in terms of how the authors themselves intended them or how they were formulated in the realm of literary criticism but with respect to what the publisher-editor deemed either as marketable, acceptable, or both.

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I find that “North Indian” is especially useful to denote the territory of Hindi publishing. It also speaks to a politics of “doing” and thinking about Hindi. The publications I study are very confident of their territory and mark themselves out for consumption by a specific region, as opposed to all of India. Also, as the Hind Pocket Books example again shows us, North Indian classics included literature from across many languages: Hindi readers regularly and delightedly consumed Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Russian, English literature etc.

 

3. What initially sparked your interest in writing about this subject? (Was this type of reading a part of your household and If yes, how did that shape your connection to the material)
 

Actually, I grew up in a very multilingual home with the thrum of Sindhi, Hindi, Punjabi and English constantly in my ears. I did see my maternal grandmother reading Hindi magazines and books when I went visiting and have very fond memories of reading Champak and Chacha Chaudhary as a child. But living predominantly around my paternal grandparents meant that I understood from a young age that gaining Hindi came at a loss. Hindi won at the cost of Sindhi– I remember seeing Sindhi newspapers coming in nagari transliteration, for instance. Being a child in a middle class household in the nineties also meant a strong emphasis on the very aspirational English. English won at the cost of Hindi—magazines like Newsweek and India Today showed up at the house in my teenage years.
 

In many senses, the interest in the project first arose years later when I was writing my MPhil dissertation at Delhi University on the best-selling Hindi pulp writer Surendra Mohan Pathak. I was tracing Pathak’s self-fashioning efforts in the second decade of the millennium where he pushed for, and started being published on, better quality paper, with better typesetting and glossier covers. As a result, this new iteration of the Pathak novel cost much more than his earlier books and his contemporaries. Working on this question – how can we make sense of a pulp author when the material contours of a book are altered to make it appear like a “non-pulp”, more literary object – introduced me to the dynamic and thriving field called print and book history which is interested in questions around the materiality of books, how they are produced, circulated, and received.

 

The project also made me dig a bit deeper. I found that while a handful of individual studies of pulp authors did exist, a history of pulp in Hindi had not yet been written. I also found that pulp writing did not just entail pulp fiction of the lowbrow variety; it also meant all kinds of writing that was published on pulp/newsprint (lugdi in Hindi) paper. Paper was literally in short supply and rationed in the period I study. In other words, paper quality did not necessarily always denote the purported quality (or genres) of writing, which led me to open up this project to other invitations. Therefore, I wrote my doctoral thesis at SOAS on middlebrow publications. The monograph is a result of this work.

 

4. The cover of the book is very striking. Tell us the story behind this.
 

The cover has the iconic Meena Kumari reading at a film set in 1962. This image came to me entirely by accident (and some distress, I might add). Funnily enough, I wasn’t thinking about a cover image at all till my book had already been contracted and my global edition publisher, University of Massachusetts Press, nudged me for possible images. I went back to my materials and found that while images of women reading in Hindi periodicals were fairly ubiquitous in the early twentieth century, I could not find these women in the 1950s in my material very much! Film, on the other hand, often depicted these varied visual cultures of reading. 

 

For the moment, I understand it in this fashion: perhaps, in the early twentieth century, these periodicals needed to be pointed or marked out, in order to encourage or educate a sense of reading for women. This makes my argument about the 1950s certainly stronger - I use middlebrow rather than women's magazines because the magazines I study were being read by the entire family and not just women. 

Also, this quest led me to start a project called “South Asian Women Reading” where, for the past nine months or so, I have been compiling my own archival findings of images of women reading as well as inviting readers and other print historians to submit their findings: https://www.instagram.com/southasianwomenreading/

 

5. In Chapter One, you discuss that the magazine Sarita created an intimate world for its readers on notions of the nuclear family, aspiration, desire, intimacy, and the imagination of home. It catered to the family as a unit by offering material designed to appeal to every member—ranging from a story about a rifle to pieces on knitting. Could you tell us more about how these themes encouraged individual growth through various forms of consumption? 
 

The very fact that these digests encouraged this in the first place deserves some attention. The best illustration of this can be found in the editorial language itself. For instance, an advertisement published in Sarita’s May 1949 edition proudly declared, “Sarita has only one aim—to serve readers.” While “service”/ “seva” appeared quite frequently in late colonial periodicals, it was usually conjoined with service to the family and nation. In this milieu, “grahak seva” (service to readers) in and of itself becomes a very interesting sentiment. 

Different sections of the magazine – fiction and non-fiction—also geared to cultivate this sense of the individual’s growth within the family and provided many alternate models for belonging. For example, there is no one ideal woman of Sarita. Equally legitimised frames of reference continually appear for women - within the family of course as a wife and mother, but also as a working woman or a single woman. These portrayals weren’t framed in overtly radical terms, yet they were still provocative. One article, for example, encouraged women to stop wearing sindoor, suggesting it wasn’t particularly aesthetically pleasing. Another piece advised women to definitely apply makeup but only as much as time allowed—acknowledging that women, whether working at home or outside, were busy and typically had less time for such routines. 

6. The chapter also mentions the serialised novels Dharavahi as well as the space given to short stories. Tell us more about the fiction you encountered (themes, cities, places, characters) while you were researching for the book and if you have a favourite among them? Where can readers access them?
 

Almost half the space in Sarita was dedicated to the world of fiction in the form of serialised novels, one-act plays and short stories. Everyone from the now canonised Yashpal, Manmath Nath Gupta, Usha Priyamvada, Mohan Rakesh to Rajendra Yadav wrote in the magazines. Most of these short stories were about contemporary middle class lives, alienation, female subjectivity, love within the nuclear family – themes that later often found themselves being articulated in terms of “new story”/”nayi kahaani” sentiments. Readers can access some of these stories by these canonical authors in their collected short stories.
 

But there are many writers who were much beloved in magazines but have suffered the cruel fate of being entirely lost from literary histories. In this regard, I am a bit obsessed with Vimla Luthra at the moment. Luthra writes a lot of one-act plays (ekanki) in Sarita, setting them in all sorts of locations. For example, she writes a humorous short play about a couple whose morning routine is thrown into complete disarray because the washerman reaches their house earlier than usual. Another ekanki is set in Kashmir around a vacationing family. Luthra works across themes and genres: in some places she is serving up aspiration at a tea party at a diplomat’s house in fiction, and at others she is holding forth on Hyderabad’s language divide in an opinion piece. India annexed Hyderabad State in 1948, so this article published in the March 1949 issue of Sarita seems particularly timely. So she is an example of an author who spills over from fiction writing to other travel and opinion pieces and is part of the shaping of vibrant intellectual world of the magazine.
 

7. The readers actively engaged with the magazine, often participating in critical commentary. There's an interesting example on page 41 where a reader contests specific details in a story published by a magazine. How did this kind of reader engagement shape the content, the magazine's editorial approach or the types of stories that were published?

I really love this example of the reader you’ve mentioned - Pratibha Singh from Ranchi – who fact-checks a few details in a story by Neelkan Perumal titled “The Story of a Hut” (“Jhopri ki Kahani”). This reader contests a fictional detail based on her position as a housewife well acquainted with the price of pots and pans. Singh here confidently situates herself as a woman possessing a wealth of practical knowledge, writing a letter to the editor in order to educate the ignorant storyteller in the magazine. At the same time, other readers actively participated in literary sphere debates. There’s a very nice exchange between readers on the significance of Sarita vis a vis other high literary magazines like Himalaya and Pratik!
 

Reader engagement made many demands on Sarita – they asked for less sanskritised Hindi, more poetry, fact checked stories, wrote opinion pieces about opinion pieces, made requests for other writers to appear more and even requested that some writers be not be published as much. Reader engagement was presented as a major part of the magazine’s appeal. The editor responded to some letters – again presenting the magazine as a space of co-creation, as it were. However, this went both ways too – the editor too rebuked some readers in his responses, telling them what Sarita stood for. 

8. The case of Hind Pocket Books creating a market model by mailing books to readers is fascinating. You write that the entry of the paperbacks into the home especially benefited women readers who may not have had access to traditional marketplaces where books were sold. In what ways did this shape the relationship between literature, class, and domestic life for women?

I like this anecdote that the Hindi academic, translator and writer Prabhat Ranjan shares about his sister in law’s relationship with Hind Pocket Books. Ranjan is amazed about his sister in law’s familiarity with the phrase “bhoga hua yatharth,” or “one’s lived reality,” a slogan identifiable with modernist “new story” sentiment in writing. To Ranjan’s mind, only Hind Pocket Books and its wide circulation could explain such an eclectic reading habit.

The eclectic library at home with its mix of genres again signals that it caters to all kinds of readers. I would hesitate to create a binary between coding genres or texts as “masculine” and “feminine” but still like to emphasise the free sharing of texts and the assertion of non-surreptitious reading – this again has implications for how women fashion themselves as readers. 
 

However, I must also say that this comes with its archival limitations - unfortunately, we don’t have much by the way of reader’s letters and memoirs to construct a fuller story of women as paperback readers and collectors of books in this period – that work still needs to be undertaken. 
 

9. This Gharelu Library Yojana (Home Library Scheme) offered its readers a wide range of titles - six books at the price of five - across genres, mixing canonical books with contemporary works, actively cultivating an aspiration for creating home libraries and owning books. Could you elaborate on how this contributed to what you describe as the "repeatable middle-class reading habit"? 

Absolutely. Through the library scheme, Hind Pocket Books facilitated two simultaneous processes. First, because of its emphasis on the seamless merging of the literary highbrow and genres elsewhere categorised as not so highbrow, it arguably created a symbiotic culture of reading in Hindi. Second, this distribution method created reader dependability on the “list” to define the Hindi middlebrow. According to publisher policy, books delivered in fixed sets were nonnegotiable in titles—only at certain times could the reader refuse or return titles. Consumers could not, however, choose or recommend books. In this way, readers at home grew to expect books to be delivered periodically, and also for the books to be chosen for them. In this way, this kind of periodical and repeatable reading habit developed.  

10. In the book you suggest that women became "agentive co-constitutors of the literary universe" as both consumers and producers of literature. In what ways might feminist scholarship benefit from a closer examination of these publications and the insights they have to offer into aspirations, consumption habits, identity, expectations and everyday lives of middle-class Indian women? 
 

I think women’s everyday lived experiences and co-constitution have been recognised critically as objects of enquiry in feminist scholarship. Postcolonial print and periodical studies take cognisance of this and I hope that with more emphasis on middlebrow studies, more interventions like this take place in the future across other languages.

My own work learns much from and enters into conversation with brilliant feminist scholarship that studies how, in the late colonial periodical universe, women found ways of articulating subjecthood, albeit within frames of the family, husband, the child and the nation. Some fantastic scholarship has imagined how this provided women space in public, and also to assert themselves as women as subjects of feeling. But that right to feel of women is also routed through a melodramatic fall from grace and women have to speak about difficult social conditions.
 

The contours of this shift dramatically with the materials I study. For example, what does it mean talk about the right to put on makeup just for oneself, or (going back to the earlier example) to reject the sindoor because it doesn’t look particularly pleasing or, as the author writes, just looks like a “signpost”? 

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11. At the end of the book, you discuss Allahabad’s publishing history, particularly through Maya (magic), Rasili Kahaniyan (juicy stories), and Manohar Kahaniyan (pleasing stories). You contrast how this form of genre fiction challenged the middlebrow aesthetic. Could you elaborate on this tension? (themes, perspectives)

I examine these three successful magazines from Allahabad published by Mitra Prakashan. These magazines, printed on paper of cheap quality, carrying genres such as thrillers, romance, horror, and detective fiction genres that were kept outside the middlebrow publications, instead presented subjects that middlebrow publications deemed taboo. What really stands out for these magazines is that, significantly, they raised questions of livelihood, living spaces, troublesome neighbours and the lack of privacy, as well as post-partition Hindu-Muslim mistrust, that were kept out of the purview of the middlebrow magazines. Using fear and uncertainty on which to base their stories, in the book I argue that the lowbrow magazines unsettled readers’ expectations and, wittingly or unwittingly, unravelled the aspirational narratives of the middlebrow magazines. In a way, these magazines carried short stories that provided alternative moral universes to the reader, challenging the middlebrow aesthetic that focused on consumption.
 

12. Did your research bring you into contact with similar magazines in other languages? Was there cross-pollination between Hindi middlebrow literature and other regional languages?

Absolutely – for example, Urdu magazines seem to be thinking about this much earlier! I am confident that many frames of thinking about this can be encountered in the Urdu periodical sphere. I have also of late been thinking about connections between sister publications of the same publishing houses that published across multiple languages – how do these frames travel between languages? I see rich exchanges between English, Hindi and Urdu publications at Delhi Press in the same time period, for instance, but it must be true for other houses and languages as well.