Introduction
This paper is an exploration into an important and relatively understudied subject—the social implications of periodical production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. It takes up Ramananda Chattopadhyay's monthly illustrated magazine, Prabāsī, a self-consciously high-brow literary journal that enjoyed a long print-run and considerable popularity compared with other contemporary literary periodicals.Footnote 1 It focuses on three major questions: first, how the Prabāsī editor conceptualized a new literary medium in the Bāṅglā language—the sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated literary miscellany. Second, how through its various journalistic innovations Prabāsī tried to address the problems of uneven literacy and the constraints posed by a capitalizing colonial economy in its attempt to democratize print-culture. Finally, how this particular magazine fashioned twentieth century Bengali middle class lifestyles by making for magazine-reading a niche within the everyday space of leisure (abasar). The long print life of Prabāsī provides an opportunity to investigate the interfaces between the nationalist agenda of the Bengali bhadralok during the period of active anti-colonial struggle and a quotidian practice like reading. A history of reading practices, shaped by major literary periodicals, provides an insight in to the ways in which the private and public domains of middleclass nationalism came to be reconstituted during the turn-of-the-century years. Reading was now as much a private, leisurely practice, as it was burdened with a sense of responsibility towards the social collective. More importantly perhaps the efforts made by Prabāsī in the course of its long print life to democratize its readership, reveals a crucial facet of the Bengali nationalist cultural agenda at a time of high anti-imperial feelings. In this context Prabāsī attempted to shape a modern literary community as a new form of solidarity wherein the imagined nation could be actualized. Prabāsī's significance lay precisely in its constant attempts to negotiate and work towards a balance between the demands of the nationalist agenda, to push the frontiers of its circulation and reach out to potential reader groups and the Prabāsī editor's awareness about the very limited nature of the aesthetics that it shaped and articulated.
Histories of print have long studied an entire range of cultural practices that revolve around or are affected by the production and consumption of print and have highlighted the stressed dynamics between technological and commercial aspects of publishing and the intellectual and social lives of societies concerned. Historical literature on print in South Asia has engaged with questions of print entrepreneurship, newspaper media and vernacular journalism. Historians have noted the role of print in generating critical public opinion through indigenous cheap book markets. We know the heterogeneous social profile of readership reflects class differentiations, along with the development of indigenous vernaculars in their modern literary forms. New research has questioned the mutual exclusivity of orality and print, pointing to the continued presence of manuscripts alongside printed books and shown how the dynamics of print were intertwined with larger questions of education, literacy and colonial capitalism.Footnote 2 While in many ways this research draws on such recent histories of print in South Asia, focus here is not simply on questions of dissemination and accessibility of print. Rather this paper is more about the variegated and multi-layered nature of periodical readerships and questions of widespread dissemination of a certain kind of aesthetic that was enabled through print and how the politics of the shaping of this aesthetic constituted the embattled cultural politics of the Bengali bhadralok.
Partha Chatterjee locates the domain of culture as distinct from that of the colonial state and as a space where nationalism embarked on its most powerful and imaginative project—that of fashioning a ‘modern’ national culture that was identical neither with the precolonial indigenous nor with the modern Western.Footnote 3 Identifying in print-capitalism and in literary and performative genres like the novel, drama and visual arts the areas of the ‘spiritual’ domain that nationalism transformed, Chatterjee has shown how, by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the bilingual intelligentsia had shaped these practices as mutually constitutive domains where the nation was already sovereign.Footnote 4 This sovereignty of the inner or spiritual domain was realized at a moment prior to nationalism's political battle with British imperial power.Footnote 5 The world of print-culture constituted by institutional and associational networks of newspapers, books, magazines, publishing houses, printing presses, literary societies and public libraries delineated a space of the nation which even if not entirely outside the purview of the legislative boundaries of the colonial state was certainly distinct. By the opening years of the twentieth century the Bengali intelligentsia had indisputably identified the realm of Baṅga-sāhitya or literature as the sovereign domain of the nation and as an instrument of nationalist ideology.Footnote 6 Literature became endowed with certain educative functions, especially the cultivation of individual character and the development of aesthetic sensibility. The pāṭhak samāj, the ‘reader society’, therefore emerged as a distinct social collective where the image of the nation could be conjured immediately.Footnote 7 This development fundamentally conditioned the role of literature in pedagogic terms. The bilingually educated bhadralok intelligentsia took upon themselves the role of the custodian of a modern national literary-culture while consigning the rest of the society as aesthetically and morally deficient, lacking the ability to discriminate between the refined and the indecent.
The culture of literary periodicals therefore emerged, at least notionally, as an autonomous domain that embodied Bengali literature (Baṅga-sāhitya) as a surrogate of the nation itself. This domain however came to be constituted not so much in terms of an inner/outer or spiritual/material divide (though such distinctions are not entirely absent in contemporary conceptions of a modern literary sphere), rather this was an arena of private/public distinctions. Reading modern literature (and therefore literary magazines) was very much a solitary quotidian practice. At the same time it constituted a significant mode of public and collective engagement with profound implications for new visions of social change. An investigation into the practices of magazine reading in early twentieth century Bengal thus brings to question a simple private/public duality, and makes it clear that the relationship between the literary pursuits of the middle classes and their nationalist aspirations was far more complex than has been presumed. The early twentieth century was the time when nationalism had become entangled with the colonial power in a political movement in the domain of the state.Footnote 8 Partha Chatterjee has shown how, in the non-West, imaginations of autonomous forms of nationhood remained caught up in nationalism's hegemonic aspirations, the latter in turn being born out of the paradoxes between modular forms of the modern nation-state enunciated in Europe and their implementations in the colonies.Footnote 9 The institutions and functioning of modern statehood were predicated on the need to classify social groups on the basis of ethnic communities. The colonial state's processes of enumeration provided the necessary ‘sociological keys’ to the understandings of indigenous societies and also shaped ensuing forms of mobilization that sought community-based representations in the domain of the state.Footnote 10 Thus conceptualizations of political communities constituting the nation remained (and continues to remain) ensnared in the contradiction between the liberal-democratic forms of politics and the Orientalist constructions of India as a mélange of discreet ethnic communities.Footnote 11
Drawing from Chatterjee this paper argues that the literary field embodied a domain where the nation had not only proclaimed its sovereignty independent of its political encounter with the colonial state but also one in which nationalism continued to work out questions of social change even as it escalated its anti-colonial struggle. This literary sphere came to constitute a notionally autonomous domain that provided ways of thinking out a new form of solidarity—the pāṭhak samāj, or the ‘community of readers’. Given the multiplicity of reading practices and the various avenues of circulation of magazines, this literary community (consisting of readers with varying levels of literacy) clearly eluded the modalities of enumeration that the colonial state had put in place. As a very modern form of public life bonds of affinity in the literary sphere were not a ‘natural bond’ that bound all who shared the same origin.Footnote 12 Rather, bonds of commonality were conceived in a typically Arnoldian sense of a cultivated literary taste enabling a certain degree of aesthetic refinement.Footnote 13 Access to this literary sphere was therefore governed (at least conceptually) not by determinate and fixed entities like caste and religion, but rather by aesthetic sensibility enabled by print-literacy. The literary sphere thus came to be imagined as a large and diffused social collective whose functioning was inherently much more harmonious than communities based on caste and religion.Footnote 14 This is not to suggest that the literary sphere constituted by the processes of production, circulation and consumption of magazines emerged as some kind of definite alternative to other forms of solidarity. But what is nevertheless significant are the imaginative possibilities that such notional solidarities produced and the ways in which such imaginations inflected the more hegemonic imaginations of nationhood.
Periodicals are presumably taken as those print forms which possess periodicity—appearance at intervals, for instance, newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, monthlies, weeklies, and bulletins. This paper is concerned only with a particular form of the printed periodical: the literary magazines and the social spaces of their readerships. Poised precariously at the interface of the newspaper media and printed books, between commercial publishing and the high arts, literary miscellanies or what in Bengali were the sāmaẏik (periodical/transitory) or māsik (monthly) patrikā (journal) constituted a paradoxical middling format. While the name of a periodical, its editorial proficiency and its principal group of writers might suggest a stable entity, it was in practice a constantly evolving format. The inherent ‘openness’ of the periodical allowed readers the choice to read what they wanted and omit those that seemed unappealing.Footnote 15 The range of a periodical's contents, authors and reader responses at least notionally cut across class, gender and religion, implicating at any given moment of its circulation a virtual community of writers and readers much larger than its subscription figures would suggest.Footnote 16 Literary periodicals in colonial South Asia can hardly be assumed to be enduring, especially because most periodicals were run on meagre budgets and were short-lived. Periodicals were products of collective efforts on part of editors and writers who often came together to constitute informal, unstructured socializations that in the twentieth century came to be called āddā.Footnote 17 By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, collective production, the range of their contents and the fact that readers could fit in portions of reading between their work schedules, made these periodicals the dominant forms of literary practice. The nature of periodicals—multiple contributors, intermittent appearances, publication of reviews—made it a much more inflected form of literary practice than any other printed form.Footnote 18 Most of these periodicals appeared in attractive forms, the cover usually carrying a picture conveying the mission of the patrikā and its name ornately printed along those of the editor, assistant editor and patrons or publishers.Footnote 19 Since Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's Baṅgadarśana (1872) and certainly by the beginning of the twentieth century the periodical market was characterized by a better distribution system through postage, emerging authors, improved printing techniques by enterprising publishers like Upendrakishore Raychaudhury and of course a gradual increase of print-literate readers. The majority of editors and publishers were now quite selective about the quality of typescript, paper provided and the overall makeup of the magazine. Most miscellaneous periodicals following the example of Prabāsī would include plates of photographs and paintings. Evidently appearance helped to make the first impression and pull a sizeable reader group. The title and makeup provided an indication for readers on what to expect and also helped to differentiate the sāmaẏik patrikā from the production and trade in newspapers, books and pamphlets. By the early twentieth century the printing and publication apparatus of sāmaẏik sāhitya had started operating from the north-central areas of Calcutta—the surroundings of College Square, Harrison Road and Cornwallis Street. As for the channels of circulation, literary periodicals were mostly distributed through the postal system to individual subscribers, including subscribing libraries, and were sold at book or newspaper stalls on street corners and at railway stations.
Notionally, the public world of sāmaẏik sāhitya was to be distinct from Baṭtalā print, a heterogeneous source of amorphous literary production whose consumers comprised people with wide-ranging reading skills—part-literate women, urban petty-occupation people, small trading groups, labourers and artisans, domestic helps, musicians and poor Muslims. Diverse literacy amongst Baṭtalā readers made possible the coexistence of different forms of reading practices and aesthetic sensibilities.Footnote 20 In contrast, sāmaẏik sāhitya was envisioned in terms of modern literary practices. Since the publication of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's pioneering periodical Baṅgadarśana literary periodicals rapidly became a source of information and entertainment but more so of communication and public engagement. Bankim's stated agenda in bringing out Baṅgadarśana was to reorient the literary ambitions of the indigenous educated elite, induce them to use the vernacular and thus enable a new public interface between various print-literate groups.Footnote 21 From his experiences of the literary life in Victorian England Rabindranath Thakur regarded literary periodicals as a quintessential index of public life.Footnote 22 By the turn-of-the-tweintieth-century years, literary practice, as Pramatha Chaudhuri, a leading literary and social critic and editor of Sabuj Patra (1914) observed, was decisively moving out of the domain of rājadharma (implying, its elite circles) and was assuming the attributes of gaṇadharma (moving towards the public or gaṇa).Footnote 23 Chaudhuri described the shift as one from the age of a ‘few forceful writers’ (bahu-śaktiśālī svalpasaṃkhyak lekhak) to the age of ‘numerous, less-potent writers’ (svalpaśaktiśālī bahu-saṃkhyak lekhak).Footnote 24 It was this shift that Rabindranath too had indicated in his editorial introduction to Nabaparyāẏ Baṅgadarśana (1901) when he explained the need to move beyond Bankim's editorial strategies. Bankim had gathered around his Baṅgadarśana a small unit of extremely erudite scholars like Ramdas Sen, Akshaychandra Sarkar, Rajkrishna Mukhopadhyay, Haraprasad Shastri, Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay as well as poets like Nabinchandra Sen and Hemchandra Bandopadhyay who regularly contributed to the journal. Bankim himself was a prolific writer and when contributions fell short he filled up the requisite spaces with his own writings.Footnote 25 Rabindranath observed that with a noticeable expansion of the reading audiences, a patrikā now had to accommodate readers with varying degrees of literacy and cultural appreciation. This required an amorphous pool of writers from which the editor could draw and so the latter himself must necessarily write less.Footnote 26 The difference in the editorial strategies of the two Baṅgadarśana represented a gradual spreading out of the emergent periodical culture. Incorporation within periodical reading audiences of variously literate groups made the social space of print consumption during the turn of the twentieth century much more inflected than the immediately preceding decades. The multi-layered nature of readership now came to represent a set of competing claims to produce a new refined maddhyabitta pāṭhak śreṇī (middleclass readership).
Periodicals like Baṅgadarśana and Prabāsī were discernable through their form and content insofar as they included modern literary genres that had already been defined and indigenously adapted by the late nineteenth century.Footnote 27 In this they were distinct from other types of journals like those exclusively oriented to science, medicine, agriculture and industry as also from those journals that were organs of specific caste based associations or even district bulletins.Footnote 28 Their primary pedagogic agenda was oriented towards weaning away a broad spectrum of the middle classes from what were considered as genres of lower taste, especially farces (prahasan), romances (ākhyāẏikā) and sensation fictions (guptakathā). The increase in readership that Rabindranath hinted at was perhaps more an indication of an increasing number amongst the Baṭtalā audiences being subsumed, even if only partly, within the domain of literary periodicals, rather than due to any sizeable increase in print-literacy. Reading high-brow periodicals like Prabāsī co-existed with reading fiction that were widely considered to be of questionable taste.Footnote 29 Histories of cultural production and consumption, especially those of literary practices therefore cannot always be understood in oppositional terms of elite and non-elite practices, or even in terms of higher and lower middle class cultures. In fin-de-siècle Bengal, especially during the post–Swadeshi years, contradictions between the cultural ethos of the bhadra and itar seem to have lost their urgency.Footnote 30 While the literary-culture of periodicals was limited in terms of its accessibility to wider social groups, and by and large embodied the prescriptive social sanctions of the bhadralok, it cannot be neatly organized in terms of elite-popular categories. Instead what emerge as significant are the intra-class tensions and differentiations within the middle classes and attempts to create a dominant and subsuming notion of Bengali culture. Journals such as Prabāsī while being self-avowedly erudite, simultaneously strove to accommodate varying degrees of print literacy as part of its endeavour to enlarge its readerships. Clearly such shifts towards democratization were limited and not without inherent contradictions. This history is therefore one of incessant tension between the lofty literary-aesthetic goals set by writers, editors and publishers, most of whom had some kind of formal education and their ethical compulsion of reaching out to lesser-educated social groups. Literary consumption as manifested in the periodical reading practices of an amorphous and expanding Bengali middle class reveals how class distinctions were delineated and defended through canonization of aesthetic sensibilities and, in the process, how the middle class Bengali bhadralok came to identify a domain of authentic and modern Bengali culture of which they perceived themselves as being the exclusive vanguard. The practice of periodical reading as a specific form of middle class social behaviour emerged as a function of the changing needs of that particular social group and can be used to trace how consumption patterns enabled sustained interest in public life (jātīẏa jīban). The question moves from being one about the social composition of Bengali readerships to a broader question about how reading audiences came to imagine themselves as part of a distinct social collectivity (the pāṭhak samāj or reader society) and how a certain notion of being cultured came to be articulated that prioritized aesthetic sensitivity over conspicuous shows of wealth.Footnote 31 The instance of Prabāsī shows how literary periodicals determined and critiqued consumption practices of their middle class readers and how this particular form of the print-medium responded to changes in readers’ priorities and values in response to altered circumstances.
Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī (1901), Jaladhar Sen's Bhāratvarṣa (1913), Jagadindranath Ray's Mānasī O Marmabāṇī (1916), Satishchandra Mukhopadhyay's Māsik Basumatī (1922), Atulprasad Sen's Uttarā (1925) and Upendranath Gangopadhyay's Bicitrā (1927) were amongst a new breed of miscellanies, the sacitra māsik patrikā that secured significantly long print runs,Footnote 32 attracted an array of writers and typically projected themselves as family magazines, some with separate features for women and children.Footnote 33 These patrikā were different from their immediate predecessors and older contemporaries like Baṅgadarśana, Sādhanā and Bhāratī not only in terms of the differences in their editorial interventions but more so because they signalled a shift towards commercialization of high-brow literature and professionalization of literary practice itself.Footnote 34 None of these previous journals commanded sustained reader responses.Footnote 35 When the quarterly journal Aitihāsik Citra (Historical Portraits) lapsed for the second time, its editor the historian Nikhilnath Ray observed, ‘in spite of our best efforts to entertain, we were unable to turn readers’ attention from the flood of plays and novels’.Footnote 36 It was precisely this perceived disparity between the profusion of print and the literary elites’ notions of a desirable aesthetic that Prabāsī tried to address.Footnote 37 Ramananda Chattopadhyay's editorials, Bibidha Prasaṅga frequently raised questions of dissemination and accessibility of print. Such investigations necessarily assumed a correlation between an advanced industrialized society, commercialized literary production, the maximum spread of print literacy and questions of modernity. Commercialization and increased production of literary periodicals did not necessarily imply that every Bengali household or even the majority could actually access such cultural commodities. But trends towards commercialization constituted significant ways of enhancing the accessibility of the periodical medium. The production of sacitra māsik patrikā like Prabāsī was necessarily a response to the needs of commercialization. The format and content of such miscellanies were such that it could potentially take literary practices out of its hitherto elite domain in to the realm of the public. Chattopadhyay was the first editor of Bengali monthlies who rigorously insisted on regularity of publication. From Māgh 1310 (January–February 1904) Prabāsī appeared at exactly 31-day intervals and never during the editorial tenure of Ramananda Chattopadhyay was this punctuality severed. Timekeeping thus emerged as one of the major criteria for subsequent illustrated miscellanies. The other major innovation that marked a departure from the earlier generation of periodicals was Prabāsī's compensation for contributions. The editor started an imbursement scheme for writers at the rate of Rs.2/ per 500 words.Footnote 38 Referring to this new practice of payment in lieu of contributions, Manamohan Ghosh observed that Prabāsī's intervention precisely lay in conjoining Sarasvatī (the goddess of letters) and Lakṣmī (the goddess of wealth), that is, commercializing literary practice.Footnote 39Prabāsī fundamentally altered the production organization of high-brow periodicals insofar as its editor insisted on compensating writers even if it involved operating the journal at a loss. As a later section on how Prabāsī navigated the War-time financial crisis shows, its editor was acutely aware of the limitedness of literary practice within the constraints of a colonial economy, especially vis-à-vis the tenuous nature of purchasing power of large sections within middle income groups.
Prabāsī was particularly popular—almost from its commencement its circulation figures exceeded that of others.Footnote 40 Its form and content were intended in ways that could at least potentially penetrate the market for cheap books and yet retain its highbrow aesthetic. Thus Prabāsī was able to touch a wider variety of readers than the immediately preceding monthlies.Footnote 41 It came to be regarded as the pioneer for its constellation of eminent writers, well-chosen appropriate compositions and above all the colourful illustrations prepared at the press of Upendrakishore Raychaudhury.Footnote 42 Looking back to the early years of the twentieth century Rabindranath credited Ramananda Chattopadhyay for having imbibed professionalism in periodical publishing that made Prabāsī the trendsetter in contemporary literary journalism. As Rabindranath Thakur retrospectively observed in the avant-garde literary journal, Paricaẏa, ‘Chattopadhyay proved that the variety and punctuality with which he had to offer Prabāsī would be extremely popular. . . . Since then all other monthlies that appeared followed Prabāsī. Whatever newness that was noticeable was only in appearance lay out and quantity of feature materials—more pictures, more stories, etc.’Footnote 43
The making of a new literary magazine: Prabāsī's interventions
When in 1943 news spread that Ramananda Chattopadhyay the Prabāsī editor had died, a woman reportedly remarked, ‘Bengal has lost its guardian (abhibhābaka)’.Footnote 44 It was this role as the guardian of the public mind that Chattopadhyay had come to fulfil in his long stint as the editor of Prabāsī and Modern Review and before that of Dāsī, Pradīpa and Kāẏastha Samācār (later Hindustan Review). In his capacity as the editor of the Bengali Prabāsī and English Modern Review Chattopadhyay augmented the function and responsibility of that office beyond what had been fashioned by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in Baṅgadarśana. For the noted historian Nikhilnath Ray Prabāsī transported the ideological inheritance of Baṅgadarśana beyond the provincial limits of Bengal into the unfamiliar domain of prabāsa (foreign land).Footnote 45 From the late nineteenth century Bengali professionals—civil servants, magistrates, doctors and teachers—had started moving to other parts of the subcontinent. The colonial administration's vast civil, medical, educational and military networks required positioning of these Bengali professionals elsewhere in India. Most of these people were highly educated and served in lucrative assignments. Prabāsī carried biographies and photographs of these accomplished Bengalis outside the territorial frontiers of the Bengal province, including those who travelled outside the subcontinent. Gyanendramohan Das and Hemendraprasad Ghosh wrote a series of essays on prabāsī Bāṅgālī (expatriate Bengalis). Besides, Ramananda Chattopadhyay too wrote substantially on Bengal's émigré personalities including the labouring communities from Bengal who had migrated to various parts of the world.Footnote 46Prabāsī continued to be the only literary miscellany in Bengali that appealed to large sections of the Bengali émigré community living in the Hindi-speaking heartlands until Uttarā was published in 1925.Footnote 47
The frontage (pracchada) of the very first issue of Prabāsī sought to represent a notional transformation from prabāsa to svadeśa of areas within Indian territoriality. Prabāsī appeared in a bright and attractive cover studded with pictures of several heritage monuments each representing formative epochs in the history of the South Asian subcontinent: the Gupta period Amaravati temple, Taj Mahal, Burmese Pagoda, Qutub Minar at Delhi, Buddhist monastery of Bodhgaya, Golden Temple of the Sikhs at Amritsar, a Lingaraja temple at Bhubaneswar and Gateway to the Sanchi Stupa.Footnote 48 This pracchada would become the regular frontage of the magazine, identifying the nation through the magnificence of its artistic traditions.Footnote 49 The first issue also carried a series of pictures of the fifth century Gupta period cave paintings at Ajanta in western India—perhaps the first of its kind in Bengali miscellanies. Ramendrasundar Trivedi, a distinguished philosopher and professor of Chemistry and Nikhilnath Ray commended the editor's compiling acumen.Footnote 50Prabāsī carried feature articles on various sites of historic and religious interests in the subcontinent, accompanied by pictures of the monuments. The visual impact of these in reinforcing the meanings of ‘Bengal’, ‘India’ and the outside world led to a clearer distinction in terms of svadeśa/prabāsa. Thus the prominence accorded to historic creations outside Bengal endorsed an emerging idea of territoriality where Bengal and India both represented svadeśa or the nation.Footnote 51
Prabāsī's large circulation and long print run (1901–1974; Ramananda Chattopadhyay having been the editor from 1901–1943) made it a pioneer in literary journalism. Prabāsī was printed on Demy sheets with clear fonts and very minor typographical errors.Footnote 52 The journal stood out for its regular fees to writers and artists, consistent publication at 31-day intervals, introduction of coloured plates, flawless print and attractive frontage.Footnote 53Prabāsī Footnote 54 was initiated in Allahabad (Prayag, United Province) during Baiśākha 1308/April–May 1901 and moved to Calcutta in 1908. In the inaugural editorial Ramananda Chattopadhyay drew readers’ attention to the fact that Prabāsī was the first Bengali literary endeavour of its kind outside Bengal. Prabāsī was brought out by the Indian Press of Chintamani Ghosh—an established printing house that also brought out the important Hindi literary journal Sarasvātī and was initially the publisher of Rabindranath's books until the latter withdrew copyrights in favour of the Visva-Bhārati Press at Śāntiniketan.Footnote 55 Chattopadhyay's daughter Shanta Devi later recollected Prabāsī's modest beginnings, being entirely a family enterprise, almost like a ‘cottage-industry’. Chattopadhyay's wife Manorama Devi helped in packaging and maintaining accounts while his children chipped in to stick stamps and arrange papers.Footnote 56 In its early Allahabad days, a handful of émigré Bengalis, notably Debendranath Sen, Bamandas Basu, Jogeshchandra Roy and Bijoychandra Majumdar, actively contributed to the journal. Once Prabāsī moved to Calcutta it began to be published from the Kuntalīn Press and its office was moved to Cornwallis Street in north Calcutta.
From its very inception Prabāsī was different from earlier journals. Unlike for instance Bhāratī, known mostly as a Tagore family journal, it refused to remain confined to a small group of writers though some like Rabindranath Thakur, the poet Satyendranath Dutta, Charuchandra Bandopadhyay and Chattopadhyay's daughters Sita Devi and Shanta Devi were regular contributors.Footnote 57 Some of the best pieces in Bengali literature appeared in the pages of the Prabāsī. It would not be an exaggeration to say that writings of almost all major Bengali intellectuals are to be found in the magazine. For aspiring poets and fiction writers Prabāsī was the platform for making a serious debut in a Bāṅglā literary venture. Many of Rabindranath's major works, most notably his novel Gorā (Rabindranath Thakur credited the Prabāsī editor for prodding him to write Gorā and most of the novels and short stories that appeared in the journal),Footnote 58 his memoir Jīvansmṝti,Footnote 59 lyrical drama Acalāẏatan,Footnote 60 numerous essays, poems and songs appeared in the journal.Footnote 61 So did the scientist Prafulla Chandra Ray's famous essays, including Bāṅgālīra Anna-Samasyā and several others on plant life by the renowned physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose. Jagadananda Ray a scientist, who would later teach at Rabindranath's Viswa-Bharati University, wrote plentifully on popular science.Footnote 62 Historians Jadunath Sarkar and Rakhaldas Bandopadhyay wrote regularly on history and archaeological findings.Footnote 63 Radhakamal Mukhopadhyay, an economist and social scientist contributed on questions of social thought.Footnote 64 Jyotirindranath ThakurFootnote 65 was a prolific translator of European, especially French works while his elder sibling Dwijendranath Thakur contributed mainly on philosophy and theology.Footnote 66
Every issue of Prabāsī aimed at variety and featured multiple serial novels,Footnote 67 short stories, essays spanning a wide range of subjects, poems, news clips, general knowledge and discussion sections, features for women and children and above all an extremely forthright and persuasive editorial from Chattopadhyay himself. Every number carried coloured plates of paintings by the distinguished artists Abanindranath Thakur, Gaganendranath Thakur, Ravi Varma, Ram Varma, Nandalal Bose, Upendrakishore Raychaudhury and Sukhalata Rao and also reproductions of Ajanta cave frescoes and the Rajput, Mughal and Pahari miniature paintings. By the turn of the century advances in printing technology had made it possible for pioneers like Upendrakishore Raychaudhury, the proprietor of U. Ray & Sons, to improve on graphic representations, moving from sepia monotones and half-tone blocks to three-tone colour (tribarṇa) blocksFootnote 68 and by the end of its first decade, Prabāsī had printed over 200 pictures and plates in a single year.Footnote 69 Ramananda appreciated the potential attractiveness of illustrated magazines in enhancing readers’ exposure to ‘high’ art and conditioning their aesthetic sensibilities.Footnote 70 He had styled Prabāsī very consciously on the leading Victorian miscellanies like Penny Magazine and the Saturday Magazine both of which were published from 1832 in England. Both Penny and Saturday were known for their high quality illustrations that were an important part of the attraction of these periodicals. The remarkable success of these magazines had opened up an entire industry of illustrated periodicals in Victorian England. At the time Chattopadhyay edited Pradīpa the graphic press was still rather nebulous and the only other illustrated magazine was Shibnath Shastri's Mukula, a children's entertainment journal.Footnote 71Pradīpa used both half tone blocks and wooden blocks for its regular illustrations. The high expenses involved in reproducing pictures made the cost of producing Pradīpa very high. Chattopadhyay wrote, ‘Had Pradīpa not been illustrated and printed on good quality paper, we would have managed to survive barely a year with the same number of subscribers that we procured.’Footnote 72Prabāsī became known for its colourful vigour and it was the visual attractiveness lent by its pictures that made the magazine an easy conduit for reaching out to the literate readers.Footnote 73 It was Ramananda Chattopadhyay who introduced the practice of remuneration for writers and artists who contributed to the journal.
Abanindranath Thakur was perhaps the most extensively contributing artist in Prabāsī who also wrote several major essays on art and aesthetics.Footnote 74 Commenting on the impact that Prabāsī had on the process of popularizing the new Indian school of paintings, Abanindranath wrote, ‘New artists came forward to contribute in Prabāsī. The one responsible for this is not me but Ramananda-Babu. . . .We amateur artists not only got publicity free of cost but we still receive regular imbursements for those paintings we give to Prabāsī. Who else would have invested his own money on apprentices like us had Ramananda-Babu not brought out Prabāsī?’Footnote 75 Several of his well-known paintings, including ‘Shājāhāner Mṝtyu’, ‘Birahī Yakṣa’ and ‘Bhāratmātā’ were all first printed in the pages of Prabāsī.Footnote 76 In 1309 Baṅgābda (1902) Chattopadhyay reproduced 21 paintings by Ravi Varma along with the artist's biography. Prabāsī also provided ordinary Bengali readers a peek in to the world of European paintings by reproducing works of Rafael, G. F. Watts, Guido Reni, Bartolomé Murillo and other well known artists. Illustrations were thus amongst its foremost components through which Prabāsī very consciously identified itself. The Bengal Library Catalogue specifically mentioned Prabāsī as ‘illustrated’.Footnote 77Prabāsī and Chattopadhyay's English editorial venture, The Modern Review (1907) marked a decisive juncture in the circulation and consumption of modern Indian art.Footnote 78 For the first time literary journalism in colonial India became intimately concerned with reproduction and criticisms of art. Influential art critics of the Prabāsī-Modern Review collective included Chattopadhyay himself, Nivedita, Coomaraswamy, O. C. Gangoly and Charuchandra Bandopadhyay.Footnote 79 From the beginning, therefore, Prabāsī consciously engaged itself in cultivating the aesthetic taste of its readers and its innovativeness lay precisely in enforcing the instrumentality of the visual medium. The journal's idealization of beauty (soundaryya) was shaped directly by its conscious appeal to the Renaissance and post-Renaissance artistic traditions of Western Europe.Footnote 80 In this Prabāsī represented a deliberate move towards endorsing an aesthetic sensibility distinct from what were seemingly lewd visual prints reproduced from the Baṭtalā presses. Though the Prabāsī editor reinforced his conviction that aesthetic sensibility could not be forcefully imposed, the journal did actually endorse the authenticity of certain types of art over others like the Kalighat pat paintings and woodcut engravings depicting religious and urban life in Calcutta.Footnote 81 Such preference was most clearly reflected in a rejection of the paintings of Ravi Varma for an appreciation of the works of Abanindranath Thakur and his new school of Indian painting.Footnote 82 The shift arose out of a desire to carve out an autonomous niche for the nation. Nationalist ideology therefore identified and popularized the new school of art as distinctly modern, Indian, and simultaneously discernible from the Western or European.Footnote 83 As a pioneering sacitra patrikā Prabāsī's intervention in the visual edification of Bengali readers was profound. Its endeavour was not simply about introducing a new, educated and respectable bourgeois aesthetic to the common purveyors of Kalighat paṭ. The visuals of Prabāsī (and the Prabāsī-Modern Review collective in general) expanded the very literary horizons of Bengali culture.
Prabāsī identified a high-brow aesthetics sensibility that was defined simultaneously as modern and indigenous. It retained the reputation of being an upper crust journal and attracted the finest writers in Bengali literature, many of whose literary careers took off once they managed to get their first efforts published in Prabāsī. Footnote 84 Contemporaneous literary periodicals like Prabāsī, Sāhitya, Bhāratī, Nabyabhārat, Sādhanā, Bhāndār and Nabaparyyāẏ Baṅgadarśana carried similar fiction, essays and verse, in terms of content and quality. Writers like Rabindranath Thakur, his siblings Dwijendranath Tagore, Satyendranath Thakur, Jyotirindranath Thakur and Swarnakumari Devi, Abanindranath Thakur, Pramatha Chaudhuri, Bipinchandra Pal, Haraprasad Shastri, Srishachandra Majumdar, Ramendrasundar Trivedi, Akshaykumar Maitreya, Dineshchandra Sen, Rakhaldas Bandopadhyay, Manilal Gangopadhyay, Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, Jatindramohan Bagchi, Bijoychandra Majumdar, Saratkumari Chaudhurani, Girindramohini Dasi, Nagendrabala Sarasvatī and a host of occasional and more infrequent amateur writers contributed concurrently to several of these journals. It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to suggest that the range of prevailing literary tastes that Prabāsī espoused were shaped substantially by Rabindranath Thakur and Ramananda Chattopadhyay—the two being not just good friends but sharing in a common cultural ethos as well.Footnote 85 Before the outbreak of the First World War Prabāsī had come to embody a cosmopolitan Bengali aesthetic that was distinguishable from the more plebeian middleclass platter of Bhāratvarṣa, the staunchly non-Rabindric journals, notably Sureshchandra Samajpati's Sāhitya Footnote 86 and the more mainstream nationalism-oriented Nārāẏaṇ (1914) edited by Chittaranjan Das.Footnote 87
The innovations that Prabāsī began in terms of its makeup and commercialized functioning distinguished it from its predecessors and contemporaries.Footnote 88 Significant literary journals like its older contemporary Sādhanā edited by Rabindranath Thakur were filled up primarily by their own editors when contributions from other authors fell short.Footnote 89 Even more than half the pages of Nabaparyyāẏ Baṅgadarśana that started in the same year as Prabāsī were filled by the writings of its editor, Rabindranath Thakur. Footnote 90 The Prabāsī editor on the other hand wrote next to nothing apart from an eloquent editorial Bibidha Prasaṅga (Diverse Subjects).Footnote 91 The need for such all-encompassing argumentative editorials arose from an escalating interest in events that affected the lives of millions of Indians at home, abroad or at the warfront. The Swadeshi Movement, a decade later the First World WarFootnote 92 and finally the Non-Cooperation Movement intensified an interest in news. This expanded the readership of literary periodicals beyond the previous circle of a highly literate audience. As Francesca Orsini has also pointed out in the case of the Hindi public sphere, this more diverse reading public received a ‘common cultural and political education’ through the periodical press.Footnote 93 That both literature and analyses of political news coexisted within the covers of the same miscellany indicate how, during the first decades of the twentieth century, aesthetic persuasions and political involvement were no longer perceived as disparate engagements of a serious and informed reader.Footnote 94 But what is also important to consider here is the role of an editor of Chattopadhyay's stature in raising the level of political awareness among his readers—a pedagogic task which would normally be associated with the newspaper and pamphlet press. In a letter to Chattopadhyay the historian Jadunath Sarkar described the first quarter of twentieth century in India as a conflict between Modern Review (the English monthly miscellany that Chattopadhyay edited) and the colonial bureaucracy, not very unlike that of early nineteenth century England which, according to Sarkar, was a history of the clash between the Edinburgh Review and the Tory bureaucracy.Footnote 95 The editor's function was clearly perceived as that of a pedagogue of public judgment. What is more important is that that role was now defined primarily in terms of an antinomian philosophy, an implicit assumption that the literary public sphere was distinct from and in certain ways posited in opposition to the state apparatus.Footnote 96 In a tribute marking the fortieth anniversary of Prabāsī (1941) the Simlā Baṅgīya Sammelan wrote, ‘. . .For a good forty years in the realms of literature (sāhitya) and thought (cintā) Prabāsī has kept the mind of Bengal enlightened. We gratefully acknowledge our debt to the person whose broadmindedness has enabled this. . .regardless of limitations imposed by community, province and religion.’Footnote 97
Prabāsī's innovativeness lay in its feature sections that provided public forums for communication amongst the virtual community of readers. The Ālocanā or discussion section of Prabāsī was the first of its kind in Bengali periodicals.Footnote 98 It comprised criticism and discussion of essays that appeared in Prabāsī and also offered authors a chance to respond to readers and critics. The introductory note to the Betālera Baiṭhaka announced a new feature where readers could send in queries and other readers or the editor himself could reply.Footnote 99 The idea was to solicit expert opinion from amongst the readers on issues of general interest.Footnote 100 The Pustak Paricaẏa section consisted of reviews of recently published Bāṅglā books while Kaṣṭipāthar (literally meaning ‘touchstone’) consisted of selections from various contemporary Bengali periodicals.Footnote 101 The Pañcaśasya (literally meaning ‘five grains’)section was conceived as a counterpart of Kaṣṭipāthar, consisting of selections from international magazines from Europe, North America and East Asia.Footnote 102 These sections were the outcome of very conscious efforts by the Prabāsī editor to engage his readers in public encounters, making the journal a space for public participation. Such participation did not require substantial formal education on the part of its readers. In this sense Prabāsī was the single major initiative since Baṅgadarśana in widening the literary public space by involving readers outside educated circles of elites, and significantly altering the meaning of and need for literature as an instrument of public engagement.
The Bengali middle classes experienced the War primarily through newspaper and journal reports. Newspapers conveyed widespread anxieties of a looming economic crisis, combined with resultant social disruption and psychological effects of the hostilities. On the home front the unprecedented force of the Rowlatt Satyagraha (1919) and Gandhi's call for nonviolent non-cooperation with the Raj (1921) intensified anti-colonial emotions of the masses while simultaneously reiterating regional-linguistic sensibilities. The interplay of these historical processes created altered circumstances that necessitated a broadening of literary imagination so as to accommodate new desires and emotions. Chattopadhyay's editorial acumen lay in shaping the journal as a broad spectrum assortment so that it could command ample contributions. The aesthetic world created in the pages of Prabāsī was assertive in its claims of being socially inclusive—Chattopadhyay reiterated the need to encourage literary endeavours of hitherto marginalized voices—women, the peasantry and other subaltern groups and of course the Bengali-Muslim community.Footnote 103 It was not until about the First World War years and certainly the early1920s that the dominant literary sensibilities articulated by Prabāsī came to be seriously questioned by more plebeian sacitra patrikā like Māsik Basumatī (1922), modernist journals like Kallol (1923) and some leading Bengali-Muslim monthlies like Moslem Bhārat (1920), Saogāt (1918, more regularly from 1926) and Māsik Mohāmmadī (1927).
Becoming a family magazine: the war and the exigencies of commercial publishing
The difficulties encountered by Prabāsī in the course of its circulation during this period and the means adopted to circumvent those crises are indicative of new strategies of survival in a changing market. Procuring finances, especially through advertisements proved difficult. The advertisements that Prabāsī received were mainly from a few medium-sized businesses and mostly from small concerns and book stores. Chattopadhyay linked the success of the print media directly to industrial capitalism. He drew on what he perceived as the happy experience of print-capital in Western Europe and especially North America where the boom in national retailing that accompanied progressive urbanization and a general movement of the economy towards mature industrialism. Magazines had become the most preferred medium for American business and the complementarity between magazines and advertising made possible enormous growth in the periodical industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 104 In Bengal, by contrast, most large-scale industries were monopolized by Europeans who chose to advertise in English language journals some of which had a circulation far less than that of Prabāsī.Footnote 105 Significant here indeed is the deeply ambivalent relation of the print media vis-à-vis the colonial marketplace. Profitable periodical publishing in colonial Bengal remained mired in the limitations of colonial capital and the fact that large sections of the indigenous population lay beyond the pale of print literacy and the ability to purchase printed material. Drawing upon the widely accepted nationalist critique of colonial economy, Ramananda Chattopadhyay's editorials frequently invoked underdevelopment of indigenous capital as the principal impediment to print-capitalism.
It was the First World War which brought in the hard crises times. The end of the war in 1918 almost immediately set off a major economic dislocation in terms of poor harvests resulting in droughts and immense retrenchment in international trade. These resulted in escalating prices that hit their highest point in 1920.Footnote 106 Prices of essentials such as salt, kerosene and cloth registered a disturbing increase in Bengal that was not accompanied by any corresponding increase in wages and salaries.Footnote 107 The middle classes or madhyabitta bore the brunt of the burden as their income stagnated whilst expenses soared.Footnote 108 Thus post-war inflation and an acute shortage of essential commodities combined with stagnating income pressed hard on the middle classes who were engaged primarily as white collar employees (masī-jībi) in government jobs and as school teachers.Footnote 109 A cadastral survey of Faridpur district in Eastern Bengal showed that around 12,771 bhadralok families did not own any land and were mainly engaged in professions such as teaching and legal clerks.Footnote 110 The survey further showed that school teachers (mostly graduates) earned around Rs. 30–50 per month. The majority in higher professions such as lawyers, doctors and professors earned around Rs. 100–150 per month, whilst only a handful were categorized as a high income group earning between Rs. 500–1000 per month.Footnote 111 This all-pervasive economic displacement did not spare the publishing industry either. Paper and printing costs soared. In 1904 an annual subscription to Prabāsī cost Rs. 3/,Footnote 112 but after the war price rises forced it up to Rs. 4/ in 1920 with a further increase to Rs. 6/ the very next year.Footnote 113 Increased prices forced Prabāsī to reciprocate to its readers in terms of bigger quantity and an enhanced variety. While it had hit the stands in 1901 with a mere 4–page first issue, the 1921 price rise came with the promise of 144+ pages per month.Footnote 114 Some readers protested at the price hike suggesting that advertisement rates instead of prices ought to have been increased. The Prabāsī editor responded by attracting readers’ attention to the financial travails of running a Bengali monthly and though the 1921 price hike included an increase in advertisement rates as well, the Baiśākha 1328/April-May 1921 issue (the first month of the Bengali year) already carried fewer advertisements than before.Footnote 115 He also added that in Bengal the costs associated with running a periodical were incurred mainly from printing expenditures. Most writers for literary miscellanies either contributed voluntarily or with minimal remuneration. Ramananda Chattopadhyay was full of praise for the writers and artists who were regular contributors to Prabāsī and attributed its success to these ‘selfless’ people.Footnote 116 Consequently Chattopadhyay urged his reader-subscribers to treat and accept Prabāsī as a commodity (paṇyadrabya) and to weigh its price vis-à-vis what the miscellany had to offer every month. In response to a reader who had demanded Prabāsī be distributed free of cost, Chattopadhyay explained that periodicals were not meant to be complementary and therefore could not go unrecompensed.Footnote 117 Comparing a single issue of Prabāsī with a book of similar volume he drew readers’ attention to the fact that the former cost a fraction of the latter, indicating the relatively cheaper accessibility to entertainment through illustrated miscellanies like Prabāsī.Footnote 118 He categorically stated that readers ought to deliberate on the quality of writings, pictures, quality of paper provided and the print—a clear indication of a commercializing literary market and a reader community still not at ease with a potential consumer culture.Footnote 119
Although the post-war price rise was necessary to meet the mounting expenses in printing the Prabāsī, the editor also justified it on the grounds of an enhancement of quality by including more features.Footnote 120 From Baiśākh 1328/April–May 1921 Prabāsī began a new feature on women: Mahilā Majlisa (The Women's Get-together) and one for children's entertainment and lessons: Cheledera Pāttāri (Children's Lessons).Footnote 121 These were not meant to stand in for separate women's or children's magazines but to provide every member of a subscriber household with something appropriate to read, a distinct shift towards a more comprehensive family magazine.Footnote 122 Enhancement of Prabāsī's volume was meant ostensibly to minimize criticism of a price hike. But the inclusion of a women's section also points to the emerging importance of women as a distinct constituency of readers with their own emotional and educational needs. Mahilā Majlisa carried essays on women's history, current problems of women, their rights in India and other parts of the world, on women scientists and poets, female labour and education, and on child rearing, besides verse and prose compositions by women.Footnote 123 In curious ways therefore the editor's compensation for the price rise of Prabāsī enhanced the periodical's appeal as a family magazine and made conceptualization of its target readership much more nuanced. The turn towards the family magazine not just enabled a further democratization of print but more importantly a marked shift in the patterns of cultural consumption within the bhadralok domestic arena.
Envisioning the aesthete reader: literacy, leisure and reading
R. D. Altick, in his 1957 influential work The English Common Reader: A social history of the mass reading public, 1800–1900, spoke of the emergence of a mass reading public in Victorian England. Charles Dickens and G. W. M. Reynolds, for instance, were widely read in nineteenth century England.Footnote 124 In colonial Bengal, almost a century later, circulation figures for popular periodicals like Prabāsī still fell far short of metropolitan ‘mass circulation’ standards.Footnote 125 While this might seem explicable in terms of contrast between societies with varying degrees of literacy and capitalist development, one needs to be aware of multiple factors that mediated the production and consumption of print in colonial India.Footnote 126 In British Bengal a mass readership in terms of enumerable print-literate readers was limited, even though an extensive market for a large variety of prints, textual and graphic, thrived and coexisted alongside pre-print practices of collective reading.Footnote 127 The sheer heterogeneity of the readership of various print forms and the uncertain reach of printed texts render class as an analytical category relevant to readership much more complex. The question of readership therefore becomes tied up with those of the spread, scope and the meanings of print-literacy for the majority of the indigenous population.Footnote 128 The indeterminate nature of print literacy in the South Asian context makes it impossible to ascertain the exact number of readers and listeners whom a given book, periodical or newspaper reached. Practices of shared reading and listening to a particular text being read aloud constituted important ways in which non-literate groups accessed and participated in print culture.Footnote 129 The actual numerical size of the reading public therefore remains elusive.Footnote 130 The assumption of literacy as a necessary precondition for consumption of print has been seriously challenged by historical research on print production in colonial South Asia.Footnote 131
Nonetheless, what is intriguing is the emergence in fin-de-siècle Bengal of a highly developed periodical culture. There were as many as 140 māsik patrikā of varying form, content, target readership and longevity that appeared in Bengali during the period between 1900 and 1910.Footnote 132 Circulation figures provided by the Bengal Library Catalogues of Books and Periodicals remain only partial indicators of the reach of print. Circulation figures for literary periodicals are however useful in determining the relative popularity of each periodical, rather than providing any definite information about the actual numbers of readers. Also it can be fairly assumed that some people must have read more than one magazine. This pattern of overlap too is difficult to trace. The question of periodical consumption and its relation to print-literacy is a large and uncertain one and therefore demands much more attention than it has received so far.Footnote 133 What is central for the purpose here is to see how vernacular literacy became a key agenda for making periodical consumption sarbajanīn (accessible to all). Footnote 134 In one of the editorials in which he examined the reasons behind the ephemeral nature of Bengali periodicals, Ramananda Chattopadhyay pointed out the limitations in the reach and quality of the colonial state's primary and higher education schemes.Footnote 135 Limited literacy he concluded was directly responsible for the inadequate subscriptions of Bengali literary periodicals. The need of the hour for him was to widen accessibility of primary education ‘whose minimum prerequisite were a few pice for books and a few minutes of practice each day’.Footnote 136
Notionally periodical subscription and the longevity of periodicals became directly proportional to the expansion in vernacular literacy. Central to this argument was the enhanced significance of the figure of the kretā-pāṭhak or the consumer-reader. This notion of the kretā-pāṭhak subsumed the idea of an individual subscriber-reader, that is, a single issue of a periodical to one individual or one household. Such notions seem to have foreclosed the possibility of reaching out to readers who shared texts by reading aloud. Thus the modern literary sphere functioned on the implicit assumption that traditional reading practices had become outdated, soon to be effaced by the modern reader. For the Bengali literary elite sāhitya kshetra or literary field became firmly embedded in notions of print-literacy and individualized private reading.Footnote 137 In this vision, the domain of production, transmission and consumption of sāmaẏik sāhitya was definitively modern and civic, somewhat analogous to the literary public sphere of Victorian Britain, numerically correlative to literacy, readership and consumption. As Chattopadhyay observed,
. . .The life-experiences of woodcutters in our forests, the peasants of the Sundarbans, the boatmen plying the Padmā and Meghnā, the sea bound fishermen and yet to find a place in our literature. Apart from a few classes (sreṇī) of people identified as bhadralok the rest of the populations have till now, restrained themselves from sāhitya sevā. Women have expressed themselves only partly in literature. The Bengali-Muslim's enthusiasm and commitment are yet to enrich and embolden Bengali literature’.Footnote 138
The literary public life of the nation was clearly conceived in terms of an inclusionary ideology fostered by a nationalist vision of a postcolonial state where every citizen would have equal access to education. However efforts towards shaping such an inclusionary literary aesthetic remained caught up in the intelligentsia's hegemonizing cultural discourses that were intrinsically exclusionist in nature. By the Swadeshi years the imagined nation had come to be embodied in a virtual literary community that extended beyond the cartographic frontiers of the province.Footnote 139 The initial agenda with which Prabāsī was launched indicated the significance of this virtual community of readers as representing the national collective. The partition of the province in 1905 by viceregal fiat pressed upon the urgency of a literary community (pāṭhak samāj) as a modern, civic form of bondedness. The representative claims of this literary community could be sustained only by being at least notionally inclusive. This becomes evident in Chattopadhyay's repeated insistence on subsuming within the literary sphere marginalized social groups through enhanced literacy.
The literary sphere that Chattopadhyay speaks of here was discernibly constituted by the literary practice or sāhitya sevā of the bhadralok or the educated middleclass.Footnote 140 Strongly pedagogic in intonation this literary sphere was seen as a result of a correlation between literacy, acquisition of some formal education (not necessarily literacy in English) and a sense of the modern where individualized reading was prioritized over communal reading.Footnote 141Prabāsī's functioning and the ways in which the kretā-pāṭhak was conceptualized as the pulsating node of literary practice reveal the educated and nationalist bhadralok's eagerness to distance the sphere of sāmaẏik sāhitya from the low-life print production of Baṭtalā that were popular amongst a wider heterogeneous rural and semi-urban population. Throughout the early twentieth century decades, literary periodicals that aimed to uphold high-brow aesthetic had to contend with the contradiction between the realities of a partially literate society where pre-print communal practices of reading were still prevalent, and an emergent nationalist utopia of a society where every individual was fully literate.
Miscellanies like Prabāsī that contained a mixed platter were considered particularly suitable for entertainment and didactic purposes. Turning over pages of Prabāsī through the decades, yields significant insights in to the social world of its target audiences—the urban middle classes. Most writers, as evident from their family names, in journals like Prabāsī were drawn from the traditional upper scribal castes and their use of refined Bengali (even if not always sādhu Bāṅglā or chaste Bengali) indicate a certain educational distinction, even if all were not financially equally solvent.Footnote 142 Neither the term ‘middle class’ nor ‘bhadralok’ sufficiently convey the complexities of the social groups in question. The majority of writers in a high-brow periodical like Prabāsī were drawn from respectable professional groups with varying degrees of proficiency in English and included lawyers, doctors, college and school teachers and college-going students. The readership that Prabāsī catered for remained by and large specific to this particular social segment—the youth and middle class groups who had moderate to substantial formal education, with or without a parallel rent income from land.Footnote 143 Its women readers, even if not always formally educated would perhaps have been familiar with a lifestyle imbued with a modern sensibility.Footnote 144 Though Chattopadhyay was acutely aware of stratification within the middle classes, or the maddhyabitta in terms of education, income and lifestyle, Prabāsī's literary aesthetic seemed to accommodate mostly the upper middle classes.Footnote 145Prabāsī followed Baṅgadarśana insofar as it articulated a dominant high literary aesthetic distanced from what were perceived as vulgar tastes for inferior scurrilous genres, like farces and romances, amongst the subordinate spectrum of the middle classes. But notwithstanding the numerical increase of the literate population, it may well be contended that Prabāsī's relative popularity lay in its accessibility to the vernacular literate.Footnote 146 It became a major avenue for familiarizing the vernacular educated with European thought and literature. Jyotirindranath Thakur, a prolific translator, rendered several short stories of Maupassant in Bengali. These translations appeared in various journals including Prabāsī. Prabāsī also carried reviews of translated fiction that included renderings of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (Chandicharan Sen, Tom Kākār Kutir), John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Satyendranath Dutta, Tīrtha Salīl), Aesop's Fables (Manilal Gangopadhyay, Kalpakathā) and Shakespeare's Macbeth (Girishchandra Ghose, Macbeth).Footnote 147 Literary miscellanies like Prabāsī therefore constituted significant avenues for reception of European aesthetic conventions as editors sought to generate reading material suitable for the vast majority of the vernacular-literate, including women and children. What remains critical here is that in attempting to move beyond a confined readership of the bilingually erudite Prabāsī marked a major initiative towards extending the frontiers of the literary circle. It constituted an important way in which the divides between the English educated elite and vast majority of the middle classes educated in the vernacular were becoming more indeterminate. The bilingualism of the Bengali elite therefore needs to be rethought in the context of both the pulls of a commercializing print-culture and the imperatives of an anti-colonial nationalism seeking to augment the domain of a sovereign national culture that had been very powerfully and creatively identified by the nationalist elite.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the limited purchasing abilities of a majority of the print literate population seems to have enhanced the importance of public libraries in urban Calcutta and its immediate semi-urban surroundings.Footnote 148 Large British publishing houses like Macmillan started their own colonial library series as part of their agenda to cultivate a marketplace for their publications in overseas colonies.Footnote 149 Indigenous public libraries, reading rooms of various locally established societies and colleges became major institutional sites for nurturing reading habits. Leading libraries in the city included the Baṅgīẏa Sāhitya Pariṣada, Caitanya Library, the Uttarpara Public Library, Bagbazar Reading Library, Sarasvatī Library, Sābitrī Library, the Imperial Library and the Paikpara Zamindars’ Association Library besides several others.Footnote 150 Almost all these libraries subscribed to multiple periodicals simultaneously.Footnote 151 Public library reading rooms therefore emerged as significant spaces for circulation of periodicals as much as they did for books.Footnote 152 A large variety of these periodicals found their place in the stacks of these libraries and were made available for borrowing, further complicating the question of their circulation and effective reach.Footnote 153 These periodicals that were simultaneously subscribed to by a large number of households and several reading libraries thus become an important archive not only as representing a rapid process of commercialization and diffusion of print in an undercapitalized colonial society but also for its materiality—as an archive that clearly demonstrates the unevenness of the evolving class ideologies and identities of the indigenous middle classes. Given the unevenness and stratification of the colonial maddhyabitta in terms of economic and socio-cultural markers it becomes quite problematic to speak of the literary marketplace and cultural consumption simply in terms of class-based ideology. The complex patterns of production, transmission and consumption of sacitra māsik patrikā like Prabāsī need to be investigated in terms of the aesthetic principles that they articulated and how those principles came to be understood and contested by various reader groups. By the beginning of the First World War, Prabāsī had come to embody a kind of mainstream Bengali literary sensibility—an aesthetic, the acquiring of which represented claims to a certain cultural and sub-national position. Thus the journal's popularity becomes significant even more in context of the internal fissures of its readership—that notwithstanding socio-economic differentiations and uneven literacy patterns, at least a section of the Bengali intelligentsia felt that it was desirable and perhaps possible to shape an aesthetically uniform readership.
Expansion in periodical reading has been linked to economic growth and a substantial section of the literate population becoming more leisured.Footnote 154 The historical trajectories of the urbanization and professionalization during the nineteenth century of the Bengali madhyabitta created a space of leisure for this emergent class. Leisure or abasar is generally conceived as constituting the less busy and less important times of the day, for instance, the afternoons in the case of the household's women, and evenings and weekend holidays for men.Footnote 155 In his memoir, Jībansmṝti, Rabindranath Thakur spoke of a virtual void in the availability of reading during his childhood days that corresponded to the 1860s and 1870s.Footnote 156 The few suitable readings included Rajendralal Mitra's Bibidārtha Saṃgraha, an illustrated monthly that was more a collection of general knowledge features rather than a literary magazine, Biharilal Chakrabarty's monthly Abodhbandhu, fiction like Suśīlār Upanyās and farces like Dinabandhu Mitra's Jāmāi Bārik. Leisure or abasar thus implied not voracious reading habits but either afternoon repose or other forms of performative and audio-visual entertainment, like the jātrā (mobile theatres) or musical presentations by itinerant performers. It was precisely in this space of leisure that Bankim's Baṅgadarśana and subsequently other literary periodicals sought to intervene. Tagore recollected that each month when Baṅgadarśana appeared none seemed to have time for their habitual afternoon nap.Footnote 157Baṅgadarśana therefore constituted an intervention that transformed conventional notions of leisure, thereby significantly reshaping the colonial domestic space. Periodical reading emerged as a modern fashionable practice that relegated communal and performative modes of entertainment in to the domain of low-life or itar. Periodical-reading emerged as the most common leisure activity amongst both men and women. Tagore described the intense excitement that Bankim's serial novels caused amongst the new readership, ‘. . .those were the times when everyone was overwhelmed by Baṅgadarśana. Like family members, Suryamukhi and KundanandiniFootnote 158 walked to and fro in our homes. What's going on, what's about to happen. . .everyone was equally anxious (deśsuddha sabār ei bhābanā)’.Footnote 159
Abasar was conceived essentially as belonging to the realm of the domestic. Reading problematized existing ideas of abasar because it was at once a leisurely, private practice and a crucial form of public engagement that shaped the textures of everyday madhyabitta (middleclass) lifestyles.Footnote 160 Twentieth century literary periodicals derided abasar samaẏa or leisure time that was spent in doing nothing, typically disparaging time wiled away in afternoon nap, playing cards or gossiping. Reconceptualized as caring for the self through constructive and helpful reading that was to play a central role in the formation of the modern self, abasar became a key indicator of middleclass identity. It emerged as a concept of time that was to be spent in sadgranthapāṭha (literally implying reading good books). Alternately it implied refraining from engaging with hāsyarasotpādak-pustaka or books of light entertainment and comedies. Footnote 161 When Bankimchandra started Baṅgadarśana, he did so with the specific aim of connecting the highly erudite amongst the indigenous elite who mostly wrote in English with the lower stratum vernacular literate who drew his entertainment from fictional sub-genres, farces and secret romantic tales.Footnote 162 Periodicals were foregrounded as an effective antidote to these sub-genres. Readers were repeatedly urged to abandon habits of reading undesirable texts, a practice that amounted to indolence and squandering of precious leisure time. In contrast, high-brow literary periodicals like Prabāsī came to be regarded as constituting good and essential reading that did not necessitate family vigilance even if read by young maidens.Footnote 163
The practice of subscribing to and reading literary periodicals therefore emerged not as an autonomous or isolated practice but through a gamut of socio-political and cultural mediations. The history of a quotidian practice like reading therefore reveals crucial aspects of the changing cultural politics of the Bengali middleclass, and provides significant clues to the transformation of middle class values, beliefs and priorities. Periodicals, in this context, along with their production, distribution and consumption, thus bridge the private-public divide that is generally assumed to have been a central feature of middleclass bhadralok life in colonial Bengal.Footnote 164 Questions of social reform that animated the colonial public sphere during the second half of the nineteenth century were no longer restricted to the older public domain of engagement with the colonial state. Rather, the same questions, now couched in a new discourse of taste and morality, reappear in the pages of literary journals. Literary periodicals tried to redirect questions of social and family reform away from the legislative sphere—but not merely in to a retreat called the domestic sphere.Footnote 165 From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially after the advent of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's Baṅgadarśana, there prevailed a sense of confidence in the transformative capacity of literature.Footnote 166 The raging debates on the Age of Consent (1891) of minor wives threw up questions about limits of the colonial state's legislative intervention in to the domain of the nation.Footnote 167 The concomitant surge in print reflected the centrality in the public sphere, of the questions thrown up by nineteenth century social reform debates—concerns over issues such as ideas of love and conjugality, femininity, masculinity and motherhood and most importantly how notions of the samāj or social collective were redrawn in the light of the new debates. The domain of print emerged as a quasi autonomous domain where jātīẏa jīban or national life could be interrogated and alternative possibilities about society and politics explored. Literary periodicals like Prabāsī reveal how the social function of literature was conceptualized differently and in intensely contested ways. The bond between literary periodicals and their readers—itself an ongoing and creative process—therefore provides a different narrative of the constitutive relationships between print-culture and social and political change. It is here that periodical reading emerged as a useful choice for spending leisure. Leisure reading offered the space for individual readers to contemplate and think through questions raised. While allowing its readers privacy of domestic leisure and choice in reading, periodicals also provided for a certain degree of engagement amongst readers, writers and editors in a public forum, something that the domain of colonial law did not. For the indigenous middle classes therefore this literary sphere emerged as one that they could claim and guard as their own, a sanctuary for the sub-dominant colonial elite.
The literary periodical, because of its remarkable inherent diversity, came to be considered as particularly apposite as an apparatus for self-improvement. Periodical reading was intended to induce intense experiences of the self through complex emotional encounters that would in turn enable new conceptualizations of the individual's social roles. Of course the incorporative aesthetics of a mainstream Bengali literature that māsik patrikā like Prabāsī came to embody, could be potentially homogenizing and hegemonizing, blending notions of jātīẏa jīban in to a single positioning. During the course of the 1920s and 1930s several literary miscellanies experimenting with differing aesthetics like Kallol, Śaṇibārer Ciṭhi, several women's journals and perhaps most importantly a range of Bengali-Muslim journals like Moslem Bhārat, Māsik Mohāmmadī and Saogāt reveal the unremitting tensions between alternative conceptualizations of the self and the burdens of a hegemonizing aesthetic.
