Saritā and the new sevā

Launched in 1945 by the Delhi-based printing-turned-publishing house Delhi Press, Saritā was among the widely read Hindi monthlies of the 1950s.Footnote ¹² Munshi Thakur Das established Delhi Press in 1911 exclusively as a printing press. His great grandson, Vishwanath, was the first in the family to begin publishing with the launch of the English magazine, Caravan, in 1940. He simultaneously edited Caravan and Saritā throughout the 1950s. Saritā was priced at Re. 1 and an average issue ran into 120 pages, with issues sometimes running up to even 200 pages.Footnote ¹³ The fact that Saritā catered to different sets of readers is evident from its structure. There are not only separate sections for different fictional genres such as short stories and one-act plays (ekāṅkī), but the more ‘serious’ genre of non-fiction ‘lekh’ (article) is allocated equal space, four to six pieces each on average. A self-help/assorted section usually followed, with advice columns on how to solve small household problems. The ‘dhārāvāhī’ or serialized novel was next; then came all the regular columns, clubbed together at the end of the table of contents: ‘Āpke patr’ (readers’ letters), ‘Chañchal Chhāyā’ (film reviews), ‘Nayā sāhitya’ (book reviews), ‘Varg pahelī’ (a Hindi crossword competition with cash prizes). Later, sections on ‘Photograph’, cooking, knitting, ‘Pāṭhakõ kī samasyāẽ’ (Agony Aunt, added in November 1951), ‘Priy mitr’ (Pen Pal, added in December 1949), and ‘Bāl saritā’ (children's literature) were added and the list of columns grew. Saritā thus operated like a ‘digest’: there was something in the magazine for everyone.Footnote ¹⁴

Historically, the magazine as a material artefact offering something for everyone was not novel to Hindi publishing. Widely read pre-Independence journals like Saraswatī, Mādhurī, and Chā̃d had also offered a variety of items to peruse.Footnote ¹⁵ In a pioneering study of the Hindi journals of the early twentieth century and their role in the formation of the Hindi public sphere, Francesca Orsini argues that the pre-Independence journals articulate reading and writing in terms of ‘sevā’ or ‘service’ to Hindi and to the nation.Footnote ¹⁶

However, because of alteration in content, a similar structure asks different questions when encountered in the post-Independence space. In her study, Orsini traces the movement in pre-Independence journals from propagating ‘sāhitya sevā’ or ‘service of literature’ in the Dwivedi periodFootnote ¹⁷ to the nationalist framing of ‘strīdharma’ or ‘women's duty’ to ‘rāṣṭrasevā’ or ‘service of nation’. Saritā, however, so close after Independence, either ignored or, at best, reconfigured these questions. This, I argue, is one of the definitive characteristics of the middlebrow magazine—that is, distancing its concerns from, and being uninvolved in, nationalist or nation-building concerns. For instance, Saritā did not carry any sections on nationalist poetry or essays on imagining either an ideal nation or an idealized subject in service of the nation. While the magazine did not completely isolate itself from the realities of the new nation, such as carrying a recurring section on the Constitution of India, the exclusion of the discourse of nationalism, so close after Independence, is remarkable.

Second, while Hindi was one of the primary concerns of the pre-Independence magazine, Saritā did not seek to preserve any particular form of institutionalized or literary Hindi. ‘Sāhitya sevā’ or ‘service of literature’ did not mean what it did in the pre-Independence period—that is, service to an institutionalized Hindi. Indeed, Vishwanath as editor categorically argued against a homogenized nationalist imagination, instead advocating language syncretism. For instance, in an editorial in the March 1958 issue, Vishwanath began: ‘Hindi—or should we call it Hindustani—because it includes both Hindi and Urdu.’Footnote ¹⁸ Saritā’s writing style on the whole followed this declaration, deploying words from the shared language bank. This ideology was also visible in the magazine's script itself. For instance, the magazine's script employed the nuqtā to denote Urdu sounds. In acknowledging the nuqtā, rather than erasing or avoiding it, Saritā directly linked the script with Hindustani rather than Hindi, registering a protest against deterritorialization of language.

Then again, Saritā not only addressed the Hindi–Urdu debate, but also the other, prominently growing Hindi–English one, which, at the time, was the other raging question in the parliament with regard to decisions about India's official and national language.Footnote ¹⁹ When an irate reader complained to Saritā about its use of what he termed an ‘English’ full stop, recommending Saritā to return to the ‘Hindi’ punctuation style of the ‘pūrṇa virām’, Vishwanath responded: ‘If other punctuations such as, ; -- can be used in Hindi, then why take issue with the “full stop”? Also, the English “full stop” takes up less space compared to the Hindi “pūrṇa virām”.’Footnote ²⁰ Saritā argued for practicality, functionality, ease, and syncretism, at the level of both words themselves as well as the script.

Vishwanath also addressed the debate around the possibility of Sanskrit becoming mandatory in schools. Arguing that Sanskrit was no longer in common currency and, historically, because of its Hindu upper-caste connections, could never be so, he advocated English instead as the lingua franca: ‘If it is a question of the country's equality and literature, then there can be no other language leading it apart from English … because the unity that exists because of English today cannot be obtained through any other language.’Footnote ²¹

In suggesting English as the unifying national language in a Hindi monthly, Vishwanath extended Saritā’s concerns beyond the straight and narrow anxieties of a Hindi-language magazine. This, in turn, built into its reputation as a middlebrow magazine that fed its readers’ imaginations as being an all-knowing unbiased space that was also at the same time easy to understand, approach, and, if needed, apprehend. Another constituent of the middlebrow magazine emerged from this discourse: apart from refusing to centre its concerns around the rhetoric of nationalism, it followed a similar practice for dealing with the question of Hindi as nationalist language, by addressing it thoroughly for its readers and, at the same time, refusing to centre on it. The middlebrow magazine, therefore, possessed its own language politics where, in its multi-pronged approach to contemporary language debates, Saritā established itself as an intellectual, serious magazine that thought beyond its own language turf.

In addition to his opposition to the nexus between Hindi and the Hindu nationalist idea of India, Vishwanath was very conscious about his anti-religious stand and Saritā often got embroiled in lawsuits because of it. For instance, Arvind Kumar, one of Saritā’s editors, wrote a poem called ‘Rām kā Antardvand’ or ‘Rām's Dilemma’, which ultimately resulted in a court case and ban on the July 1957 edition of Saritā. Footnote ²² Saritā also periodically produced several polemical essays against Hinduism.Footnote ²³ While, on the one hand, Vishwanath's anti-religion policy can be read as conforming to the Nehruvian secular vision, it was complicated by Saritā’s anti-Congress stance visible, for instance, in cartoons lampooning Nehruvian tactics to rally public opinion and get votes.Footnote ²⁴ Vishwanath, in fact, even openly satirized Nehru and Congress. For instance, he wryly advised Nehru to establish more new Cabinet ministries in the government so it would result in more Congress ministers being employed, as well as ‘a hundred, two hundred representatives, superintendents, section officers and clerks removing India's unemployment utterly so that they (Congress) can secure some more votes in the next election’.Footnote ²⁵ Within the magazine, Congress is portrayed as manipulative and duplicitous rather than idealistic and egalitarian.

Given this, I argue that Vishwanath's articulations on religion should not be merely read as Nehruvian or secular, but can be extended to be read further in another, well-known literary tradition of the 1950s. In other words, these expressions need to be examined more in light of the ‘moh bhaṅg’ tradition. Indeed, the Hindi literature movement of the 1950s was deeply invested in this idea of moh bhaṅg, loosely translated as ‘disenchantment’, which questioned whether Indian freedom had been achieved at all through official independence from the British government. This freedom, it was argued, was merely nominal. The moh bhaṅg movement in literature is commonly attributed to having emerged from the progressive-communist front where, literary historian Gopal Rai writes, ‘at that time, critiquing the Congress, the Communist party declared 1947's freedom as an “untrue freedom”’.Footnote ²⁶

While the progressive-communist literary faction focused on literary representations of the lower classes, another literary movement, called the Nayī Kahānī/New Story movement, emerged in this period that focused on the idea of individual, subjective disenchantment as opposed to mass struggle.Footnote ²⁷ The Nayī Kahānī movement focused on its slogan of ‘bhogā huā anubhav’, or ‘felt experience’, which meant that personal, individual, independent meaning-making was necessary if one were to speak and write of experience.Footnote ²⁸ Therefore, in either the mass progressive articulation or the individual feeling of experience in the Nayī Kahānī movement, the national or collective experience did not hold much reckoning. I argue that, against this backdrop, Saritā articulated its own sense of disenchantment. The magazine regularly published Nayī Kahānī as well as progressive writers.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, Saritā found ways to express disenchantment without privileging the progressive emphasis on the mass. Similarly, Saritā also expressed disillusionment with the Nehruvian ideal nation without favouring the inner life of Nayī Kahānī. Saritā’s moh bhaṅg uniquely blended practical and consumer concerns within its Nehruvian-secular-seeming fabric.

This can be best demonstrated through Vishwanath's use of ‘sāhitya sevā’ or ‘service of literature’. He connects the importance of supporting magazines by buying individual copies for each family member, saying:

Moh bhaṅg, here, acquires another strain and trajectory. I argue that the post-Independence disenchantment in the commercial magazine deserves to be investigated in its shift to a new rhetoric of ‘grāhak sevā’, or ‘service to the consumer’. For instance, an advertisement published in Saritā’s May 1949 edition proudly declares: ‘Saritā has only one aim—to serve readers.’Footnote ³¹ Another advertisement states that Saritā does not accept film advertisements because that would create bias against the magazine's ethical film reviews.Footnote ³² Saritā harbours an active sense of obligation towards the readers and their creative, intellectual, and ethical interests. Indeed, if we map the structure of the magazine to the body of the family, in a marked departure from the pre-Independence rhetoric, Saritā does not ask what the family can do for the enrichment of the country, but instead informs the family what it must do to nourish itself. This possibly emerges from disenchantment that is contemporary to literary movements, feeding into the readers’ particular middlebrow concerns about language, literature, and religion, although also dramatically altering it by ingeniously feeding in ideas of consumption and consumer service.

The following section focuses on the value of the reader as producer and primary creative entity in Saritā. Even as Vishwanath's editorial voice and subject position appear throughout the magazine, what emerges from reading Saritā is a sense of readers not as passive objects editorialized into submission, but rather as autonomous minds who speak back to the magazine.

Readers as producers

This section examines some reader responses—letters to the editor, advice columns, and readers’ own literary and creative contributions—to show how the readers of Saritā fashioned themselves as equal creative minds, actively constituting the magazine with stakes in it.Footnote ³³ Often, the readers wrote back critically. Even as Saritā prided itself on its simplicity of language and style, readers were quick to catch any slips and report their displeasure. In the June 1949 issue, Bamchand Surana from Sadulpur, Rajasthan, writes:

Another reader—Balswarup ‘Rahi’ from Timarpur, Delhi—also expresses his dissatisfaction: ‘Saritā often satirizes radio's sanskritized Hindi, but what was the kind of language employed in the first two-three contexts of “Crime”, the short story published in the December issue?’Footnote ³⁵

The average reader of Saritā exercises his or her right to ask for a simpler language. At times, as seen in the first example, this is cloaked either in the older, more familiar pre-Independence ‘strī-upyogī’ or ‘useful for women’ rhetoric of promotion of literacy of ‘sisters’ so that they can carry on their ‘strīdharma’ or ‘women's duty’. Again, this is indicative of the fact that the discourses of the pre-Independence period, as articulated by Orsini, are not completely absent from the magazine. Mostly, however, as can be seen in the second example above, where the reader rejects the story's ‘radio's sanskritised Hindi’, the assertion of choice comes out of an exertion of the right to read freely and for pleasure. To facilitate this, the reader is not afraid to take the magazine itself to task.

Often, this is played out in the conversations between the readers themselves. This is illustrated best in the readers’ comparison of the magazine with other contemporary literary journals such as Pratīk and Himālaya.Footnote ³⁶ While Vallabhdas Gupta, a reader from Amravati, Maharashtra pejoratively speaks of Saritā’s position vis-á-vis these magazines—‘Saritā will take ten years to match them. These are magazines as well as literary books’—other readers differ and hail Saritā as the magazine of genuine ease.Footnote ³⁷ Rajkumari from Ahmedabad, Gujarat writes: ‘Even I have read Himālaya and Pratīk, but they don't possess the pleasure I get from reading Saritā.’Footnote ³⁸ Yet another—rather sardonic—response to Vallabhdas Gupta comes from Kaminilata, from Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh:

The informed and articulate reader not only counters the literary magazine's specific claims to literariness, but she is also aware of the link between the publication of a magazine and advertisement revenue, deriding the ‘progressive’ reader about his lack of awareness on the matter. The conversation over literariness runs into February 1950, when another reader—Shyam Hari Tiwari from Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh—writes: ‘However, we should not overlook the second aspect. The other two magazines are not as close to life as is Saritā.’Footnote ⁴⁰

I dwell on the readers’ comparisons between the literary and middlebrow journals here to establish three ideas: first, that the consumer of Saritā is indeed familiar with the Hindi literary sphere and the publications circulating therein; second, that s/he is making an intervention of choice, declaring not only the use value that s/he derives from Saritā, but also in terms of the pleasure value derived. Finally, s/he expresses an intellectual assertion to a right to a middlebrow magazine such as Saritā. The emphasis on how the middlebrow magazine is ordinary, close to life, and therefore more valuable to the reader than literary magazines is expressed as an intellectual, well-articulated choice.

Apart from the readers’ assertion of a right to Saritā, other letters express their own opinions on the individual pieces within the magazine. Some stories are deemed too light or critical, non-fiction pieces too are weighed, and readers often comment on the lack of poetry in the magazine. That said, studying letters to the editors is only one way of understanding readers’ engagement with the magazine. Readers also made themselves visible throughout the text through other contributions, most notably through the stories they themselves wrote and submitted. ‘Naye Aṅkur’ or ‘New Saplings’ was a section launched in January 1952. Vishwanath explained its rationale thus: ‘Saritā has, from its birth, stopped itself from getting influenced by big names. It has always given more importance to the creation—who has written the creation has been uninfluential.’Footnote ⁴¹ Saritā invited stories from readers—a novel way of participating in the economy of the middlebrow magazine that also significantly published prestigious Nayī Kahānī and progressive fiction alongside it in the same space.Footnote ⁴²

Readers also communicated extensively through advice columns. While many readers wrote in with questions about physical appearance such as hair and skin problems, other questions were of a more personal nature. For instance, one reader asked whether it was socially acceptable for his friend to marry a girl who had, at a point in time, tied a rākhī Footnote ⁴³ on his wrist. In the same column, another reader wondered whether it was possible for her to marry her sister-in-law's brother's son.Footnote ⁴⁴ The answers to both these questions were similar: it was perfectly socially acceptable to marry anyone so long as the person was not a blood relative. Often, the editor would open a reader's question for the other readers to answer. In the December 1951 issue, for example, a reader writes in about his wife, who has confided in him about a premarital sexual relationship. Reader responses in the January 1952 issues address this, offering that that the husband should accept the wife and even shift from their current neighbourhood if the social pressure and taunting proved to be unbearable. Often, columns were concluded with other questions from the consecutive issue. By creating a pool of replies in the article with direct quotes from readers’ suggestions, the editor makes space for readers as integral to the magazine itself. This, again, is another piece of prominent evidence of the growth of the middlebrow self—a self that demands to be included as an intellectual and creative driver within the magazine and, by extension, the public sphere itself.

The female assertive reader

The female reader of Saritā particularly is a fearless and assertive reader, self-confidently spelling out her clear likes and dislikes, reporting her concerns directly and confidently to the magazine. In addition to the examples of female readers writing to the magazine in the previous section, this section will specifically discuss the different and varied female responses and articulations in Saritā, signifying a range of female readerships. For instance, a reader called Pratibha Singh from Ranchi objects to the veracity of the depiction of human relationships in a story by Neelkan Perumal called ‘Jhopṛī kī Kahānī’, or ‘The Story of a Hut’:

This reader contests a detail based on her position as a housewife who is well acquainted with the price of pots and pans. On this basis, she calls into question the veracity of the story itself. The reader here situates herself as a woman of knowledge, using it to educate the ignorant storyteller in the magazine. Another reader—Neeraja, from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh—poses the issue from the position of a woman stepping out of the home:

The above two examples illustrate how women define themselves in relation to both the parameters of the home and the world outside, stitching the two entities together within the fabric of the magazine. For both kinds of women—those in the home and the world—Saritā offers space for an expression of themselves as effortlessly thinking subjects. That is, the magazine flattens the differences between what it means to be inside the home and outside, not privileging one for the other.

Francesca Orsini writes of women's journals and their usual conflation of womanhood with motherhood and, in the nationalist framework, with woman as mother of the nation.Footnote ⁴⁷ She argues that Chā̃d—first published in 1922—however, breaks away from this tradition to an investment in feeling, by ‘recognizing women as emotional beings, questioning their home-bound existence, and envisaging new public roles’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Returning to Orsini's study of the pre-Independence women's journal Chā̃d is particularly useful, for three reasons: first, Chā̃d was the most popular Hindi monthly of its times; second, it falls within the frame of ‘strī-upyogī’, namely ‘useful for women’ literature but also significantly alters it and widens its scope; and, third, it provides methodological tools for reading new genres. For instance, Orsini shows how the ‘hybrid genres (confessionals, epistolary novels, social novels) mixing reality with fiction, instruction with entertainment’ published in Chā̃d ultimately made space for ‘taboo issues concerning women to be raised, directly and with the heightened impact of a melodramatic narrative’.Footnote ⁴⁹

In addition to Orsini, Shobna Nijhawan, in her work on nationalism and women's periodicals, argues that ‘the periodical was a site to expose patriarchal, social, and political ideologies that negatively impacted the lives of women’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Mapping the readerships of women's periodicals as ‘by default upper class and Hindu’, she notes that the periodicals addressed the readers ‘as an entity, indicated by the terms strī jāti (womenkind), strī samāj (women's society), strī gaṇ (women's group), and even Hindī bhāṣiṇī nārīsamāj (the Hindi-speaking women's community), or through the more intimate kinship terms mother and sister’.Footnote ⁵¹ Nijhawan's study of periodicals invokes a sense of women's place at the centre of public discourse, which they otherwise cannot attain because of their inability to physically be present in it.

Again, Nijhawan's study of women's periodicals in the pre-Independence period is useful, as she additionally imbues them as a space for expansion of the roles of women's subjectivities during the nationalist struggle, stating ‘the periodicals that had first addressed women, girls, and children as separate audiences collapsed these gendered divisions and began conceptualizing women and girls and men alike as future citizens of an independent nation’.Footnote ⁵²

As the illustrations in the article show, however, Saritā did not address women exclusively as a separate audience, nor did it seek to address social ills that oppressed women. Nijhawan's argument about the collapsing of divisions along the lines of gender finds continuation in the middlebrow magazines such as Saritā. In Saritā, the magazine acts not as a prescriptive manual reproducing normative formula for what a woman ought to be or ought not to be. The magazine consciously configured itself as a magazine for everyone in the family and women were an inherent part of it, fashioned as matter-of-fact readers and producers within the magazine.

Similarly, if the pre-Independence period had its own discourse of women as mothers, women as mothers of the nation, and, finally, women as subjects of feeling, Saritā’s female readers perhaps can be understood more in terms of arbiters of taste and knowledge and less in terms of either kinship or seeking to expose oppressions. Significantly, women's voices are not cloaked in apology. Instead, the magazine as a material object serves to make available a multiplicity of subjectivities to the different women who engage with, and are integral to constituting, it.

Female readers’ direct relationship to the magazine is reflected in Kumari Vimla's letter to Saritā from Shahdra, Delhi about the magazine's cost: ‘The price is definitely expensive, but it can be tolerated because of Saritā’s beauty. However, please don't step even further, otherwise Saritā will escape middle class and reach upper class status.’Footnote ⁵³ Kumari Vimla asserts her opinion over price, linking it directly to a question of class status. She expresses an entitlement over the right to read, which is tied not to her gender, but rather to her class. This assertion of value-for-money, in turn, stands in stark contrast to other value-for-money book publications for women, namely religious chapbooks and almanacs.Footnote ⁵⁴ Saritā notably marketed itself as a family magazine and not as a women's magazine. Kumari Vimla's concerns about price then reflect her role as a consumer of ‘Saritā’s beauty’; she does not feel the need to cloak the pleasure she derives from reading the magazine and has a direct economic stake in the material object, fully aware of her choices and how much she should pay for the magazine.