Everyday Reading

Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India

Aakriti Mandhwani

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781625347909
  9781625347916
• eBook ISBN:
  9781685750664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize

During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines—like Delhi Press's Sarit?—and the first paperbacks in Hindi—Hind Pocket Books—North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion.

Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices—particularly those of women—Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction: Middlebrow Not only in the Middle
• Chapter One: Sarita and the Birth of Middlebrow Publishing
• Chapter Two: Hind Pocket Books The House of Exploding Hindi Paperbacks
• Chapter Three: Dharmyug From Dharma to Dharmvir Bharti
• Chapter Four: Romāñch and the 1950s The World of Genre Magazines
• Conclusion: Who’s Afraid of Manmath Nath Gupta?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover