SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Indian magazines and print culture in general have been studied more thoroughly for the colonial period, but the 1950s–1970s have rightly been called the golden age of magazine culture. In Hindi literary lore, magazines loom large as the main platform for literature, where poets and fiction writers found readers and recognition and critics debated aesthetics and ideology. To borrow Amit Chaudhuri’s phrase, magazines were sites of intense ‘literary activism’: an activism by editors on behalf of literature to champion new writers and encourage readers’ tastes, but also a constant critical interrogation on the value and function of literature. Despite their ephemeral nature—particularly in the Hindi context where old books and periodicals tend to be sold in bulk as scrap paper—magazines embody, and capture for us eager after-readers, a lively community of readers and writers. This essay explores the multilingual ‘ecology’ of Hindi and English literary and middlebrow magazines, including Kahānī, Kalpanā, Sārikā, Saritā and Caravan.