[Reader-list] Hindi little magazines

Fri Aug 26 11:34:41 IST 2005

A piece I wrote on Hindi periodicals sometime ago-both
a response and a substantiation of some things Anurag
mentioned yesterday...

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HER EDITORS VOICE- HINDI PERIODICALS

How does it happen that a language supposedly spoken
by some 40 crore people, with  multi-edition
newspapers that have readerships running into several
millions, the language of Bollywood and of television,
the national language of this country in fact,
cannot publish more than ten thousand copies of even a
best-selling novel? How is it that Indias leading
language does not even have a national magazine,
commercial or otherwise, worth its name? 

How does it happen that another language, the one we
use in our offices, clubs, media, home, schools, a
language where our novelists have dominated virtually
an entire decade of world literature does not have a
single literary magazine to its credit? How does a
literature emerge in the absence of a literary
culture? Where are the critics, essayists, satirists,
the pink and yellow English writers in India?

Hindi, the language that lacks a magazine of any
stature can yet support a number of literary
periodicals with readerships running into several
thousands. Some of them have been around for far
longer than any review or magazine anywhere else in
India. Hans prints eleven thousands copies every
month, Samyantar from Delhi brings out five thousand
copies, there is also Pahal, Tadbhav from Lucknow,
Vasudha, Pratimaan and several others as well. Ditto
for Urdu too. Shabkhoon from Allahabad has been in
existence for some forty years, there is also Shaair,
Zehen-e-Jadid, Asri Adab, Kitabnuma and so on.  

Their readers live in the unlikeliest of places,
places that last saw glory during the independence
movement and have since been falling off the map:
cities like Balia, Gaya, Banaras, Gorakhpur, Jhansi.
Many obituaries later, small town North India
stubbornly lives on. If there are takers for such high
brow magazines then there should be takers for serious
literature as well? Yet no serious work of fiction or
non-fiction in Hindi sells more than ten thousand
copies. Partly because the serious Hindi writer/reader
has easy access to English and, here it becomes
circular, partly because there is little serious,
that is academics/non-fiction etc, literature
available in Hindi. And yet the success of the little
magazines, the evident hunger with which people demand
it, not merely in the mofussils but also in the
metropolises, cries for an explanation. For a language
that seemed to have been crippled by its mythical
grievance against the government, the injustice of the
Indian State against it, it is astonishing that
independent ventures such as the above can subsist for
so long and indeed, thrive. 

There was a time though, not too long ago, when
magazines of many kinds ruled the world of Hindi
literature, a time when their importance was
scintillatingly evident. There were magazines such as
Dharmyug (which sold more than four lakh copies),
Saaptahik Hindustan, Dinmaan, Sarika, Kadambini,
serious as well as literary reviews that commanded
nationwide respect and stature. The revolution of the
elite[r] subaltern castes in the sixties and the total
(anti-English) revolution of the Lohiates, it seemed
then, had propelled Hindi to that dominance that it
had always openly craved. Most prominent leaders of
the opposition were Hindiwallahs, Hindi academics and
writers had access to the levers of power and it was
the language of political gossip in the capitals
cafes. It was all symbolised by the glittering
productions of National School of Drama under Ibrahim
Alqazi, that great Saheb of Hindi theatre.

To be published in Dharmyug then was considered the
epitome of achievement for Hindi writers while its
editor Dharmvir Bharti was the presiding and haughty
deity who could make or mar careers at will. It was
the first to serialise that tremendous milestone of
Hindi and Indian theatre Aadhe Adhure as well as the
first to publish Shivani, the grand old populist doyen
who still commands prominent space at railway station
bookshops. It was avidly read in places as far as
Kerala and Bengal. Mostly middlebrow, they also
provided space for poetry, criticism and for social
and political comment. 

Within a space of twenty years that world has been
wholly destroyed. Dharmyug, Saaptahik, Sarika have all
folded up, there is no national Hindi magazine of any
kind today and the only Hindi writers known to the
national press were all born aeons ago. True, they
were commercial ventures brought out by big business
houses, not independent little magazines, but
precisely therefore, if one also remembers those
astonishing circulation figures, their disappearance
becomes even more inexplicable. Especially when the
newspaper reading public is expanding exponentially
with one particular newspaper claiming a readership of
several crores.

Reviews and periodicals such as the Blackwoods
Magazine, that inescapable presence in colonial
libraries everywhere, or the Edinburgh Review
virtually gestated modern literature. The Quarterly
Review was the first, for instance, to review Emma and
recognise Jane Austen while Byrons satire against the
Edinburgh Review, English Bards and Scott Reviewers
(after the latter scathingly tore his second
collection), has forever immortalised that publication
for posterity. While literary periodicals had always
been a one-man show, it was the growth of modernism in
the twenties and thirties that catapulted them to the
status of a movement, against conventional tastes and
values. The writer-critic running the publication used
it as a platform to intervene in ongoing debates of
all kinds. The periodicals thus came with an agenda
and were often used as surrogate political weapons. T
S Eliot, founder and editor of The Criterion, F R
Leavis, founder and editor of Scrutiny, The Athenaeum
edited by Middleton Murray exemplify this trend.

In Hindi, the little magazine rose to prominence in
the thirties, just as the newly constructed language
was hastily assembling a repertoire of fiction,
criticism and essays. The canon of modern Hindi
literature would be incomplete without two magazines,
Saraswati and Hans that like the rest of the Hindi
movement, began as platforms for Nationalist
articulation against the British. They were
anti-establishment and contained not just literary
issues but also sociology, politics, history and
current issues. Under Premchand, the founder of Hans,
the magazine was renowned for its progressive and
humanitarian overtones. 

For a decade or so after independence there was an air
of entente between Hindi establishment and the
establishment per se. The newspapers and periodicals
that had been fervently anti-colonial and pro-Congress
remained muted, but only for a while. The
disillusionment with the independent state and its
fruits was manifested first in Renus Maila Aanchal,
the novel that redefined rural India. In its wake
followed Raag Darbari that destroyed all illusions
about governance, politics and democracy. This was the
background from which middle-brow semi-literary
magazines such as Dharmyug were born. Still they were,
and remained, largely, mainstream. The deviant,
experimental, angry voices of younger writers, those
who wanted to break boundaries and grounds, to fuse
the personal with the political felt constricted in
this space. 

The floodgates opened with Ramesh Bakshi and his
redoubtably titled little magazine Aavesh
(fury/frustration) that heralded a new role for the
dissatisfied writer, this time as editor. Akavita,
Shanichar, Vasudha, Utkarsh, Pahal, the list was
unending, the variety impressive. These werent just
new periodicals, each reflected a movement of sorts
with which writers in different parts of the country
could identify. Concomitantly, they were brought out
by committed writers, some of who became so engrossed
with the job that their creativity went for a toss.
Shorn of glamour and focused solely on content,
periodicals like Pahal included not just literature
but also tried to intervene in society. They
concentrated therefore as much on non-fiction, essays,
criticism and social thought, as on literature. 

Edited by Gyan Ranjan, the model of the selfless
editor who even wrote subscribers addresses in his
own hand, Pahal took the lead in raising the
intellectual content of the periodicals. Many others
like Vasudha, Pratimaan, Tadbhav followed that model,
combining literature with activism . Ironically, their
presence became more conspicuous against the backdrop
of flourishing middlebrow commercials like Dinmaan and
Dharmyug. Their contributions too stood out because
they formed the vanguard, the trendsetters. Akavita
(anti-poetry) for instance, the clarion call of many
periodicals, eventually gained acceptance in the
mainstream itself. The needs of the lay readers as
well as the literati could thus be met. 

In lieu of that fertile and multi-layered world, the
arena of Hindi literature has today shrunk to a
handful of periodicals. The consolatory note of the
last two decades is provided by a couple of
periodicals, a couple of people really, who battle on,
recklessly as it were. Hans revived publication in the
early eighties and under Rajendra Yadav has come to be
the most authoritative representative of the Hindi
world. It publishes stories, comments, reviews but
also discussions, debates and polemics about anything
and everything. It champions the rights of the
minorities, women, Dalits, Adivasis in many different
ways, yet withal it tries to keep the ordinary reader,
ignored by Pahal, in mind. Without any substantial
backing, relying mostly on subscriptions, it yet
prints more than ten thousand copies every month. Then
there is Samyantar, a story in itself. 

Some years ago Pankaj Bisht, a Hindi writer of great
distinction, chose to resign from his government job
in order to bring out a periodical. It was a suicidal
mission, as many warned him. He went ahead
nevertheless, printing 500 copies of the first issue
in the cheapest possible format. Restricted initially
to fellow travelers, the five hundred or so people who
make up the elite Hindi intelligentsia in the country,
who contributed and consumed the journal, it today
takes out 5000 copies every month, apart from several
hefty annual numbers. Bisht puts half his pension into
it every month while his household runs on his wifes
earnings. The periodical contains an average of 30
pages and unhesitatingly translates material from
other world languages. A wide circle of sympathisers
ensures the supply of serious, quality food for
thought while its confrontation with patriarchy,
orthodoxy and feudalism rages ahead. It has relied
solely on subscriptions and has even managed to break
even. 

Meanwhile the more exponentially the Hindi newspapers
expand, the less space they leave for serious readers.
Multi-editions ensure concentration either on local
issues or on national ones and therefore even their
reportage of news has declined greatly in quality. On
the one hand are the novels, the books that do not
sell more than 5-6000 copies, except for something
like Raagdarbari or Premchand, and even then only
because they have been prescribed in the course. The
symbiotic relationship between publishers, text books
and government (libraries, universities etc) has
ensured a steady depletion of the status and
visibility, the positioning in short, of the serious
writer. On the other hand, there are apparently no
takers for serious stuff. And still a Hindi newspaper
can sell more than a crore copies. 

It would not be enough to blame the media, the
television or the net for this. The struggle for
survival of serious literature and the quarterlies,
monthlies and weeklies, the competition and influence
of cinema and television and the net, these are
problems besetting serious literary production
everywhere. They explain everything and nothing.
Serious literature has never commanded a very wide
audience, even TLS or New York Review of Books, read
internationally, print only 70-8000 copies. The
problem with Hindi is different, and acuter, in that
its entire world is becoming more and more imitative
as readers and writers are forced to communicate via
English. The newspapers are shallower, if that is
possible, versions of the mainstream English press,
the two most prominent newsmagazines are not even
original, merely versions, there are no academic
journals and, in most places, no bookshops even. To
top it all, there is not even a mentionable cinema,
television or sports magazine, let alone a literary
one. 

Yet, for a long time to come, the number of Hindi
readers will increase faster than English ones, no
matter how many convents may come up, simply by virtue
of demographics and poverty. In most places even
university teachers barely understand English, even
those who read the English papers are not necessarily
able to comprehend a serious English text or article.
Where do they go, what do they read, how do they read?

The importance of a Samyantar or a Vasudha or a Hans
therefore is not simply about those journals, worthy
as they are, but about the survival of the mofussil(y)
intelligentsia. This is the only supply of oxygen for
many towns in the hinterland and the only access for
the intellectuals to address a wider audience. In an
era where the mainstream Hindi press has become deeply
politicised and conservative, these periodicals remain
the last bastion of free and fearless expression, the
outstanding signs of protest and freedom. 

A literary periodical, eventually, is like writing a
poem. For it to be heard, to make a difference, one
needs much jigar chaaki and khoon afshaani. While the
editors dip their fingers in blood a la Faiz, ki
khoon-e-dil mein dubo li hain ungliyan maine, we could
do worse than praise their poems. 

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