The Post-Colonial Magazine Archive

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.

towards the present and the future, making their far-flung readers feel that they were in step with the new times. 7 This essay engages with some of the conceptual and methodological issues arising from the post-colonial Indian (and particularly Hindi and English) magazine archive. Not only were magazines highly aware of each other, quoting each other's pieces and debates, writers regularly contributed to several periodicals, and editors moved from one magazine to another. Moreover, while work on 'little magazines' underscores their high literary status and consciously anti-commercial ethos, working with other magazines shows the magazine field as comprising both literary and commercial middlebrow magazines. 8 Thinking through the ecology of magazines allows us to look beyond ideological differences and acknowledge other aspects of magazine activism, including their interconnections and their remarkable investment in translations and in special issues. Magazine ecology gives us a fresh perspective on the relationship between English and Hindi and other Indian languages: while the hierarchies between English and Hindi and between Hindi and other Indian languages remained firmly in place in education and public life, magazines show that in the literary domain, the position of Indian English writing was not hegemonic. Not only do magazines reveal the largely overlooked domain of local 'middlebrow English', they also show Hindi editors as supremely confident and English editors as comparatively defensive. Moreover, many Hindi editors, and some readers, clearly read in English and used English as a medium to access world literature. In turn, English editors actively acknowledged and sought out literature in Indian languages. For all these reasons, rather than thinking of English and Hindi magazines as belonging to two completely separate (and competitive) linguistic and literary fields, it is better to acknowledge but also bracket the language debates and consider the magazine field as a multilingual ecology. 9 The paradoxes of the magazine archive When working with the rich archive of post-colonial magazines, we are immediately faced with two paradoxes. First, magazines are an abundant archive that offers an excess of information, sensory inputs (covers, advertisements) and interesting juxtapositions. Reading about the visit of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his meeting with Bombay film stars next to an article about Hindi paperbacks ( Figure 1) gives us an immediate sense of the breadth of the readers' horizon and provides clues about what was reputed interesting and how readers were supposed to take in information or entertainment. Nasser's article brings Non-Aligned internationalism home and makes it both glamorous and familiar, while the article on Hindi paperbacks signals the emergence of a new, serious Hindi reading public. Visual clues signal literary seriousness in the case of Pasternak's obituary and exotic tradition in the translation of an African folktale (Figure 2). At the same time, lore about editors and publishers has remained largely oral, and most Hindi magazines come with no publishers' archives, no minutes of editorial meetings and editorial decisions and no accounts of payments and sales. 10 The correspondence of a few editors has been published, though not in a systematic fashion. 11 Even in the case of the revered Hindi monthly, Sarasvatī (1900-75), the vast godown and offices of the Indian Press contained no editorial papers when Mushtaq Ali undertook his ground-breaking study. 12 Shripat Rai, the editor of Kah anī, burnt all his papers when he closed down the magazine, and only a sack of random letters and invoices remains in his daughter's keep. Other Hindi publishers may well have kept their papers in their almirahs, but they are yet to come to light. As a result, by and large, we only have the magazines' texts-the 'open archive', to use Deepika Bahri's useful phrase (in this issue)-to infer and, frankly, guess why items were chosen and arranged the way they were: whether certain juxtapositions  (like between Nasser and Hindi paperbacks) were planned or random, and who the translators who enabled the intense magazine internationalism of this period were. The other paradox has to do with the magazines' ephemerality versus their historical importance. For little magazines, it is a paradox between their very limited, noncommercial and often short-lived circulation-and the difficulty in sourcing or finding them (especially entire runs)-and their lasting historic significance, to the extent that the talented group of writers and artists assembled around a little magazine may lend its name to a generation-such was the case with Vrishchik (Scorpion, 1969-73) in Vadodara, India, Souffle/Anf as in Rabat, Morocco (1966-72) and Charrua (1984-86) in Maputo, Mozambique. 13 But even for mainstream magazines like Kah anī, S arik a, Naī Kah aniy an, Sarit a and The Illustrated Weekly of India, the importance they held in people's lives-as the epigraphs show-and their efforts in producing 'durable literature' (sth ayī s ahitya in Hindi) and very substantial, collectible special issues, starkly contrast with the readers' disregard for their preservation. Though some readers may have bound and preserved their files, and a few public libraries and publishers hold them, in most cases, magazines once read became raddi, paper to be sold by weight to itinerant waste collectors alongside empty bottles and jars.  In other words, stories should not be just for 'taimpas' but must be original and 'unforgettable', challenging readers and budding writers without descending into obscurity or opacity. Naī Kah aniy an and S arik a encouraged discussions of the story as a genre by publishing readers' letters in response to particular stories or issues: these often involved affective responses and 'making the story one's own' (in Hindi, apn an a) by retelling its plot. 19 A long-running topic of the Kah anī Club pages was, 'Is entertainment the aim of the story?', with respondents overwhelmingly writing that entertainment was important but could not be the only aim. 20 S arik a included columns like 'X: In Their Own Eyes', and its story quizzes rewarded attentive readers. 21 Kamleshwar's short editorials emphasised the role of the story as running parallel (sam an antar) to readers' lives-not a reflection but an attempt to express the language of their dreams, aspirations, concerns and desires; he called writers 'fellow travellers' (sahy atrī) in the readers' struggles as 'ordinary people' (s am anya jan). 22 Magazines like Kah anī, Jñ anoday, Kalpan a, Naī Kah aniy an, Dharmyug and S arik a seriously invested in young talent, and their table of contents, particularly of their bulky special issues, read like a Who's Who of the new generation of Hindi writers-from Nirmal Varma and Ramkumar to Mohan Rakesh, Mannu Bhandari, Rajendra Yadav, Kamleshwar himself, Krishna Sobti, Dharmavir Bharati, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Shrilal Shukla, Raghuvir Sahay, and so on. 23 Competitions for the best story in Kah anī and Sarit a encouraged and highlighted new talent, while the Sarit a column 'Naye A _ nkur' ('New Shoots', from June 1952) invited readers to submit their own stories. 24 Translations were key to the activism of several magazines and to their project of broadening the horizon of readers and writers. 25 They were also key to literary nationbuilding. In the context of the new multilingual nation, Indian literature was an ideal  'Gurvel Singh, the author of "Our Village", is prominent among young Punjabi writers. You must certainly remember his story "Ga-Ge-Gi"'. 29 The 'Bh aratīy Kah anī Vi ses : a _ nk' ('Indian Story Special Issue'), edited by Kamleshwar for the magazine Naī Kah aniy an (New Short Stories, November 1964), included stories from seven Indian languages, while S arik a was the first Hindi mainstream magazine to introduce Marathi Dalit writers to Hindi readers (April 1975).
Translations were also a means-as Amrit Rai had suggested-to teach readers and budding writers the art of the story. Consistent with this pedagogical impulse, Kah anī Colin Wilson. 30 The then middlebrow English magazine Caravan offered condensed European classics (from Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris to Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop) and a regular 'Story from around the World' slot, which combined the aim to systematically cover the world with a random choice of writers and pieces. 31 Magazines thus chose different strategies to make the world, and world literature, visible to their readers: essays, translations, snippets of news and brief paratexts. If Kah anī published translations of model stories, the literary magazine Yugchetn a (1955), whose mission was to 'introduce Hindi writers and readers to the developed level of world literature', did so indirectly through critical articles that largely reproduced the Anglo-and Eurocentric bias of its academic editors. 32 Kalpan a published only a few foreign stories a year (by Ernesto Palacio Valdes, William Saroyan, Romain Rolland and Lu Xun), but it translated detailed and dense survey articles of recent foreign writings, originally published in the US magazine, Books Abroad. By contrast, most foreign stories published in Kah anī were from China, Eastern Europe and Russia, while European modernist stories by the likes of Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and so on, were notably absent. Kah anī also translated Jomo Kenyatta's fable, 'Gentlemen of the Jungle' (May 1955), as an example of anti-colonial writing, possibly the first African story to appear in an Indian magazine. 33 In this era of Cold War and decolonisation, which parts of the world were made visible and which foreign literatures and authors were featured also correlated with different political internationalisms. 34  Ubkar' ('Tired of Both Shores'), started from the experience of colonisation and underdevelopment in 'the whole southern half of the globe', which had produced a 'struggle for economic freedom' in which human beings had 'become prey to disintegration (vighat : an), despondency (badhav asī), lack of values (m ulyahīnt a), and cold cruelty'. But these, he continued, were 'superficial and bi-dimensional matters'. There was 'a third dimension, extremely delicate and abstract. And very concrete and deep, like the "third bank of the river" in Rosa's story in this issue. This is the common fundamental voice of all the stories. The voice of the fate of living midstream, tired of both shores'. 37 Here Kamleshwar, who in the context of Hindi literary debates was loosely aligned with the Progressives but critical of their ideological stranglehold, combined a post-colonial reading of the Cold War and the Third World with a vindication of the autonomy and literature and its critical insight.
Not that all special issues of Naī Kah aniy an and S arik a were as political. 38   Magazines were a democratic medium thanks to their cheap price, accessible format and active engagement with ordinary readers. Despite being an ephemeral medium, magazines like Kah anī, Kalpan a, Naī Kah aniy an and S arik a invested in the creation of a corpus of 'stable literature' and in the formation of discerning readers and new writers. Their special issues, many of them truly innovative and 'spectacular', vastly broadened readers' horizons, made whole new parts of world literature visible, and allowed Hindi readers to situate Indian literature within world literature. 41 Meanwhile, translations from Indian languages made the abstract idea of Indian literature graspable. Magazines made modernity and literary cosmopolitanism accessible at very little expense.

An ecology of magazines
Everywhere there is a demand for 'more culture and more of our own culture!' … The problem now is not of too few journals, but of too many (250 applications for new licenses in UP alone!). This will produce a vicious circle of more required literaturehigher reward-little choice-bad publishers and competition among publishers.
-Agyeya, 'Periodical Literature, New Writing', in Pratīk (1947) 42 Big industrial families (ghar ane) were running large periodicals. They needed big names as editors, that is writers who were established and accepted in the literary field. It was an experiment that had started not with Hemchandra Joshi but [earlier] with Ilachandra Joshi … . A different kind of experiment in the sense that the editor had to be not a journalist but a litt erateur. By then, cultural and literary horizons had opened up together with the national horizon. Kamleshwar, Adh ar sil aen, p. 169 What do I mean by magazine ecology? When we consider magazines as a field, we think of magazines in a single language, hierarchically distributed into more or less literary ('restricted' or commercial, to use Bourdieu's terms) and according to ideological and aesthetic positions. 43 From this perspective, Agyeya's magazine, Pratīk (Symbol, 1947), so wary of the flood of new periodicals, and Kalpan a (Hyderabad, 1949, edited by Aryendra Sharma), with its artistic covers by M.F. Husain (its proprietor and art director were collectors Badrivishal Pitti and Jagdish Mittal), its sober white pages and unashamedly literary content (it called itself 'a high-standard literary and cultural monthly'), count as 'highbrow'. Naī Kah aniy an was literary and ideologically aligned to the Progressive movement; Kah anī was also literary but more ideologically and aesthetically eclectic. On a different scale, the weekly Dharmyug, which called itself 'India's Prestige Hindi Illustrated Weekly', pursued under Dharamvir Bharati's editorship (1959-) what Aakriti Mandhwani has termed 'middlebrow cosmopolitanism', which she defines as 'a cosmopolitanism that was made accessible and approachable, while fulfilling the middlebrow curiosity or "need to know", in addition to providing a range of pleasures to the readers'. 44 45 Thinking of Hindi and English magazines together as part of the same ecology, instead, allows us to broaden our purview beyond literary magazines and to consider overlaps across magazines and across languages beyond the oppositional logic of ideology and of linguistic fields. 46 For one thing, the ecology of magazines helps us focus on the sites of sociability where editors and writers from different periodicals collected-not just editorial offices but also the inexpensive coffee and tea houses in cities like Allahabad and Delhi. 47 It also helps us trace the movement of peripatetic writers and editors from city to city and to different publications and positions across the field. Communist writer Bhairav Prasad Gupta (1918-95), for example, first edited the Maya Press' lowbrow magazine Manohar Kah aniy an (1944-53) before moving to the literary magazine Kah anī (1954-60) and then to the Progressive story magazine Naī Kah aniy an . 48 Kamleshwar, himself a celebrated short story writer and a protagonist of the Nai Kahani (New Story) group, began working for Kah anī in Allahabad before he moved to Delhi in the early 1960s, where he edited a foreign affairs periodical, I _ ngit, and supported himself through translation work for the Delhi Press. 49 Offered the editorship of both S arik a and Naī Kah aniy an, Kamleshwar initially opted for Naī Kah aniy an the much greater possibilities offered by BCCL. 50 The move of Experimentalist stalwart Dharamvir Bharati to BCCL's Hindi weekly Dharmyug in 1959 has been variously hailed as a brilliant step that raised the standards of Hindi journalism or as the sacrifice of a talented writer to the demands of the market. 51 Agyeya switched between editing Hindi and English periodicals, and in its short life, his literary monthly Pratīk (1947-52) moved from Allahabad to Delhi. 52 This is to say that although many writers at the time were wary of working for the government or for 'big industrial ghar ane', as Kamleshwar put it, that was the reality of the employment on offer. Given the writers' need for income and the editors' for material, it is not too unusual to find stories by literary writers-Rajendra Yadav, Mohan Rakesh, even Dostoevsky!-in high-, middleand even lowbrow magazines. 53 Again, while 'field' suggests a clear hierarchical and ideological distribution, 'ecology' reflects this more nuanced picture.
Moreover, magazines themselves, already in the colonial period, surveyed the broader literary field, reviewing literary gatherings and festivals, pieces and debates in other magazines, and publications in other languages. 54 Kalpan a ran a regular column that informed readers about new articles, stories and translations, and it occasionally reviewed news beyond Hindi. 55 Sarit a undertook a similar exercise on an annual scale, commissioning veteran critic Manmath Nath Gupta to write forty-page surveys of the best publications in Hindi over the past year, including novels, short stories, poems, non-fiction books, children's books and translations of foreign books and from other Indian languages. 56 It is useful to think of the ecology of post-colonial magazines as multilingual, in more ways than one. Multilingual competence, whether in English and bhasha or in more than one Indian language, characterised many editors, writers and readers. 57 Large publishers, too, were multilingual, and had been so already in the colonial 50. 'I still remember that evening well: the three of us, [Mohan] Rakesh, [Jawahir] Chaudhri and I chatted and walked from Ansari Road in Daryaganj to Asaf Ali Road. On the footpath in front of Delite Cinema I decided, there and then, that I should accept the offer of editing Naī Kah aniy an, not S arik a … . Because Naī Kah aniy an is an intellectual magazine … it's the bearer of an extremely important movement, a movement with which we were not only connected but in whose creation we had invested a lot. We discussed salary and opportunities. S arik a would surely offer four times the salary and ten times the opportunities period, maximising investment by reusing materials in one language or platform for readers in another language, while also catering to specific constituencies. 58 This trend continued after Independence, as the array of periodicals brought out by BCCL (Figure 3) shows.
The enterprising Delhi Press also brought out the English monthly Caravan  Indian classics (like Bankim Chandra's The Poison Tree). It included 'short stories from around the world' (see above) and translated stories and poems from Indian languages, including works by Buddhadev Basu, Sitakant Mahapatra and Nanduri Subbarao; survey articles on Indian literatures ('Five Urdu Poets', 'The Two Joshes', 'Telugu Literature') also appeared regularly. 59 Mostly, however, Caravan's original stories reveal an archive of Anglo-Indian fiction, overwhelmingly set in India, that is quite far from the familiar post-colonial canon and that deserves further scrutiny. This is a world of action-packed, rousing historical narratives and office romances that blends Englishness and Indianness in several ways. 60 Interestingly, many of these stories, sketches and serialised novels were translated into Hindi and Urdu in Sarit a. As for the Hindi Sarit a and Urdu Sarit a, though more detailed comparison is required, their format and content appear practically identical, with only a few more articles on Urdu literary figures in Sarit a. 61 Luthra's parodies of a district collector's office, of the arcane knowledge required in Service Commission exams, or of the handover of power in a princely state, read as naturally in Hindi and Urdu as they do in English. The fact that the same translations of Anglo-Indian writers and Bimla Luthra's sketches feature with equal prominence in all three magazines, without in fact spelling out the language they were originally written in, suggests a striking overlap between the English and vernacular urban magazine worlds. 62 While English education and the English language had not left India in 1947 and attempts to shift even partly higher education to the regional languages were met with vociferous opposition, 63 in the early post-colonial decades, India's regional languages confidently occupied the literary and cultural centre-stage while English periodicals were more thinly spread. 'Periodical journalism in India, especially in English', Caravan's editor quipped in 1950, 'is a consistent struggle against death; it is no better than tight rope dancing hundreds of feet above the ground. Literacy is confined to a negligeable percentage, and the taste for English to a still narrower field … . Book and magazine buying is a habit almost conspicuous by its absence. Reading is a luxury in India, a luxury that comes even after films, races and other amusements'. 64 Like Caravan, The Illustrated Weekly of India and Quest also balanced information about foreign writers with the championing of Indian English writers and translations and essays about Indian language writers. Before 1947, The Illustrated Weekly of India, BCCL's weekly magazine, edited between 1946 and 1958 by the Irish C.R. Mandy (who wrote an editorial column under the penname Gallimaufry, and a literary column called 'Books and Comment'), negotiated a position that was located in India but 'naturally' looked towards England. 65 After 1947, the Illustrated Weekly of India realigned itself with the new nation-state, with covers of happy farmers and a focus on modern development and bustling cities combined with artistic locales and ethnographic artefacts and peoples, a combination that recalls the Films Division documentaries. 66 While Mandy was known to encourage local talent, and his literary column featured a few Indian writers in English, almost all book reviews and articles were of British and American authors and books, 67   Night'), Elizabeth Bowen and William Faulkner ('Dynamic Story-Teller'). 68 At the same time, the Illustrated Weekly of India also regularly published stories by contemporary writers in Hindi (Krishna Baldev Vaid), Telugu (S. Subbulakshmi) and other regional languages. 69 Under Nissim Ezekiel, Quest reviewed books of Indian English writers, not always encouragingly, and published bilingual poets A.K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar, but also surveyed articles and even special issues on Indian language literatures. 70 Even apparently monolingual magazines, then, bore conspicuous traces of other languages, through translations or advertisements. Similarly, while Kah anī, Naī Kah aniy an and S arik a are remembered as Hindi magazines and as fostering the contemporary Hindi story and nurtured a new generation of writers, they brought other Indian and foreign stories to Hindi readers, some of which revealed their English reading in their letters. Though in general the names of translators and the work of translation was underplayed, occasionally magazines highlighted it and experimented with representing other languages, for example through transliteration that helped Hindi readers 'hear' the English, or Malayalam, original ( Figure 4).

Conclusions
This essay has grappled with some of the paradoxes that post-colonial magazines in South Asia embody-their textual abundance in the face of the absence of other archives documenting their production; their crucial importance as literary platforms; and the strong attachments they aroused as objects of consumption versus their ephemerality and sad end on the waste heap or in the dark deposits of libraries. If magazines, particularly in South Asia, embody a perishable archive, this essay has employed the term 'literary activism' to acknowledge and value the investment required in producing-but also in reading-them. As literary, cultural and social historians, we do well to consider the magazine archive beyond 'little magazines', and beyond a narrow focus on specific authors, genres or topics, or on self-contained linguistic fields. A comparative, multilingual perspective reveals common trends, such as an interest in foreign literatures and in writing in other Indian languages, and a close, non-paternalistic engagement with readers. Moreover, whereas we tend to think of Hindi and English as starkly hierarchical linguistic and literary domains, and of English as intrinsically more cosmopolitan, in these early decades, Hindi, Urdu and English magazines display equal ambition and confidence, and magazines published by the same conglomerate-like Caravan and the Hindi and Urdu Sarit a-shared authors and content, without always specifying the original language. Both Hindi and English magazines of these decades register Nehruvian foreign policy and Cold War trends in their competing internationalisms, and they embrace various kinds of cosmopolitanisms, including what Aakriti Mandhwani has called 'middlebrow cosmopolitanism'-in English as well as in Hindi. In short, magazines provided a literary and intellectual education and an exposure to the world, and to the world of consumption, that went much beyond the material possibilities of their readers. As Santu Babu, the lower-middle-class clerk of Vinod Kumar Shukla's novel, The Servant's Shirt, rightly considered, buying a magazine for his homemaker wife was a good investment even if, or especially because, they could not afford any of the items advertised. Acknowledgement I warmly thank my co-editor, Anjali Nerlekar, and the anonymous readers for their comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.