{"id":6838,"date":"2026-05-18T17:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T21:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=6838"},"modified":"2026-08-17T01:52:30","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T05:52:30","slug":"aakriti-mandhwani-everyday-reading-middlebrow-magazines-and-book-publishing-in-post-independence-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2026\/05\/18\/aakriti-mandhwani-everyday-reading-middlebrow-magazines-and-book-publishing-in-post-independence-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Aakriti Mandhwani. Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India.<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Aakriti Mandhwani. Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India.<\/em><\/h1>\n\n
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Elizabeth le Roux<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a>, <\/span>Reviews<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Cover<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Aakriti Mandhwani. Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India. <\/em>Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024. 296 pages. ISBN 9781625347916. US $99.00 (hardcover).<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In this engaging and well-researched book, Aakriti Mandhwani uses the commercial publishing sphere to understand and reimagine the middle classes of 1950s and 1960s India. She examines the role of popular publications in creating a middlebrow reading habit and class. While much scholarship on Indian publishing has examined the literary or the political, especially in the wake of independence, this book takes as its focus ordinary, everyday reading within a family or in the home (especially among women). Also notable is that Mandhwani analyzes the reading public along a number of axes, including language and socio-economic criteria such as occupation and property ownership, but to a lesser extent political ideology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is structured as a series of case studies featuring previously overlooked publications and publishing houses. They begin with Delhi Press\u2019s pioneering Sarit\u0101<\/em> magazine, positioned as \u201ca viable alternative to literary and highbrow magazines on the one hand and the existing range of lowbrow genre magazines on the other\u201d in the late 1940s and 1950s (p. 20). Mandhwani <\/strong>then turns to Dina Nath Malhotra\u2019s Hind Pocket Books, the first affordable paperback series in Hindi. The series successfully published an exceptionally wide range of authors and genres and circulated them through its book club, the Home Library Scheme. Dharmvir Bharti\u2019s editorial philosophy at Dharmyug <\/em>expanded the magazine\u2019s focus to include visuals, such as photographic travel essays and religious calendar art. While the majority of such publishing took place in Delhi, the centre of book publishing in Hindi, Everyday Reading<\/em> <\/em><\/strong>also examines a group of popular genre publications (rom\u0101nch<\/em>) produced in Allahabad: M\u0101y\u0101 <\/em>(Magic), Ras\u012bl\u012b Kah\u0101niy\u0101\u02dc <\/em>(Juicy stories), and Manohar Kah\u0101niy\u0101\u02dc <\/em>(Pleasing stories) published by the enormously successful Mitra Prakashan and Maya Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mandhwani considers the lives of both the magazine and publishing houses\u2019 founding editors and their publications. Serving as tastemakers, editors helped to develop a canon and a middlebrow readership even as they also sought to make commercially sound decisions. Mandhwani\u2019s central argument is that \u201cmiddlebrow publishing is one of the primary sources through which to understand the aspirations and consumption habits of contemporary middle-class Indian women\u201d (p. 142). While women are not the sole focus of the book, their role and habits are key to the concept of everyday, family-based reading. The middlebrow, she contends, \u201ccomes into being because of specific historical conditions, tastes, desires, and publishing decisions, which may or may not take their cue from the highbrow\u201d (p. 13). She explores how the publications circulated, who read them, and where they were bought or accessed. Significantly, she does not portray the audience as passive, but rather argues that average readers\u2014\u201cgeneralist\u201d readers, using Joan Shelley Rubin\u2019s term\u2014produce a literary culture as much as they are produced by it. Seeing reading as a marker of respectability, the Indian public deliberately sought out and engaged with a wide variety of different publications. The case studies show that they favoured genres such as self-improvement and self-help, but also leisure reading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mandhwani provides detailed evidence for her arguments in the form of close analysis of the content and materiality of the books and magazines themselves, examination of archival documents related to the authors, publishers and editors, and dissection of media such as book reviews, articles, and advertisements. Using these sources, she shows that the magazines and books she analyzes are inseparable from their context: \u201ctexts that interact with the culture which produced them and which they produce and places \u2018where meanings are contested and made\u2019 and where readers made sense of their lives\u201d (p. 140). They were mostly non-religious and non-political in contrast to the dominant narratives of 1950s India, i.e. nationalism and religion, but revealed increasing disillusionment among the middle class after independence. These publications highlighted social debates such as promoting the use of Hindi in the case of Sarit\u0101<\/em>, a complex tolerance of diverse religious views in Dharmyug<\/em>, and previously taboo subjects (such as romances across religious divides) in the genre fiction of M\u0101y\u0101<\/em>, Ras\u012bl\u012b Kah\u0101niy\u0101\u02dc<\/em>, and Manohar Kah\u0101niy\u0101\u02dc<\/em>. According to Mandwhani, they were also profit-oriented, which calls into question easy divisions between \u201cliterariness\u201d and \u201cmarketability.\u201d The dichotomy between cheap production and low costs and the aspirational middle-class spaces the publications sought to embody is just one of the contradictions teased out in the book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mandhwani is an associate professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence, India. Her book adds to the growing body of scholarship on middlebrow publishing and reading by focusing on a very diverse, politically tumultuous, and developing nation: India in the post-independence period. Her work thus contributes to comparative studies of \u201cpaperback revolutions\u201d in other countries and across multiple locations; the influence of Penguin Books and the Book of the Month Club, for instance, is apparent. Clearly written and well researched, Everyday Reading <\/em>makes a convincing case for the importance of studying neglected publishing houses and genres, and for interpreting the relationship between publishers and their readerships.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth le Roux, University of Pretoria<\/p>\n\n\n

India<\/a>, <\/span>middlebrow<\/a>, <\/span>reading publics<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n

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In this engaging and well-researched book, Aakriti Mandhwani uses the commercial publishing sphere to understand and reimagine the middle classes of 1950s and 1960s India. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":6841,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888,1887],"tags":[2061,2059,2060],"class_list":["post-6838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-reviews","tag-india","tag-middlebrow","tag-reading-publics"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6838"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6970,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6838\/revisions\/6970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}