Speaker:
Aakriti Mandhwani, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR
Moderator:
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, September 9, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom
Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India captures the significant and yet largely unexplored world of commercially successful print and publishing in post-Independence India. It examines the world of “middlebrow” commercial publishing and practices of reading of North Indian middle-classes in the 1950s and 60s, the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947. While the immediate post-Independence period in India has been studied largely from the perspective of planning, policy, and the partition, the overarching and dominant critical narrative that emerges from the period emphasises sacrifice over personal pleasure, marking each citizen’s unconditional contribution to the nation’s growth. However, it was also a time when middle class selves were being re-imagined, and re-articulated themselves, in multiple ways. Taking as its focus the form and content of a range of bestselling middlebrow magazines and paperbacks in Hindi, Everyday Reading constructs an alternative story for the 1950s: one that is marked by consumption. The book argues that the middle classes who read these publications were everyday active consumers who defied the state’s prescriptions, carving their roles outside the logic of the austere nation.
Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction.
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