Let’s travel to the India of the 1950s, a country redefining itself in the wake of a hard-fought victory. Decades of collective effort, hope, and sacrifice had reached their crescendo with the end of British rule at the stroke of midnight. The British were gone. What do you do when the world you knew is no more? What does a society do when its shared purpose dissolves?  In such a society, what do you write? What do you read? What do you dream about?

Questions like these form the backbone of Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class by Aakriti Mandhwani. It examines how “middlebrow” reading habits—situated between high literary aspirations and mass-market pulp—helped imagine a new purpose in the wake of independence. Mandhwani defines the middlebrow as a consumption practice rather than a rigid cultural category, where readers actively engaged with a mix of genres and literary forms. As she puts it, “middlebrow readers not only constitute but are also constituted by the middlebrow publications,” making the consumers the shapers of their literary culture. 

Through an in-depth examination of publications like Sarita, Hind Pocket Books and Dharmyug (with a brief foray into “lowbrow” publications such as Maya, Rasili Kahaniyaan and Manohar Kahaniyaan), Mandhwani deciphers the existing and evolving social dynamics of the era particularly as they applied to the middle-class woman and what the act the reading meant for her. Of how the reader viewed herself and, in turn, how the producers of those stories viewed her. This naturally brings us to a larger question.

What makes literature “literature”? And who decides which stories deserve that crown? Are some books, to make a hotchpotch out of George Orwell’s quote, more literary than others? And if some stories are more literary, does it follow that some forms of reading are more meaningful or valid? Such judgments about literature are rarely straightforward. As readers and thinkers, we tend to resist nuance. Ambiguity makes us uncomfortable. We like neat bowties. We want clean endings. Clear labels. In such a worldview, paradoxically, even the absence of labels becomes a label. Everything, including reading habits, tends to be seen from a monolithic perspective. In resisting ambiguity, we risk flattening the past into stereotypes. 

The perception of women in the 50s and 60s as regressive overlooks the nuanced ways they expressed agency—through their reading habits, practices of leisure or pleasure, aspirations, and contributions to middlebrow culture. It’s easy to imagine pre-internet societies as limited in their worldviews, isolated from global ideas and trends.

Come, let’s challenge those preconceptions. 

Sarita: Dreams and Dilemmas of the Indian Reader

We begin at the beginning. The first chapter of the book and middlebrow publishing in India.

Sarita.

Though labelled as a magazine for women, Sarita found an eager reader in young Amritesh. But what he didn’t know was that the magazine was older than independence itself. A history dating back to 1945!

Founded by Vishwa Nath—also the mind behind iconic magazines like Caravan and Women’s Era—Sarita revolutionised everyday reading, appealing to readers across social and gender divides. On one hand, it actively engaged in debates around literariness, politics, religion, etc, both through its editor’s curatorial choices and readers’ letters. On the other, it covered short stories, pictures, recipes, and celebrity gossip, finding that sweet balance. 

The magazine’s reach and impact can be seen through this reader’s letter from the book, “Every day my sister-in-law and I quarrel. She says she’ll read it and I say I will. (…) Should we buy two copies then?”

“Vishwa Nath categorically argued against a homogenized nationalist imagination, advocating language syncretism instead. Sarita’s writing style on the whole followed this avowal, deploying words from the shared language bank.”

The story of Sarita cannot be disentangled from the story of its founder—a relationship Mandhwani interlaces as she explores the microcosm of the aspirations of the Indian middle class or the inner lives of its women readers. 

Through its feminist and anti-establishment outlook, Sarita redefined the relationship between a magazine and its readers, offering them a lens to view themselves as agents of change. For women, reading Sarita helped carve out time for themselves, a moment of quiet in a world that demanded their attention at every turn. Mandhwani puts it best:

“Sarita poignantly opened up a rich world of women confidently asserting themselves, initiating a space for debate both within and outside the framework of the nation and the family.”

The act of reading itself became an assertion. A way of claiming a space for themselves. And this entire exercise wasn’t just passive. Women weren’t merely reading; they were demanding their right to read, to imagine, to engage with a world beyond the one prescribed to them. A reader from Meerut, Neeraja, for example, writes to the magazine, asking if the pieces they “publish for women (…) are for everyone, can [they] please tell me why an unmarried girl is called ‘fashionable’ if she dresses herself according to the suggestions of Sarita”? The query accentuates both the magazine’s reach and the cultural tensions it navigated.

Hind Pocket Books: Shaping a Nation’s Reading Habits in Just a Rupee

If Sarita sought to interact with its readers by catering to its changing aspirations, “the house of exploding Hindi paperbacks” democratized reading for an entire demographic. If Sarita gave readers a mirror, Hind Pocket Books handed them a ticket to the world. Creating a “repeatable” reading habit by selling paperbacks at a mere one rupee, curating monthly bundles sold at discounted prices, and offering a rich diversity of genres, Dina Nath Malhotra, the founder, editor, and publisher, sold Hindi books like no one before—or since.

While he made literature accessible, he also made it a shared experience. Readers across classes and geographies could engage with multifarious stories beyond their horizons, creating a new generation of literary consumers.

Drawing inspiration from Penguin’s affordable paperbacks and the subscription model of the Book of the Month Club, Hind Pocket Books came to be known for its carefully curated catalogue. Such was the impact that “before the writer and title of the book itself could be identified, Hind Pocket Books was recognised.” They offered everything: translated literary classics, Hindi/Urdu poetry, political treatises, melodramatic novels. In doing so, they democratised literature. They broaden reading palates. 

“Sex education for married couples, then, sits side by side with letter writing.”

Dharmyug: A Golden Era

What happens when one of the most established Hindi authors is handed the editorial responsibility of the largest Hindi magazine? This is the story of Dharmyug under Dharamvir Bharti.

It was already the most widely read Hindi magazine when Dharamvir Bharti, a known modernist writer, assumed its editorial leadership. And yet, the subsequent “intellectualisation” would see distribution figures like never before. 

Before Bharti, the magazine was full of religious stories and photographs, something he would dismiss as “calendar art”. Even when it would feature non-religious content, like in a photo essay of American life, with images of a smiling American family, “it [could] be read in continuation with the religious images of the deities”. “Both types of images (…) prescribe a uniformity of hierarchy (…) In one case, the object of devotion is a god, and in the other, it is the male provider.”

Bharti’s arrival marked a departure for Dharmyug, steering it toward what Aakriti aptly describes as a middlebrow literary cosmopolitanism. From existentialist philosophers to progressive satirist poets, travel writers to history essayists, the magazine would introduce its reader to movements intellectual and literary, national and global, satiating their “need to know,” something every magazine and publication strived to cater to. 

But behind it all were men—editors like Vishwa Nath and Dharmvir Bharti—shaping a readership that was largely female. Through their editorial choices, yes, they were catering to women, but they were also shaping how women saw themselves, what they read, and what knowledge was deemed worth engaging with.

The “Lowbrow”: The Horror and Thrills of Ignored Stories

But amongst all these debates of “literariness” and “marketability” and the cosmopolitan, globally situated, aspirational writing, the ground reality remained unchanged: poverty, unemployment, patriarchal dependence, a lack of privacy, religious divides, long ration queues, license raj, etc., things conveniently ignored in the glossy world of middlebrow magazines and only acknowledged by lowbrow publications like Maya, Rasili Kahaniyaan and Manohar Kahaniyaan.

They unapologetically featured advertisements considered too “vulgar, ugly and misleading,” creating a marketplace for lesser-known brands hawking soaps, remedies, and infertility cures. They also ventured into genres rarely seen in middlebrow publications—horror and thrillers, or “romanch,” as Mandhwani describes them, tales that stirred feelings of “dread but excitement.”

Imagining a Nation, One Page at a Time

Thus, through a mosaic of letters, story themes, and memoirs, Mandhwani reconstructs the world of middlebrow India in the 50s and 60s, its reading habits, and the larger societal shifts it mirrored. They point to the nuanced self-awareness of readers, especially women, as they grappled with questions about their roles in a shifting society while imagining lives beyond traditional confines. The portrait that emerges is one of cultural multiplicity, where differing opinions and simmering issues coexist with an appetite for diverse literary selections. They point to the plurality of people, society, and a young nation finding its way.

After all, when the fight ends, the story begins. And in the telling, the future takes its first breath.