From the Age of Dharmyug to the Age of Dharmvir Bharti

Presenter:

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Abstract

The proposed paper will examine the Hindi weekly Dharmyug in the context of the first two decades of post Independence India. Dharmyug was published from 1948 until 1993 by the Bennett, Coleman and Company group. I will particularly focus on the group’s appointment of Dharmvir Bharti, a prominent modernist Hindi writer, as Dharmyug’s editor in 1959. Under Bharti, Dharmyug consciously veered from the Hindu religious content by which it was previously dominated, and instead ambitiously promoted high literary fiction as well as intellectually robust content focused on contemporary pan-India and global philosophical and literary movements. This alteration in the magazine’s offerings resonated with the readers, and led to steep rise in circulation and an unprecedented readership, making Dharmyug the largest selling Hindi magazine of the 1950s and 60s.I will briefly situate the editorial shift within the larger commercial logic that was born out of the success of other Hindi middlebrow magazines in the immediate post-Independence period, as well as other magazines published under the Bennett, Coleman and Company group.In showing post-Independence middlebrow publishing’s conflation of distinctions between “literary” and “commercial” publishing, the paper shall problematize ideas around the “literary” in Hindi. I shall then discuss two examples of travel pieces about domestic life in America published just immediately before and after Bharti’s appointment, and show how Dharmyug fashioned the figure of the ideal cosmopolitan Indian self specifically under the shadow of the Cold War, juxtaposing it seamlessly against a national “Indian” identity and its values of ideal domesticity.