Book review: Aakriti Mandhwani, Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class

Aakriti Mandhwani's Everyday Reading is an elegantly written contribution to a growing scholarship on print culture, reading practices and social history of Hindi in twentieth-century India.Focusing on the two decades after independence, Mandhwani reconstructs the vibrant world of Hindi middlebrow magazines and paperback publishing through a close study of Sarita, Dharmyug, Hind Pocket Books and genre magazines such as Maya and Manohar Kahaniyan.The result is not merely a history of publishing.It is also a history of aspiration, consumption, domesticity and the changing textures of middle-class life in north India.The 1950s and 1960s in India were marked by contradictory energies: trauma of Partition, shortages and inflation, building of democratic institutions and emergence of new middle-class aspirations.Historiography on this period has largely focused on nationalism, Nehruvian planning, constitutional debates and Partition.Mandhwani intervenes by shifting attention to everyday reading practices.Her central argument is persuasive, that is, commercially successful Hindi magazines and paperbacks fostered new forms of reading, pleasure and selfhood that cannot be understood solely through the framework of nationalist austerity and developmentalism.One of the book's strengths lies in the seriousness with which Mandhwani treats pleasure in post-independence Hindi print culture.She argues that magazines and paperbacks opened spaces where readers could imagine themselves not merely as citizens obligated to the nation, but also as consumers, desiring individuals and members of aspirational families.This is especially visible in her nuanced reading of Sarita, which fashioned itself as a magazine for the entire family, while simultaneously cultivating women as active readers and contributors through letters, advice