From privacy issues to Hindu-Muslim distrust: what post-Independence India read about beyond mainstream prescriptions

In this excerpt, Mandhwani discusses the genre of magazines that emerged from Allahabad, which had been a major hub of Hindi publishing. She examines three successful magazines from Allahabad: Maya (Magic), Rasili Kahaniyaan (Juicy stories), and Manohar Kahaniyaan (Pleasing stories). “Significantly, these lowbrow magazines raised questions of livelihood, living spaces, troublesome neighbors and the lack of privacy, as well as post-partition Hindu-Muslim mistrust, that were kept out of the purview of the middlebrow magazines,” she explains.

Excerpt

While three chapters in this book focus on Delhi (Sarita and Hind Pocket Books) and Bombay (Dharmyug) as prominent midcentury publishing centers, the story of post-independence publishing in Hindi would be incomplete without situating Allahabad as a publishing location. As the capital of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (later named the United Provinces and current day Uttar Pradesh) until 1920, Allahabad functioned as a major colonial administrative hub. Located only some hours away from Varanasi, Allahabad was also an important Hindu pilgrimage center and a key nucleus of Hindi publishing. A rich history of literary and nationalist publishing is inextricably tied to Allahabad’s Indian Press. It published the Hindi monthly Saraswati, which, under Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi’s editorship, arguably set the tone for the standardization of khari boli (upright tongue) as Hindi. Other journals, Grihalakshmi, Stridarpan, and Chand, also flourished within the city. Allahabad was a significant Hindi literary center in the 1940s and 1950s, with several leading modernist and progressive writers living, writing, and thriving there. 

This chapter sheds light on another rich and dynamic aspect of Allahabad’s publishing history: as a center of popular publishing and genre fiction. Here, I focus on Maya (Magic), Rasili Kahaniyaan (Juicy stories), and Manohar Kahaniyaan (Pleasing stories) published by the enormously successful Mitra Prakashan and Maya Press. Mitra Prakashan and Maya Press, established by K. M. Mitra and his brother-in-law B. N. Ghosh for publishing and printing works, respectively, put out several enormously popular genre fiction standalone titles under its two series. Titled the “Manohar Series” and “Maya Series,” respectively, they were often advertised together and included a range of novels and short story collections. Priced at twelve annas per book, offerings were as diverse as anyone’s literary imagination could be: the series sold the classic nineteenth-century Urdu novel Umrao Jaan Ada, the nineteenth-century British novel David Copperfield, as well as novels by well-known contemporary writers: among them Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’s Andhera Ujala (The shadowy light), which, as its advertisement promised, “will show you the true picture [vastavik chitra] of cinema,” and Bhairav Prasad Gupta’s short story collection Farishta (Angel), which “will encourage/stimulate healthy entertainment alongside advancing life and developing character.” However, celebrating (or even revealing) authorship was not the case with all novels. For instance, some were advertised without author names but promised thrills: a novel titled Yam ki Chhaya (The shadow of yama) guaranteed “mystery and romance” (rahasya aur romance), Doctor Shekhar was billed as a “thrilling detective novel” (romanchkari jasoosi upanyas), and Maut ki Malka (Mistress of death) stressed that “the novel is as thrilling as the book’s name is terrifying.”

Maya, Rasili Kahaniyaan, and Manohar Kahaniyaan from these houses were ephemeral periodicals, with a few extant copies still existing. We can only guess at the years these magazines were first published. One thing is definite: the publishing house and press were in business much before this, especially Maya, which ran (in a different, more literary form) for decades before I pick up the story in the 1940s. The publishing house and printing press, too, have since closed. Subject to heavy litigation, the family rarely makes any public statements or gives interviews. Some clues do help us construct a partial story of beginnings. Litigation documents reveal that Mitra Prakashan and Maya Press were established as private limited companies in 1953. According to Audit Bureau of Circulation records, Maya and Manohar Kahaniyaan certainly flourished, with circulation figures ranging between 41,000 and 60,000 subscribers throughout the 1950s. 

While the book’s focus has been on middlebrow publishing, through a close reading of short stories, I find that these magazines facilitated conversations that middlebrow magazines often either ignored or did not address. Indeed, Hindi middlebrow magazines’ primary emphasis on aspirational narratives meant that they also ignored other central questions: poverty and unemployment, poor living conditions and the lack of privacy, fissures drawn across religious belonging, desire and the pressures of the joint family. Maya, Rasili Kahaniyaan, and Manohar Kahaniyaan actively aired these fears, desires, and complex realities that emerged from post-1947 Indian individual and social experiences. In a way, by challenging the middlebrow aesthetic that concentrated on aspiration and consumption, genre magazines carried short stories that provided alternative moral universes to readers. 

At the same time, to propose that these alternative moral universes were set to achieve specific or ostensible political intentions of publishers, editors, or writers would be to, perhaps, oversell and in doing so underrepresented this world. However, these short stories exposed fears and insecurities. Shortages and rationing of food and cloth were some of the major problems the new nation faced. Developmental policies immediately following 1947 depended on the citizens’ duty to support the nation’s food development goals. In addition to food and other scarcity, another concern was the trauma from the carnage of the Partition. With the passing of the Special Marriage Act in 1954 and the Hindu Marriage Act in 1955, marriage remained one of the hotly debated institutions in the 1950s.

The magazines recognized that everyday citizens—who were their readers and consumers—felt these questions palpably. They employed varied genres such as detective fiction, melodramatic romances, thrillers and mysteries, ghost and horror stories, and what I call “fictions of melodramatic poverty,” that is, stories in which narratives of poverty were laden with pathos and other heightened emotions that made the reader sympathize with the plight of the impoverished character. At first glance, it might seem that these peculiar formal elements and characteristics undermine the point of the whole story. However, Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell’s frame of “affective genres,” which “classify the emotional response or affect,” provides a convincing critical counterpoint. Affective genres, that is, the very way in which these stories were written, were conducive to raising serious worries and uncertainties that, perhaps, could not be aired otherwise. 

I propose romanch as the frame through which we can better and more comprehensively understand the functions performed by these stories. I invoke the word “romanch” from the magazines’ own vocabulary. Maya’s only interactive section titled “Romanch ki vah ghari” (The moment of romanch) asked its readers to narrate stories that made the heart tremble (dil kamp uthta hai). The magazine offered to pay between (a decent) three to (a whopping) fifteen rupees for readers’ real-life stories. The dictionary definition of “romanch” suggests the “curl or thrill of the body hair” and “thrill (of ecstasy or of horror)” which relates to feelings of “dread but excitement.” This affective duality of “dread but excitement” is paramount to understanding romanch’s function. The romanch in these stories expresses physical feelings resulting from unpleasant emotions of fearful uncertainty, which, because of the way it is represented, also provides the pleasurable feeling of excitement. Romanch, in short, is the fearful excitement arising from the nonrestoration of a moral universe. 

A great example of a short story that demonstrates this is “Nangi avaazein” (Naked Voices), written by canonical writer Saadat Hasan Manto published in the November 1952 issue of Maya. Written in the third person, the narrative opens with Bholu’s eagerness to get married. He tells his friend Ramu in desperation: “I am also a human being. For God’s sake, I cannot sleep at night. It has been twenty days since I slept… Please tell brother (bhaiya), he should start making preparations for my wedding.” Here, Bholu equates being “human” with getting married. Very strong overtones of sexual tension dot the conversation. Soon, through the extended family network, Bholu finds a suitable bride. However, inexplicably at this point, Bholu’s living circumstances start to make him uncomfortable. Bholu lives in a chawl (poor tenement): his “home” is just a bed in a room full of beds that are occupied by other bodies that can always be heard if not seen. In short, there is no room for privacy.

In his first excitement, Bholu decides to make his bed a private space for himself and his future bride: he installs four posters around the bed and hangs curtains on them, making the space self-contained. However, as the date of the wedding draws closer, Bholu’s excitement transforms into dismay, despair, and fear. He can constantly hear other couples’ sexual activity all around him, and the “naked voices” haunt him. The romanch in the story is derived from the fear of being heard during sexual intimacy. He is terrified that his own intimacies will become a public spectacle. Here, fear is expressed through his anxious questions: “Will he also produce such sounds?… Will people around us also hear our sounds?… Will they also spend their nights being awake, just like he is? If someone peeked in and saw, what would happen then?” Bholu begins to dread the upcoming nuptials. The ideal that Bholu was aspiring to has now turned him neurotic.

After the marriage date is set, Bholu’s neurosis reaches a crescendo. Even after he has married the girl, who he thinks is very beautiful and desirable, he cannot bring himself to be intimate with her. Unable to resolve his dilemma between desiring his wife and having the privacy necessary to initiate sexual intimacy, Bholu ultimately rejects her. The lack of intimacy also cannot be kept private: soon, rumors circulate in the chawl that Bholu sent his wife back home because he was disinterested, with the implicit assumption that he is impotent. In other words, to the home’s inhabitants, the information about lack of intimacy is as significant and exciting as the sounds confirming it. Bholu himself hears the rumors, which is perhaps the moment that drives him mad: “Now Bholu wanders around the bazaar completely naked. Whenever he sees jute hanging, he tears it apart in tiny pieces.”

Impotence arising out of the shame and fear of unveiled intimacy lies at the heart of the narrative. Bholu’s neurosis is born the moment he has to initiate intimacy in a semipublic space. The unsettling ending in the form of stark and literal naked madness raises the larger question regarding what it means to be the urban poor. The short story can be read as part of a whole series of stories focusing on homelessness or living on footpaths—or in crowded chawls—that indict the newly independent state for failing to cater to its citizens’ basic needs.

Another story asks difficult questions of partition violence. “The embrace of death” (“Mrityu ke bahupaash mein”), written by a certain Shyam Sundar Goyanka in Rasili Kahaniyaan, is a story of two friends from a neighborhood. Abbas, the Muslim friend, is shown rather agitated, while Prakash, the Hindu friend, is seen addressing him kindly. The readers soon become aware that Abbas has come to visit Prakash at the hospital. Prakash has sustained burn injuries over his face, also losing his eyesight, from an acid attack during the recent Hindu-Muslim riots that he had participated in. Several paragraphs into the narrative, the readers then slowly become aware that it was, in fact, Abbas himself who threw acid on Prakash’s face! The story at this point is beset with tension, with Prakash stoically reminding Abbas of their mutual friendship before the riot and a flustered Abbas repeatedly asking Prakash for his forgiveness. While Prakash cries in pain, he also takes hold of Abbas’s hand, telling him he has completely forgiven him. Already brimming with romanch, with the guilty Abbas being physically unable to hold on to Prakash’s hand, the climax is particularly horrifying: Prakash lures a guilty Abbas to stay with him in the hospital to take care of him for the night, only to throw acid on him! The story ends abruptly with Abbas’s face scarred and him blinded. While throwing acid over him, Prakash says this to Abbas: 

Take heart. It’s burning a lot. Why are you biting me like an animal? What will get out of cutting me, my friend? Do you think that I’ll survive this and go to jail for hurting you? 

After saying this, Prakash took the bottle of acid and drank it. 

How is one to interpret fear and horror in the above story? The narrative technique used by the writer—Goyanka was not recorded in any mainstream literary histories—is one of leading readers from one revelation to another, much like a detective story. Readers are invited to investigate the tension’s buildup, being handed shocking revelations at every turn. The ultimate climax is beyond anticipation, throwing readers into complete confusion. A gradual increase in what seemed to be forgiveness is overturned by a climax that instead proffers revenge. The story then also becomes a story of revenge against the “other.” The binary between good and evil is maintained. At one level, readers “know” that Prakash actually has cause to attack Abbas. However, this binary is complicated, because readers also know from the very beginning that Abbas feels extremely guilty about the violence he inflicted on Prakash. When Abbas is made to believe that Prakash has forgiven him, he cries: “You’re an amazing person … I am unable to repay the debt of your friendship.”

How is one to read the “other” in this story? The fear experienced while reading the story is from the Muslim character’s perspective, as is the guilt. The story, then, is not only one of revenge: the genre is primarily that of detective thriller, and revenge is coincidental to perhaps necessitate an acceptable closure. However, the underlying conflict between friendship and betrayal also becomes a very important lens through which to read the story.