Scholarship on Print Culture in Independent India: A Story of Publishers and Readership

Aakriti Mandhwani’s Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class is a significant intervention into North Indian, modern Hindi-speaking society and its print-entertainment culture during the two post-Independence decades. It covers a period and an area of inquiry that has largely been overlooked in sociological or literary studies. The volume focuses on middlebrow, middle-class reading patterns, as well as the corporeality and financial conviviality involved in the production of publications under examination. It decodes the publishing and editing practices of publishing houses that catered to the requirements of their readership, their reading practices, preferences and subjectivities as a self-conscious class of consumers in young, independent India. By taking into consideration production and consumption of middlebrow literature, the volume also studies the way these productions shaped the tastes, preferences, everyday objectives, social practices and values of their consumers, stressing that the readers were ‘nonpassive’ creators of literature and discourse (p. 20). Alongside, it analyses how and where the middle class spent or preferred to spend its disposable income.