We invite you to join us on Zoom on Friday, February 21, 2025, at 9AM CT (8.30PM IST | 3PM GMT) for a discussion of Aakriti Mandhwani’s new book Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India, published by UMass Press in 2024. You can find the introduction online here.
About the book:
Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (UMass Press, 2024) captures the significant and yet largely unexplored world of commercially successful print and publishing in post-Independence India. It examines the world of “middlebrow” commercial publishing and practices of reading of North Indian middle-classes in the 1950s and 60s. While this period has been studied largely from the perspective of planning, policy, and the partition, the overarching and dominant critical narrative that emerges from it emphasises sacrifice over personal pleasure, marking each citizen’s unconditional contribution to the nation’s growth. However, it was also a time when middle class selves were being re-imagined, and re-articulated themselves, in multiple ways. Taking as its focus the form and content of a range of bestselling middlebrow magazines and paperbacks in Hindi, Everyday Reading constructs an alternative story for the 1950s: one that is marked by consumption.
About the author:
Aakriti Mandhwani is associate professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi NCR, India. She is the author of Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (UMass Press, 2024); Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle Class (Speaking Tiger, 2024). She is co-editor (with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Anwesha Maity) of Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories (Routledge, 2018). Her research on North Indian libraries and archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction has been published in Modern Asian Studies and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies as well as several co-edited volumes.