‘Reading For Pleasure Pauses The March Towards Women’s Productivity’

What did you grow up reading, and what literature did the women in your family have access to?

I grew up in a pretty multilingual household – so I heard a lot of Sindhi, Hindi, Punjabi and then there was English. Subscribing to magazines was still seen as aspirational (most family members didn’t read them), so apart from the Sindhi and English language newspapers that my grandfather enjoyed, we got Outlook, India Today and the much fancier and more expensive Newsweek that my father wanted to read. I myself grew up reading Tinkle, Chacha Choudhary and, much later, the Archie comics – we bought these during train journeys. I was a very voracious reader – so the Famous Fives of my childhood gave way to the Bronte sisters by the time I was in the ninth grade (all thanks to my English school teacher Shalini Dutta). But still there was no Indian novel in sight – and my life changed when I read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy issued from the school library. Of course, it had to be read in secret under the blankets.

Three wonderful women who I dedicate the book to had three very different access to reading. While my maternal grandmother read a variety of Hindi popular and high literary fiction, my paternal grandmother, dadi, couldn’t read at all. She decided to learn very late in her life. At that point in time, we didn’t think much of the mother reading. The mother’s reading was not privileged at all — so much so that I don’t have any memory of her reading avidly, talking about what she read, or taking time out to read. I would see her encountering magazines at a beauty salon or at the dentist. My mother’s reading – of magazines like Sarita and Women’s Era – was entirely eclipsed by my father’s assertive (and loud) construction of himself as the avid reader of far more “literary” things – he was the first English graduate from this Sindhi household and he made sure everyone knew it. 

I understood much later that he was no different from my mother in his consumption practices–he was an avid consumer of middlebrow objects. For example, he would endlessly wax [lyrical] about Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is the most middlebrow of authors at this moment in time from the point of view of a ‘middle class family’ – he’s aspirational, endlessly accessible, everybody wants to lay claim to him. 

Were you interested in women’s experiences with reading and access to books?

I honestly went into the project trying to decode the history of pulp. I was sure that I was going to find strong women readers of it. But the research unfolded even more confident and assertive readers than I could have dreamed of. 

Historically so much of women’s reading has been rooted in surreptitious and collective reading practices, or just in the language of ‘service’ or ‘duty’. What I found remarkable was the sheer volume of exchanges [through reader letters] taking place in these magazines – among readers, writers, editors, so many of them women. They really did not hold back on their opinions. These women not only liked or disliked stories, they argued factual discrepancies in them, they told off other readers and writers if they didn’t agree with their opinions, they didn’t even spare the editor. This may very well have been a choice on the editor’s part, to display this kind of a strong, assertive female reader (unfortunately we don’t have any other correspondences that survive). However, this editorial choice gestured to more readers that such opinions would be welcome.  

Also in the 1950s historically, the fact that these women thought of themselves as readers was a mark of pride. And they didn’t think of themselves as readers who would only comment on one thing. They’re saying we deal in the particulars: they are interested in being readers of [articles on] household chores, of literary short stories, and of gossip columns. For context, second generation feminists are also writing at this time elsewhere in the world, and they are thinking about this ‘masculine sort of universalism’ and whether they need to prescribe to it, but that thinking is not happening with these women. 

What picture do you draw of women readers and creators? Would you say their caste, economic, or religious identities shaped their reading choices?

I do want to stress that as generously as these magazines included, they excluded. That means that these women very much came from mostly Savarna Hindu backgrounds. They read widely, across genres, across fiction and non-fiction, however, I found next to no minority representation in these magazines. There was a smattering of material relating to knowing about the “tribes” of India, however, the gaze is very much that of an imperialist/pseudo-benevolent outsider looking in. 

While it is true women are reading in exciting ways, these are middle-class women who operate in the context of their time. We have to bring the conversation back to caste and the exclusionary practices of these very women.

Journals of the time framed women as being in service to the nation or the family. Did they inform women’s domestic lives or reproduce gender norms?

Absolutely. Sarita and Dharmyug crafted confident women readers and writers, but they remained mostly preoccupied with marriage, love, family. But these were also undercut by what can only be termed confrontational arguments with these very systems. How can we, for example, make sense of a woman writer who told women to not wear the sindoor because it looked “ugly”, “like a signpost”? Or another article that advised women to never bow their heads, even in supplication to elders, because it would mess with their posture? I find these negotiations with gender norms very interesting in these magazines. 

Women’s magazines and paperbacks are often seen as frivolous in comparison to non-fiction books or political magazines. Did this bias impact women’s reading habits? 

The magazines I discuss in the book weren’t called “women’s magazines” at all – these were marketed as family and general interest magazines. Often advertisements for these magazines literally show the family in battle with each other about who gets to read first. However, since women read them in numbers, many “literary” magazines looked down upon them. In fact, a famous writer moaned that Dharamvir Bharti, Dharmyug’s editor, had sacrificed himself to run a vyavasayik (commercial) magazine. The critique may be of commercialism, but inherently coded was also the message that just because the family (women included) read them, they were not literary enough. Even now, this bias exists – for example, “feminine” genres still need to jostle for space to be taken seriously. Many times, it is these very genres that drive sales but are still looked down on. 

We have such little scholarship on contemporary reading practices; so much of our time is spent lamenting that people are not reading, that actually the work of figuring out what they’re reading is not being undertaken at an industrial scale. This data is available with big companies who will not share that data with research scholars. Research lags into women’s reading habits due to a lack of data, or maybe it’s a lack of interest. 

But what we know for sure is that women are reading. Anecdotally, I can say that women are reading notes, and women are reading in ways that perhaps don’t constitute reading sometimes: for instance, reading on phones these episodic novels, fan fiction, or romance stories.

We see a surge in the popularity of romance novels, such as those by Colleen Hoover. How is this genre shaping the identity of women as readers? 

We have to reckon with this difficult problem of women as readers of romance. How can you call yourself a “feminist”, or how can you think of yourself as somebody who’s not interested in romance or fashion but still reads literature that are “cowboy romances” or “mafia romances”, where men actively glorify in masculine roles? A lot of young feminists voice a discomfort in wanting to engage with this material. 

We can also see why readers of romance are reading Colleen Hoover. Her last book that was made into a popular movie was actually about domestic violence, so we have to take cognisance of the kinds of imaginative universes women are able to evoke in these fictional worlds that they often quote as fantasy. They don’t want to have these abusive relationships in real life, and a certain desire is met through the reading of these romances. And maybe this is an expression of desire classified as queer. A podcast made this argument that the rise in stalker romances is a response to our worlds becoming much more conservative.

On the other hand, women are also making and consuming the Boys’ Love shojo manga (a genre aimed at a young female audience) which basically rehashes the trope of two men falling in love. Why are so many women interested in consuming stories of men falling in love with each other? Maybe they’re trying to break the gaze. Women’s creation of literature is a way to counter that conservative strain, but also give into it — it’s confusing.

There is the idea that only men produce important ideas while women produce gossip. What about women creators at the time – what were their motivations?

Women have always had different motivations, right? For example, there’s an upcoming essay by Melina Gravier on Khatoon e Mashriq, an Urdu magazine edited by a woman set in the same time period. The women are asking very open questions about divorce, what women are entitled to, and what it means to be a citizen of this country. The Muslim women were trying to find a solidarity or community similar to what is geographically constructed in India. We can only imagine what kind of solidarities are built and what they wanted to build. 

In another work, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay talks about the Indian Ladies Magazine which was being published in Chennai where women read book reviews of books published in America, Canada, and beyond – books that they will never read. Women were trying to build very feminist solidarities around the world from the act of reading.

 Did you come across Indian women writers or publications led by women lost to history? Also, what can be done to make it easier for women to create and access literature today? The Hind Pocket Books library scheme, for instance, introduced the first-ever mail order book club for readers.

So many women writers and publications have been lost entirely. And these were writers who were at the height of their fame when they were writing for these magazines. I’m absolutely mystified by the fate of Vimla Luthra, for instance, who was so widely read. Some writers like Shivani thankfully are still kept alive in public memory.

One of the biggest barriers to entry with reading is access – despite being subsidised to a great extent, books are still expensive. Another problem of access is representation – traditional print publishers have still not produced enough diversity along lines of caste, queerness, minority representation. All around the world women have taken matters into their own hands – so much reading today across happens in fanfiction or self-publishing, for example. 

Some infrastructure in India sort of resonates with these schemes of the past – for example, Pratilipi is doing exceedingly well, with so many of its writers and readers coming from across languages and readers being able to read thousands of books for a monthly subscription. But public and travelling libraries used to be the pride and joy [of communities] and they created access. Well-stocked and approachable community libraries are the need of the hour.