‘What kind of job would her husband have?’
‘A clerk, a bank employee. A middle-level job in a factory, earning about 1000 to 1500 rupees. Her job would be anything from 600 to 1000.’
‘That sounds hard.’
‘Very hard. It’s not funny at all. She’s away from the children the whole day. She gets off from her office at 5.30 or six. She might first take a bus to the station. Or – this is more harrowing – she might have to take a bus all the way home. There are mile-long queues for the bus sometimes. When I pass I often wonder when they are ever going to get a bus. Before getting to the bus or station she would buy her vegetables or whatever she needs. Her vegetables are there, in her little thela, a carrier bag.
‘And then she gets home. And before having her own cup of tea, she has to give one to her own lord and master, who’s probably sitting with his feet up, already at the television. Ten to one, in spite of the low earning, they have a television. Then the dinner, then a bit of the children’s homework – if she’s capable of doing that. Her day would end late. She would have to do the washing up. Then she has to think of the water again.’
‘How do they keep going?’
This is their lot, their destiny. They believe this is how it has to be for them. I’m not necessarily describing the reader of Eve’s Weekly or Woman’s Era. I’m just making the point of how sad such women can be with so much drudgery in their lives.’
Women in such circumstances needed special magazines. Simple mimicry of European or American magazines wasn’t what was required. The idea of glamour might even be wrong.
Mrs Ewing said, The only difference between the middle readership of Eve’s Weekly – which might be secretaries – and the readership of Woman’s Era is language. Woman’s Era uses more simplistic language and talks down to the woman. A fascinating explanation of the success of Woman’s Era was given to me the other day. The women who read Woman’s Era are really intimidated by magazines. They’d rather pick up magazines like Woman’s Era that don’t make them feel uncomfortable. But I’m optimistic that that kind of reactionary woman’s journalism will be on the way out. When we’ – she meant Eve’s Weekly – ‘write about bride-inspecting, we get all het-up. And we tell the woman, the girl, that she doesn’t have to go through this. But she can only revolt if she is educated enough to be economically independent at some later stage.’
That was the point: that for a girl or woman from that background, with that education, living in those ‘surroundings’, the idea of revolt was fantasy. Woman’s Era was addressed to those women. And so the magazine which had at first appeared so characterless to me, so dull, began to say more, began to create a whole new world of India, a whole new section of urban Indian society which wouldn’t have been easy for me to get to know.
There were no Indian women’s magazines before independence. Middle-class Indian women read the two popular British magazines, Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Own. When the British went away these magazines ceased to be available. Even a middle-class Indian woman would have found them too expensive to subscribe to from India. I was told this by Nandini Lakshman. She was a journalist specializing in media and advertising matters. From her I got a short history of Indian women’s magazines.
‘When the Times of India, a British paper, was Indianized, they started Femina. This was in the early 50s. In the early issues they had a British hangover. The editor was a Parsi lady. In those days modelling wasn’t considered a good profession in India. So in Femina you had pictures of a lot of these foreigners posing in these Indian outfits. The Indian women who modelled came from affluent Indian families who were not so bound by custom and traditional norms. Then unfortunately within a few years the first editor committed suicide. Nobody knows the reason why. She must have been in her late forties. Then you had an Indian editor for the first time.
‘Femina wanted then to reach out to more women. So they started this Miss India contest. They had contests all over the country – in the major metros, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Delhi – and then all the winners had a Miss India competition. Not really middle-class – it was quite a society affair: the affluent, the moneyed, the influential, people who frequented social parties. The contest had a kind of snob appeal. Initially there weren’t too many girls who participated, because again a beauty contest was considered below their dignity, even for many of the snob people – because not everybody wins. I suppose it was the fear of being rejected. And, moreover, the chosen Miss India had to participate in the Miss Universe contest. And there, in one session, she had to wear a swimsuit and parade herself. This would have been shocking to all Indians. So in the early days we had Parsi girls and Christian girls as Miss Indias. But even though the middle-class Indian woman couldn’t participate, she began to aim towards that. It was something new to her – the glamour, the image. She was partly shocked, partly fascinated.
‘Eve’s Weekly came along at about this time, and they also started a beauty contest. The circulation of both papers then would have been about 15,000. Much later, they started carrying articles about how to drape your sari, how to look good. It was the editor of Femina, a man, who began to do that. I suppose he had a more open view of women’s expectations.
‘In those days you didn’t have too many women working. The magazines carried stories like “The Experiences of a War Widow” – or the experiences of people who had lost their husbands during the partition of India.
‘The creation of Indian women’s magazines was a gradual process– with a growing readership and a wider market, because of growing education and more awareness. Femina touched 90,000 in the late 70s; Eve’s Weekly also. Woman’s Era, the star today, was launched in 1973. As Woman’s Era has risen, Femina has dropped – to 65,000 today. And now there’s a new magazine, Savvy, which is the opposite of Woman’s Era. Savvy is three years old, and it already has a circulation of 50,000. It’s a monthly. Femina is for the older woman. Savvy is for the city-bred woman, from eighteen to thirty.
‘Savvy is a scandalous magazine. It carries a cover story, a personality story, about a woman. She is known as the “Savvy Woman of the Month”. She has to be a divorcee, or she can have affairs, or she can have her husband beat her up, or she can leave her husband and kids for somebody, or he can leave her for somebody else, or she can have a husband and a lover. And at the end of it all she can still emerge victorious. She manages to have her cake and eat it too. Every month. Savvy women are fairly famous, but not always. If I have a gory life, if I want to dare all and bare all, Savvy will make a heroine out of me. They have found a market for this: I think they did some kind of research. An Indian woman may not admit that she reads Savvy, but she still reads it. Savvy is for the metro areas. Femina and Woman’s Era you will find in the small towns, like Nasik and Nagpur. Savvy did something on rape a couple of months ago – with photographs – and the women’s organizations said it was too blatant, and there was a court injunction, and they had to withdraw all the issues.’
We talked about Woman’s Era. I told Nandini what Gulshan Ewing had said about the working woman to whom Woman’s Era was reaching out.
She said, ‘That’s glamorizing the Woman’s Era reader a bit. It’s the elite voice talking.’ Nandini herself was just a generation or two from traditional and small-town life. ‘Every day I change two buses and take a train to come to office. And I get up early. But I don’t read Woman’s Era. I cook at home and I come to work, and I don’t find it a drudgery. That’s a skyscraper view. The person who says that probably has a lot of servants at her fingertips.’
Nandini didn’t see Woman’s Era as appealing to the working woman. ‘It aims at the traditional middle-class housewife. I don’t mean illiterate. It is the only magazine that carries five stories, fiction, in every issue. All about: they lived happily ever after. The husband comes back to the wife. Woman’s Era is very biased towards women. The woman can do no wrong. She is always a good person. She may be a grandmother, or a wife
, or a mother-in-law; she is always a good person. Even when the husband is an alcoholic, in the story the wife with her good nature helps him give up the bottle. To the magazine it may not matter why the husband has hit the bottle. They don’t tackle that angle. The situations are from everyday life. The readers can identify with each and every situation. In the 1950s, in Femina and Eve’s Weekly the stories would have been remote.’
I said that the Woman’s Era stories seemed to me to be fables, to be hardly stories.
Nandini said, They are badly written. I fail to understand that in spite of such bad presentation and packaging the magazine has such a wide readership.’
Was there an element of instruction? Did women turn to the magazine for simple basic advice?
The stories are meant to entertain. The reader sees the situation as one that may befall her. Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law problems. Or the boy studying abroad. He is engaged to a girl in India, or he is married to her, and he has affairs abroad, but ultimately he comes back to the wife, and they live happily ever after. Woman’s Era doesn’t tackle social problems. They tackle personal situations. The editors know what they are doing.’
We talked about the ‘bride-seeing’ article. It had caused a certain amount of offence. Many people talked about it, and from the journalistic point of view it had to be considered a success.
Nandini said, ‘I would condemn bride-seeing. But they don’t. Their article has the sub-title, “A Positive Look at the Custom”. And they carry photographs like this.’
A posed colour photograph, occupying the top half of the first page of the article, showed a girl bringing tea on a tray to a viewing party. The room in the photograph was small and cramped (perhaps one of the standard 10 feet by 10 feet Indian rooms), and there was almost no space between the furniture: a matching three-piece ‘sofa set’, a coffee table, and a side table with a big lamp and with marigolds in an earthen pot. Four people of the visiting party were on the sofa; and two of the visiting women were staring hard at the girl, who was standing with the tea tray, in a new sari, her hair freshly done, looking with something like wretchedness at the camera.
Nandini didn’t have my outsider’s eye. She saw nothing humorous in the photograph; her feelings were absolutely with the young girl. ‘It is horrendous. At the end of the article they say that a get-together between the boy and the girl is advisable – they don’t say it’s a must – and they have a photograph of a boy and a girl facing each other across a table, but not looking at each other and not talking. “Be respectful and affectionate” is a sub-heading.’ She read out from the article: ‘ “The boy’s sisters and nieces and nephews should be treated with friendly affection.” ’ She was irritated by what she read. She said, ‘If a battalion comes to see you, you are not on parade. You are not being bought. In the article they try to take a liberal step. But the arguments justifying the custom are so strong, the liberal step is nullified. They are not appealing to the new woman. They are appealing to the traditional woman.
‘My sister is educated, but she went through an arranged marriage. She hadn’t fallen in love with anybody, and there was this proposal from these people. So my parents asked her. There wasn’t this kind of exhibition. She just met the boy. He is a merchant-navy captain. Both of them liked each other.’
‘Would Woman’s Era readers suffer when they have to go through something like that bride-seeing?’
‘They are conditioned to the fact that they have to go through all this. Some women do find it a torture, but they have to go through with it. However educated or affluent a woman is, you have her saying, “Ultimately I would like to get married and have children.” But there are also women who accept Savvy magazine. There are the two strands now, and these two papers are leaving Femina and Eve’s Weekly far behind.
‘When you come to the advertising, you will find food ingredients and certain cosmetics in Woman’s Era and Femina. But not a winter skin-care lotion costing 50 rupees for 200 ml. That would be advertised in Savvy. It’s not such an easy market in India. It has to be studied.’
From time to time on my journey I bought an issue of Woman’s Era, and my regard for its journalistic and social achievement grew. I felt it deserved its success. I thought its merit lay in something Gulshan Ewing had mentioned: it did not intimidate its readers.
A recurring theme of its stories was the discovery by a woman – usually a new bride – that the great shame she feels about her poor relations is misplaced. And Woman’s Era never shamed its readers. In its stories, its recipes, its photographs of interiors (like the cramped small room which illustrated the bride-seeing article), it acknowledged the conditions in which its readers lived; and it never went beyond those conditions. Perhaps that recognition in itself was a kind of glamour; perhaps in no other form – not cinema or television – did women of that group find that recognition.
With that recognition, there was always reassurance. It could be said that reassurance was the dominant tone of Woman’s Era. In the stories (the themes usually connected with family love) people always turn out to be better and more human than they appear. And there was reassurance again in the articles of instruction or advice. Nothing was taken for granted there. Woman’s Era will tell you everything about how to pay a visit: don’t go unannounced, don’t let your children touch things, don’t let them jump in their muddy shoes on your host’s sofa and cushions. In another number Woman’s Era – turning the tables, as it were – will tell you how to deal with an unexpected caller: ‘Not immediately after their arrival, but some time during their stay, you can give them a tip by saying tactfully, “Had I known you were coming for a stay, I would have provided you with more comforts and adjusted our own schedule.” Unless the guest is extra thick-skinned, this should serve to carry the message across.’
Woman’s Era will tell you how to write a letter: don’t use a crumpled or grease-marked sheet, don’t tear a sheet from your daughter’s notebook, don’t use big words, don’t write only about yourself, don’t slap the stamps on all over the envelope. The magazine will even tell you how to go to the cinema: don’t take food, don’t comment on the plot, don’t take your baby and walk it up and down the aisle when it begins to cry.
People who don’t need this kind of advice don’t need Woman’s Era. And the people who need the advice are never rebuked or ridiculed. The faults are never written about as the reader’s faults. They are other people’s faults, faults the reader might have observed; there is always some story or fable to soften the correction. Woman’s Era invites its readers to a special, shared world. The editorial tone is one of concern, almost love.
And when I got to know the editor, Vishwa Nath, I found that this tone fairly reflected his idea of a mission.
He was seventy-two, and he was still very much in control of his printing and publishing business. He was of middle size, brisk, with no great fat on him, looking cool and ready for business in his white trousers and short-sleeved shirt – Indian homespun, but I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t told me.
He gave the impression of not being used to talking about himself. He had no personal anecdotes, and didn’t draw moral lessons from his experience. He was still engaged in the world; ideas still held him; he was engrossed by his work and it made him look outwards. He loved the idea of magazines; he loved everything to do with print. He was proud of the new Heidelberg presses on the ground floor. At the same time, out of his love of print, he kept, in a caged room on the upper floor, trays and boxes of movable type, Hindi and English, from older days.
His family had first set up a printing press in Delhi in 1911. So in the printing business he had something like an ancestry. As with Indians in other fields, the talent that had appeared to flower after independence had been maturing over a generation or two. His family had been in Delhi for 400 years, but he could trace it back only as far as his great-grandfather, in whose house he had been born in 1916, and where he had lived until 1934. This great-grandfather h
ad been born just before the Mutiny, perhaps in 1854; he was the man who had passed on the story of the family abandoning the house during the British siege and sacking of Delhi in 1857.
There was a more tangible record of that ancestor. At some time in the 1870s he had been employed by a British lexicographer, Dr Fallon. Dr Fallon was preparing a Hindi-Urdu-English dictionary; and Vishwa Nath’s ancestor had travelled about North India with Dr Fallon, recording the words and phrases they heard.
At Vishwa Nath’s back, in his office, there was a glass-doored bookcase that rose from the cupboard to the ceiling. Dr Fallon’s Dictionary – re-bound – was on a shelf in that bookcase. It was 1200 pages long, the pages almost quarto size, 10 inches by seven: A New Hindustani-English Dictionary, With Illustrations from Hindustani Literature and Folk-Lore, by S. W. Fallon Ph.D., published in 1879 by Trubner & Co., London, and E. J. Lazarus & Co., Banaras. Every entry appeared in the three languages, in the three scripts; the pronunciation of the Hindi or Urdu word was given an English approximation.
So, just 20 years after William Howard Russell’s journey, there had been this other English journey, through some of the same districts, and there had been this other labour, that couldn’t possibly have been adequately rewarded. And there, in Dr Fallon’s preface, was the acknowledgement of Vishwa Nath’s scholarly ancestor: ‘Munshi Thakur Das of Delhi.’