What Was is a recurring column that explores residual and/or forgotten concepts, objects, or events.
How does one narrativize the transitory? Is it possible to imagine a history of print ephemera that is both synchronic and limited on the one hand as well as diachronic and expansive on the other? Jed Birmingham observes that the little magazine is “first and foremost, a storage technology” which is capable of “documenting a multitude of spaces and times, which in turn alter depending on when, where and how they are read.” His description foregrounds the polyvocal and pluri-centric nature of this print form. He notes that despite being a ‘small’ form—ephemeral and irregular—the world of the little magazine is vast, with ever-expansive chronotopes. Scholars like Abel Debritto refute Birmingham’s claim by stating that the little magazine’s “commitment to the present” distinguishes it from more persistent print forms such as the book. These debates make writing a single history of the genre (even a localized one) an elusive task: something always seems to slip through the cracks. In this brief essay I show that the history of this promethean genre in South Asia needs two intertwining strands, one synchronic and the other diachronic. First, the 1960s and 70s are said to be the prime years of South Asian ‘littles’ simultaneous with the transnational little magazine movement. In fact, extant narratives about South Asian little magazines focus solely on this period. This leads me to the second strand, that it is important to recognize the long history leading up to these decades as the tradition of small-scale periodicals struggling to stoke and shape the public discourse from the margins dates back as early as the late nineteenth century. Any answer to “What was the little magazine in South Asia?” must acknowledge that these two strands are inextricably entangled in writing the history of this inventive technology for an aesthetic, social, and political movement.
During British colonial rule, South Asian reading publics were introduced to many ‘radical’ texts (that might be categorized as anticolonial literature in retrospect) through periodicals. These magazines were often small-scale author-led enterprises, with little to no revenue. The figure of the author-curator-editor emerged in the literary marketplace around this time—a literary persona whose artistic vision, enterprising nature, and anti-authoritarian impulse merged to produce print ephemera. Several of these personalities ran businesses from their own residence, with the help of family members, often at the cost of generating no profits at all. A few ‘serious’ magazines also shunned most kinds of advertisements, a principled stance which meant irregular printing schedules and unpaid or underpaid authors. Some that were considered especially radical (such as the phansi/capital punishment special issue of the Hindi magazine Chand) came under grave colonial censorship. Most contained translations and travel narratives from across the country and the world. These are the very hallmarks of what we have come to associate today with the identity of a little magazine: penury-struck, art-driven, anti-commercial, defiant, unpredictable, peripheral, radical, worldly, and most importantly, little. While periodicals with relatively higher circulation like The Modern Review and Chand went on to become well-established and canonical publications, smaller magazines such as Parichay, Agrani, Viplav, Manikodi, and others did not enjoy as much fame or readership beyond (or sometimes during) their lifetimes. It is the latter category that shares greater resemblance with the little magazine movement that exploded across the subcontinent following decolonization, and joined the global effervescence of this print form throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Authors and artists who published in these littles were, perhaps for the first time, in complete control over where and how they published, and who they wrote for and to. Consequently, little magazines became the site to think experimentally about an emergent third-world internationalism.
Abel Debritto links the late-twentieth century explosion of independent publishing to the ease and cost-effective nature of the mimeograph revolution. The mimeograph machine (while already popular with resistance groups for illegal newsprint and pamphlets during the Second World War) made an entry into aesthetic print technologies around the 1950s with its ability to duplicate copies using a simple stencil, and until the arrival of the photocopier it remained one of the most efficient ways of proliferating new print media. Debritto notes that with a mimeo in hand, anyone could publish a poetry chapbook or a little magazine from their backyards or garages. This technological shift reoriented the positions of power and exposure within the literary marketplace. The 1960s and 70s saw a proliferation of independent presses and publications across the globe, with artist-publishers creating little magazines and cultivating radical reading publics in locations as diverse as San Francisco, Kyoto, Bombay, Heidelberg, Cape Town, Bengal, and the Lower East Side. Authors and artists who published in these littles were, perhaps for the first time, in complete control over where and how they published, and who they wrote for and to. Consequently, little magazines became the site to think experimentally about an emergent third-world internationalism.
The desire for an anti-hierarchical internationalist order was crucial in the aftermath of the Second World War, as the world stumbled through rising Cold War tensions. Notably, the aspiration was shared between Global South artists, activists, and statesmen alike. Thus, the leaders of several newly decolonized nation-states—such as India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Ghana’s Nkrumah, China’s Enlai, and others tried to craft a joint agenda in the mid-1950s that would allow them to escape the partisan politics and compulsory allegiances mandated by the entrenched poles of the Cold War. They called themselves the Non-Aligned Movement and held a conference in Bandung in 1955 to imagine the coordinates of an alternative global order. The unprecedented worldmaking of their ambitions—one that relied on alliances of hope, support, solidarity, and anti-imperialism among politically disparate units—unfortunately did not last too long neither in diplomacy nor in economics, but aesthetically it left a remarkable legacy, especially in little magazines.
This was critical in the context of post-independence South Asia, where avant-garde artists in a nascent nation were struggling with conflicting ideas about national sovereignty, citizen-building, and transnationalism. They were reimagining the aesthetic paradigms of their new interconnected world. The transnational networks and translational poetics of little magazines went hand in hand and aided such an ethos. Their hearts throbbing with the promise of what Adom Getachew terms “postcolonial cosmopolitanism,” these imaginative thinkers often found themselves at the margins of mainstream patriotism, and they infused their art with a profound “anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.” The little magazines of the 1950s-1970s in South Asia exemplify the hope, the revolutionary intensity, and the scepticism that was characteristic of this period. These radical ‘littles’ rewrote the aesthetic rulebooks that guided the big publishers, their avant-garde rebellions continuing well into the end of the twentieth century.
The post-independence little magazines in South Asia were where most poetic experiments and avant-garde intermedial radicalism found their home.
Each component of this exciting episode in history relied heavily on how effectively the little magazines functioned across multiple languages and the sheer profusion of translations that they facilitated. At this time, little magazines abounded across multiple South Asian languages, especially Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, English, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Assamese, to mention just a few. These little magazines aspired to be multivocal and for artistic inspiration they peered sideways into other South Asian literatures as much as they gazed outwards into the vast interconnected world of multiple poetic subcultures. Krittibas, Kaurab, damn you, Aso, Ezhuthu, Jwala, Vrishchik, Kalpana, Kriti, Srijan, Waste Paper, Shankhachil, fakir, Kantashwar, Asmat, were some of the better-known little magazines from the subcontinent, but the actual number of little magazines being published out of the area during this time runs into the hundreds. The post-independence little magazines in South Asia were where most poetic experiments and avant-garde intermedial radicalism found their home.
There were three critical socio-cultural trends in the South Asian avant-garde of the time that Snigdhendu Bhattacharya has identified. The first was a re-energized sense of newness across all the vernacular and Anglophone writing, reinventing colonial linguistics and its affordances. The second was the writers’ desire to be widely translated and globally read, to travel through their creations to countries beyond the United Kingdom (where Indian writing already had some presence), hence the South Asia special issues in North American little magazines such as Salted Feathers and Citylights Journal. These issues, while edited by the American and/or European editors who ran the little magazines, were dedicated almost entirely to poetry, art, and aesthetic correspondence from South Asian little magazines. South Asian little magazine editors and contributors wrote for and to a Western readership that they only knew partially. One can easily infer that the little magazine in South Asia was not content to merely remain the little magazine from South Asia. The editors and artists of South Asian littles wanted to participate in little magazines from all over the globe, contributing towards them, and even claiming some of them as their very own. International travel and poetic correspondences facilitated the desired writerly contact and bridged literary subcultures across the world. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky’s travels in India in the 1960s and their support for the avant-garde, for instance, functioned as a transcontinental bridge and influenced contemporary writing in the region. These poets and editors in both India and the United States craved contact with an expansive world, an experience afforded by little magazines.
Take for instance, the case of intrepid 10, published in 1968. The tenth issue of Allen de Loach’s little magazine opens with a map which is labelled in Bengali script. This map does not depict where intrepid was published (Buffalo, NY) or where its editor Carl Weissner wrote from (Heidelberg). The map, copyrighted by a Bengali printer called Kata Katha, depicts the Indian city of Calcutta and the neighboring lowland of Howrah. According to Weissner, Calcutta was (emphasis his) “the center of new creative activity in India today.” In the volume’s introduction he emphatically claimed that Calcutta was “where it’s at.” This special issue was mainly devoted to poetry by Indian poets from across the country (translated into English from various languages by the poets and their collaborators) alongside excerpts from Ginsberg’s India Journals. In this way, a little magazine circulating primarily among Anglophone audiences in the Global North was made to resemble a patchwork of excerpts from little magazines circulating in South Asia. However, this fascinating pastiche is not meant to insist on a seamless and intentional syncretism between the East and the West in the new world of the global 60s. In fact, Laetitia Zecchini has shown how these little magazines would often be mailed by the poets and editors to each other, sometimes as secretively as contraband materials, highlighting the internationalist fervor of this material to have the potential of being seditious. She astutely observes that even within these webs of radical friendships and struggling periodicals, the distinction between little magazine proprietors located in South Asia and those in the Global North was only too apparent, riddled with “the global asymmetries of funding, distribution, visibility, and consecration inherent in the (post)colonial world order.” intrepid 10 was only one of several such American littles which made their presence felt in South Asia through translation, cross-publication, correspondence, and patronage. Despite these global conditions of unevenness, little magazines in South Asia promoted a flourishing subcultural internationalism between avant-garde radical minds from South Asia and beyond.
Let us return to the question we began with, “What was the Little Magazine in South Asia?” An answer to the first part (‘What was the Little Magazine’) might be found in Raymond Williams’ pioneering categorizing of cultural modes into dominant, residual, and emergent. The little magazine has long been categorized as an emergent form—one that could lose its edgy irreverence once it becomes mainstream. One might even argue that its ephemeral and tentative nature is a relief—instead of (col)lapsing into the establishment, impudent and anarchic little magazines can simply fizzle away almost as soon as they have served their purpose of rocking the dominant order. But in South Asia (as might be the case in other decolonized regions), the brazen vitality of the little magazine has not always faded into oblivion, some of its spark continues to leak into the domain of the conventional. It taints the peripheries of the fast-liberalizing mainstream with voices, translations, and graphics from other dynamic imaginaries, like an ever-renewing archive, what Eric Bulson (in his 2016 book Little Magazines, World Form) would identify as a steadfast “world-form,” functioning like a floating signifier between the local and the global. The little magazine in South Asia has stayed as a sign of the postcolonial, cosmopolitan, egalitarian future that its makers had always imagined for it, from colonial times through decolonization and beyond.
Supurna Dasgupta teaches postcolonial and world literature in the Department of English at Santa Clara University. She cooks compulsively and dreams about new places to see and newer poems to translate.