The Occasional Streaks Of Rebellion Within Women's Magazines
This week in BehanVox: why TV news lost the plot during the India-Pakistan conflict, gender divide in the upcoming South Korean elections, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! Still revelling in Banu Mushtaq’s Booker win, we bring you an interview with a scholar on what middlebrow Hindi magazines did for women’s reading and writing. An analysis of why TV news lost the plot while covering the recent India-Pakistan conflict. And a look at the deep gender divide in the coming South Korean elections.
Anyone who grew up in the decades before the digital revolution, will recall the excitement of the latest issue of a beloved magazine slithering in from under the door. The fresh feel of gloss, the bright covers, the anticipation of the joys waiting within, squabbling with siblings for first access. In the mix usually was one women’s magazine – Women’s Era, Femina, Eve’s Weekly in English; Sarita, Grihashobha or Sushma in Hindi, Vanitha or Kumkumam in Malayalam, Sananda if you were a Bengali household.
The women’s journals were usually sniffed at: for they carried ‘family’ stories, recipes, fashion, knitting patterns, some gharelu advice and so on. No one really bothered with taking a closer look at the content, to analyse what they stood for or said of the times they represented, how women consumed it or if they were actually as cliched as they were thought to be.
Today, now that we are buried under digital detritus of every kind, it is a great idea to look back more objectively at these magazines and analyse what they meant for women’s reading and writing in those decades. Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India by scholar Aakriti Mandhwani does precisely this.
In an interview with Saumya Kalia this week, she speaks about how women’s identity as readers was constructed through a mix of gender norms, nationalistic currents and the economics of publishing.
The book also looked at how women from different socio-economic and religious backgrounds moved through their universes.
What was the reading and production culture of post-Independence India? How were women positioned as readers of romance? What was their worldview as creators of literature? What did it mean to read for oneself? For pleasure?
“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,” Aakriti says in the interview.
There are other riveting nuggets she discovers – the fact that there were occasional streaks of rebellion in women’s magazines. In one article, the writer questions the point of wearing sindoor in the parting, in another women are told not to bend their head before their elders in supplication. Which does not take away from the pages of advice on how to be a perfect mother, wife and bahu either. But it does question the narrative that the magazines were universally preaching the virtues of patriarchy.
Read the interview here.
We at BehanBox have been repeatedly stressing the importance of news organisations not fanning the embers of conflict between India and Pakistan through fake and provocative reports. As you may recall we even put out a list of bankable sources for information in those days of anxiety over an impending war. This week we analyse why television news got away with some really irresponsible and dangerous reporting.
In that one critical week, television studios showed incorrect footage, quoted “unnamed officials”, reported on events that never happened, and declared the enemy “defeated” more than once. It is not that television news has not been known to do this earlier but the scale at which it happened was unprecedented this time. It was not just small and suspect channels that were airing this material, it was also the known and established ones and their stalwart journalists.
Saumya Kalia speaks to experts and finds two problems – one that the existing laws are not applied forcefully or uniformly enough to act as deterrents or applied only on certain narratives and not others and the other that the self regulatory mechanisms supposed to control this content just do not have enough teeth.
Read our analyses here.
Gender Split As S Korea Votes: South Korea votes for a new president on Tuesday and multiple analyses (here and here) say that the election results will show the massive gender divide. The election is being held to replace Yoon Suk Yeol, who was removed from office for placing the country under martial law for six hours in December. A Reuters report says that the country’s young women will likely lead a “broad political backlash” against the main conservative party, now in opposition, while young men will lean right. This is in keeping with worldwide trends, seen lately in the US presidential elections. With a high unemployment rate, young men in South Korea feel that they are failing to meet the expectations of a largely patriarchal society such as – find a good job, marry, buy a home and set up a family. And it is the women who are blamed for this.
Letting Go The Veil: Sister Anupama, the Kerala nun who fought the powerful church establishment for its silence over sexual violence, has renounced nunhood. Among the six nuns who led a case and campaign against the former bishop, Franco Mulakkal, for rape and criminal intimidation, she has returned to her family. It was seven years ago that the nuns at the Missionaries of Jesus convent in Kottayam accused the former bishop of rape. Despite immense pressure from several quarters, transfer orders and harassment, the women stood their ground. The former bishop was acquitted for lack of evidence but the appeal is now pending before the Kerala High Court.
Business As Usual: In a case that shook Kerala and led to the formation of the Women In Cinema Collective, Malayali actor Dileep had been accused of engineering the abduction of and sexual assault on a young actor. He was arrested in July 2017 on these charges, and later released on bail as the case continues. But, like many other men in his position, the actor is now busy reinstating himself as a superstar. To the horror of women’s groups and left parties, Dileep’s latest release, Prince and Family, was praised by none other than CPI(M) general secretary leader MA Baby.
Literary landscapes: Heart Lamp author Banu Mushtaq, who bagged the 2025 International Booker Prize, speaks to Vineetha Mokkil about her journey as an activist and journalist, the tales of women from marginalised communities, and the struggles of being a ‘critical insider’.
War and conflict: In the Novara Media podcast, Richard Hames and Kashmiri scholar Mohamad Junaid discuss the brinkmanship of India and Pakistan, and daily life under endless occupation.
Challenging pseudoscience: This 2009 paper, A Statistical Test For Astrology, was written by astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar and rationalist Narendra Dabholkar. It takes apart the belief that astrology can be used to predict academic ability. Narlikar passed away on May 20, this year.
Intimacy and identity: American novelist CJ Hauser pens an essay exploring the self, and travails of love, after she calls off her wedding and embarks on an ornithological field trip.
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I absolutely love the BehanVox series and I look forward to it every weekend. Thank you for putting this idea of your team into actual implementation and providing the readers a much larger ocean of learning to dive in 🌸 Kudos to the entire team ✨️
I suggest that with the use of AI your team can prepare year wise core messages of every woman centric publication in all languages and how they changed over the years. This will help in understanding that the letters sent by women’s to the editor in response to their articles and received by the editor had impacted publication’s mindset or not or otherwise.