Little Magazine as Counter-archive: Notes on Pedagogy and Print Culture of India

Abstract

The culture of little magazines in India came into being with the publication of Sabuj Patra in 1914 and became popular in other Indian languages in the 1950s. These “noncommercial” and ephemeral presses not only created the “modern” literary canon, which was chiefly “non-conformist”, but also defamiliarized the notion of the “text” through its material discontinuity. Little magazines in India served as the counter site of “new” literary movements and “unheard voices” from the margin. Thus, little magazines circulated, celebrated, and popularized the alternative fervour in the print culture of India. National Education Policy of India (2020) emphasizes the importance of “a rootedness and pride in India, and its rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems and traditions”. Little magazines are the storehouse of local traditions such as folk culture, oral histories, and endangered languages which are usually neglected in the mainstream media. This paper seeks to understand how the little magazine can be used as a tool in Indian pedagogy and its potential as a counter-archive of modernist as well as “alternative” texts. Reading the text with mere linguistic codes de-historicizes the work. This paper also proposes that including the media history in the curriculum or as a method may refashion the way of reading modernist texts, and broaden the horizon of the “literary” beyond the prevalent print cultures for better understanding of the socio-cultural histories of India.