Printing and Publishing as Ideological and Commercial Enterprises: Political Cartoons and Literary Activism in the Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–30s

The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of numerous large and small print-publishers in towns and cities of colonial India. One such city was Lucknow, which at the time was not only a stronghold of Islamic culture, but partook in the development of modern Hindi language and literary culture. This paper explores the political imaginaries of Dularelal Bhargava (1895-1975), publisher-editor of two influential socio-literary, cultural and political Hindi periodicals, i.e. Sudhā(1927-1940s) and Mādhurī (1922-1950), and proprietor of Ganga Pustak Mala Publishing House and Ganga Fine Arts Press. It seeks to understand how the literary and political networks Bhargava built around his enterprise not only impacted the Hindi literary sphere, but extended its reach into what was envisioned as a national Hindi public sphere.

The intensification of the Indian nationalist movement and anti-colonial activism in the 1920s also impacted Bhargava’s enterprise. This paper gleans his literary and political interventions by analyzing political cartoons that regularly appeared in Sudhā and Mādhurī. Cartoons and satire contributed most prominently to debates surrounding social reforms, politics and literature. They aimed at widening readers’ horizons in a manner that was in line with the overall objective of many publishers and periodicals of the time, i.e. the creation of subject citizens of a nation-to-be. As they took into account British colonial censorship rules and regulations, the artists employed by Bhargava embedded and integrated the political cartoon into a Hindi literary and Hindu nationalist, middle-class narrative that - packaged and presented as sāhitya sevā (service towards literature) – reconciled Bhargava’s commercial interests and ideological convictions.