After her husband’s untimely death in 1906, Kamala Satthianadhan was struggling to support herself and her young children. By 1911, she was living in what her daughter described as a “mofussil town” that was “in reality no better than a poverty-stricken village.” It wasn’t the life she’d expected to lead.
Born into a family of Telegu Christians, she was the first woman to graduate with a college degree in South India, as well as the first to acquire a master’s degree. She’d collaborated with her husband, Samuel, a Tamil Christian educator, on several literary projects, including a volume of short stories, Stories of Indian Christian Life (1898), and a compilation of the writings of his first wife, the novelist Krupabai Satthianadhan. The town she and her children now lived in was a book desert. A bright spot for the family was their subscription to the Literary Society in the city of Madras, from which they would receive boxes of books in the mail. More importantly, Satthianadhan was scrambling to keep The Indian Ladies’ Magazine afloat.
Alongside the burden of her domestic duties and the imperative to educate her children, Satthianadhan needed an income. She took on the role of tutoring a local landowner’s wife, which provided the family with some semblance of economic support. Between all her commitments, she worked on The Indian Ladies’ Magazine. The task was onerous, as the magazine was, for the most part, a one-woman operation. Satthianadhan planned and edited each issue while also contributing articles herself. Despite the labour involved, the arrival of the printed issues at the family residence, ready for distribution, became something of a ritual. Her daughter, Padmini Sengupta, recounts the event as one of material wonder and pleasure:
[t]he large packages of the journal would arrive each month, and we would avidly scan the pages. Our next task would be to sit and roll each journal separately for the post. How vividly I can see the neatly stacked piles rising before us, and my brother and I and the servants sitting on the ground busy with our task of rolling, gluing and stamping, while Kamala and “Nani” [maternal grandmother] would sit back and watch us.
Sengupta’s biography of Satthianadhan, A Portrait of an Indian Woman (1956), describes her mother as a fiercely intelligent and well-read woman with no business acumen at all. She struggled to create an infrastructure for the magazine’s production and source revenue from advertisements. As subscriptions fell, the production schedule of the magazine became increasingly erratic, finally ceasing publication in 1918. It was restarted in 1927 after the family returned from some years in England for the children’s education and was finally discontinued in 1938.
The Indian Ladies’ Magazine emerged in a crowded landscape of newspapers and periodicals. Spurred on by the availability of cheap print, magazines, both in English and South Asian languages, were mushrooming across colonial South Asia. Compared to the almanacs of Chapter 3, the print runs of individual magazines were modest. The Indian Ladies’ Magazine’s average monthly print run of 800 issues, amounting to a total of 9,600 copies a year, was but a fraction of the Gupta Press’s yearly turnover of more than 100,000 almanacs. But cumulatively, magazines as a genre represented a major presence in the print landscape of South Asia. For the first quarter of 1902, the Madras Presidency alone recorded 36 registered magazines in English with a total print run of 33,560. These were in addition to the 57 other magazines being published in Tamil, Telegu, Sanskrit, or a combination of the three. Households with literate members would have subscribed to multiple magazines, which were read alongside other printed materials, such as books and newspapers.
The 19th-century counterparts of The Indian Ladies’ Magazine had circulated in a world of male publishers whose didactic impulses determined what were and weren’t legitimate subjects for women’s reading. In the early 20th century, by contrast, publications like Satthianadhan’s periodical were written for and by women.
As Francesca Orsini’s history of Hindi magazines from North India tells us, early twentieth-century periodicals cautioned their readers that abstract conceptions of “Indian womanhood” shouldn’t be left in the hands of Indian men. After all, women had as much a right to participate in defining this concept as men did. A similar impulse shaped The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, as it sought to encourage women to articulate opinions and intervene in social debates. As a cooperative, rather than a didactic, space, the magazine provided readers with the tools to think for – and write for – themselves, placing their voices on a national stage.
The table of contents of the magazine’s very first issue demonstrated its commitment to being a collection of useful articles for its women readers. Articles geared toward the social reform project, in which Satthianadhan and her circle were invested, were threaded through the magazine. The first three articles – “Indian Women – Past and Present,” “The Present Condition of Female Education,” and “Female Infanticide in India” – were meant to be a rousing call for gender reform in South Asia. The magazine’s interventions in debates about the state of the Indian woman were punctuated by articles of a more literary bent: original short fiction and poetry by the magazine’s contributors.
The “News and Notes” column portrayed stories of women in far-flung places who faced the same challenges and overcame the same hurdles as their South Asian counterparts. So did articles that described different parts of the country and world, whether “Rural Scenes in India” or “The Englishwoman in Her Home.” Then there were the pieces of domestic advice. A cooking column in July 1901 led to articles in later issues about needlework designs and knitting patterns, and others on sanitation and health in the home.
Throughout its life, the articles in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine continued to span a wide range of topics. Essays recounting political meetings and events were interspersed with quotations from literary texts, just as essays on literature reminded women that the act of reading could be put toward the purpose of self-improvement. The tables of contents presented the titles of these articles as a list, with each article discretely separated from the other. However, the actual layout of the magazine put the articles in dialogue with each other. In every issue, women’s rights, recipes for South Asian food, and reviews of books jostled with each other for space on a single page. This, as Satthianadhan argued in her editorials, was the challenge of being a modern South Asian woman: balancing domestic duties with education and learning.
Excerpted with permission from Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Princeton University Press.
