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Literary Review
The big little mag
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Little magazines provide an alternative to the mainstream media. Not many, however, survive for long. ANURADHA ROY on a magazine which has.
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IN the bathroom of The Little Magazine's office, you find yourself confronted by your feet. A malevolently blistered mirror sits on the floor, never having made it up to the peach-coloured wall. Same feet, different angle — just the way most things in little magazines are viewed.
When Antara Dev Sen and Pratik Kanjilal threw up their pleasantly lucrative newspaper jobs to start The Little Magazine (TLM) frustrated by the commercial compulsions of mainstream media, they were not the first. Before them, little magazines in various Indian languages had existed in India. In English, The Indian PEN, Civil Lines, The Brown Critique, Yatra, Seminar, and others have been surviving alongside the Brobdingnagians all along. Kolkata even has a little magazine library and research centre which stocks 22,000 copies of such journals.
The "little" in little magazines resonates with all sorts of meanings. These magazines paddle in defiant, sometimes desperate, opposition to the tide of market forces, usually publishing artistic and creative writing for a small readership; often such journals are produced from the space between kitchen and dining room, riding on enthusiasm and surviving perilous bank balances with a little help from friends and funding agencies. The enthusiasm and funding usually run dry sooner or later. The number of short-lived little magazines would probably outstrip those still in existence.
Given these conditions, most such magazines either look drab, or redefine the word "periodical" by being wildly irregular — Civil Lines once had a gap of two and a half years between issues. TLM, on the other hand, produces a classily designed, full-colour issue every alternate month and is 11 issues old. The current issue on hunger, echoing the grimness of the topic, looks a little forbidding for first half: footnotes, tables, references and subheads cast their cold light over the pages. But the latter half makes up by poking at the embers of the theme with a combination of fiction, drama, prose, paintings and cartoons, TLM staples. And the tongue-in-cheek, saucy editorial voice is in place too.
Between them the two editors commission pieces, trawl through the 400 unsolicited contributions they receive every week, edit, design and produce. This is a tall order for people used to the infrastructure of conventional journalism. In the early days distribution was achieved by simply distributing — to friends; bundles of the magazine were given to friends in other cities, with instructions to sell them there. The first issue — with writing by Noam Chomsky, Martha Nussbaum, Keki N. Daruwalla, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Ramakanth Rath, K. Satchidanandan, Ashis Nandy, and Amartya Sen — reached bookshops on the pillion of a scooter.
I find myself uncomfortable with this roll call of the same Old Big Names. Big Names are in demand everywhere; aren't little mags meant to publish new writers with big ideas, writers the media is generally wary of? Weren't little magazines in the West fundamental to the growth of artistic movements like Imagism and Surrealism?
James Joyce's Ulysses, first published serially in the United States in the Little Review, was responsible for the magazine being banned in 1918. When the Little Review finally folded in 1929 after 15 years of publishing, it was partly because its editor, Jane Heap, felt that they had not been able to publish significant new writing: "For years we offered the Little Review as a trial track for racers... But you can't get race horses from mules. We have given space in the Little Review to 23 new systems of art (all now dead), representing 19 countries. In all of this we have not brought forward anything approaching a masterpiece except the Ulysses of Mr. Joyce."
I ask about the 400 unsolicited articles a week. Any Joyces among those? Antara Dev Sen is acerbic: most articles they receive are lurid sexual fantasies disguised as poetry. If they do receive anything reasonable they publish it, maybe one or two such pieces in each issue.
Though it cannot be said that TLM is a journal of new writing, through the many translations they publish of writing from various other Indian languages into English, they are performing a crucial function. In every issue there are translations, often commissioned by TLM and worked over by them. Writers like Gulzar, Kaifi Azmi, Krishna Sobti and Nirmal Verma have all been published here, making a huge change from those we usually get to read in English journals.
To entice people into serious reading, TLM has been getting writers like Gulzar, Vijay Tendulkar and Dom Moraes to read from their work at bookshops. For those who are phobic about opening books at all, they have produced a line of cards with art on top and poetry inside. They are branching out into publishing under the imprint "Indigo" — their first book is a Nirmal Verma novella entitled The Last Wilderness. These are ideals — merchants, marketing a social conscience and good reading with energy and pragmatism.
Explaining his strategy in A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, a periodical Daniel Defoe started in 1704, Defoe shrewdly said he was trying to "wheedle [readers] in ... to the knowledge of the world; who, rather than take more pains, would be content with their ignorance, and search into nothing."
A few centuries and some continents away, there are others attempting something similar.
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