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More old journals

The masthead for My Magazine of India

The old journals of Madras continue to fascinate readers. Reader S. Srinivasan tells me I ought to have recalled The Merry Magazine and reader Jaiboy Joseph says I forgot The Indian Review. Both S.S. Vasan’ s English humour magazine, founded in 1933, and G.A. Natesan’s scholarly and politically incisive journal had in the past found mention in this column, so their omission in my recent writing. But since readers would like to see them recorded more fully with the others, let me add that Merry Magazine specialised in serial stories like ‘Bala the Bad Woman’, ‘Devi the Dancer’ and the most popular of the lot, ‘Private Joyful in Madras’. The first two were written by ‘Deisvi’, the nom de plume used by D. Sundra Varadan of Everyman’s Press, George Town, and were illustrated by A.K. Sekar. ‘Pepys’ (P.P. Samuel), who also wrote for My Magazine, was the author of the ‘Joyful’ series and it was illustrated by Mali. The well-known lawyer V.C. Gopalaratnam was another who wrote for Merry Magazine. S. Singam (Iyengar) edited the fortnightly “brilliantly”, accordin g to one account.

My Magazine of India, published by P.K. Vinayakam and edited by P.R. Rama Iyengar, was more student-oriented than the more adult Merry Magazine and was no competition for the latter. But it survived longer, because V asan had no time for losing propositions and soon closed advertising-short, high-priced Merry Magazine. R. Mahadevan was one of My Magazine’s regular contributors. Writing as ‘Devan’, one of his suc cessful serials was based on Richmal Crompton’s immortal ‘William’ series. He went on to join Vasan’s Ananda Vikatan. Reader S.S. Kumar, another contributor to My Magazine, recently sent me a masthead of the journal, which I feature here.

Typical of the humour of the time were fillers such as this one that My Magazine used to complete a page:

Victim: Hey! That wasn’t the tooth I wanted pulled out!

Dentist: Calm yourself. I’m coming to it!

As for G.A. Natesan’s Indian Review, after it went into cold storage, it was revived in the 1970s by T.T. Vasu, to give his father T.T. Krishnamachari a space to express himself in. TTK’s friend M.C. Subrahmanyam edited the journal throughout the decade it got a new lease of life. One of its most successful features was a series of articles on Tamil Journalism by R.A. Padmanabhan, who had been with the Sunday Times’ sister weekly H industan and, then, Ananda Vikatan. This column owes much to him.

S. MUTHIAH

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