DELHI is not Samoa and I am certainly no Margaret Mead, but it cannot be denied that a rites of passage moment occurred recently in the life of Biblio. It turned 21 years of age in April 2016. As we all know, this is the symbolic age that by convention, if not in actual fact, marks a transition to adulthood in many ‘modern’ societies. As a participant-observer in Biblio’s young life, it thus seems to me serendipitous that Seminar, an esteemed Indian journal with an haute Delhi pedigree of no less than 57 years, has now invited us at Biblio to contribute to a special issue on the ‘Modern Magazine’. The invitation not only gives us a chance to forge overt solidarities but also to address a form of the famous question that once, according to her own account, sent Mead to Samoa: ‘Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions, does adolescence present a different picture?’

Were we to apply this basic anthropological metric to non-academic, public outreach journals, we might ask: Are the ‘disturbances that vex’ journals of this sort common to all modern magazines? Or does the cultural context in which a magazine is born and raised – in this case, the Indian city of Delhi at the turn of the century – significantly influence its ‘nature’?

Biblio, specifically, is a ‘modern magazine’ that staples the 21st century to the 20th. Its fin de siecle launch back in 1995 seems to have endowed it with a certain contrarian energy, making it a Janus-faced venture in which the weighty files of historical memory are followed by still pristine blank pages where notes towards the future are yet to be made. The current Seminar issue now gives us an opportunity to look again at all those stapled pages, some engraved, some unwritten, and ask that Meadish question: has Biblio indeed come of age?

 

To begin with Biblio’s late 20th century inception, one of its founder editors, Dileep Padgaonkar, eloquently described its history and the difficult conditions that shaped its nature in the long but telling passage below, written on Biblio’s 20th anniversary.

‘When we – Arvind N. Das, Darryl D’Monte and I – decided to launch Biblio, even our well-wishers warned us that we might be chasing a chimera. There was no Big Daddy to support our venture – no media house, no publishing outfit, no corporate largesse, no guaranteed advertising. We also had to contend with the decline of the reading habit due to a number of factors – newer avenues of distraction and entertainment, the dumbing down of culture, lowering of educational standards, the high price of books and so forth. Those were the harsh realities that Biblio had to face in its fledgling years.

‘Other hurdles accosted us on the way: censorious governments and pressures on writers and artists by self-appointed guardians of culture and morality. The publication managed to keep its head above the water as it swam against this tide too – against what our editorial in the first issue of Biblio described as "the reigning orthodoxies about politics and society, the economy and culture, against, above all, the dominant ethos related to what constitutes individual fulfilment in the deepest sense of the word." [Yet] we persisted in the path laid out for us by the mentor we were privileged to have from the very start of our endeavour: Sham Lal, the former editor of the Times of India who commanded awe and respect for his brilliant reviews of books that shaped the world’s intellectual and literary trajectory in the 20th century. Even as Biblio sought to follow [Sham Lal’s] guidelines, it ran into other, far more complex problems related to the digital revolution. The advent of e-books and of on-line sale of books led to a flurry of mergers and acquisitions across much of the globalized world. A handful of publishing houses ruled the roost in the content, manufacture, marketing and sales of books with the result, as Sham Lal presciently noted, that its unseen hand "made the life-span of every new fashion and thought so short".

‘The digital revolution in the globalized publishing world had a profound impact on libraries and especially on bookshops. The closure of the latter by the score became routine. Journals devoted to book reviews had to cope with all these shocks. Add to this another phenomenon: anyone and everyone was allowed to post instant reviews on, say, Amazon or Flipkart and these reviews, as some surveys showed, often dictated the choice of book buyers. Such "democratization", it was widely feared, would be at the expense of lengthy, authoritative and well written reviews to be found in publications devoted solely to books of serious intent.

‘That fear, as it turned out, did not overly faze such reputed publications in the English-speaking world like the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Though it continued to operate on a shoestring budget, it did not rattle Biblio either. It made its presence felt in the digital space and thus ensured its survival. Despite its financial constraints, Biblio has also been able to enlist the cooperation of leading publishers, of a growing number of advertisers and, above all, of some of the most stimulating minds in India and abroad who write the reviews and the commissioned essays.’

Padgaonkar goes on to list some other factors that helped Biblio to reach the point it has arrived: ‘Foremost among these is the unswerving determination of its Editorial Board to abide by the ambition that was formulated for the publication at its inception: to focus on ideas and sensibilities that explain, and raise awareness about, humankind in the throes of change quite unprecedented in its history. The dedication of the team led by Brinda Datta, Biblio’s publisher and hugely talented designer, has been exemplary, not least because its members have received no pecuniary benefits for their labours… As we look back to the distance that Biblio has travelled… it is on the strength of this reputation that Biblio enters the third decade of its invigorating journey in the unchartered terrain of ideas and sensibilities with the grit and confidence of a seasoned and intrepid adventurer.’

 

As these paragraphs energetically argue, Biblio seems to share with other small circulation magazines the usual dire lack of financial support. Almost all such enterprises narrate similarly ‘vexed’ childhoods but, as Padgaonkar emphasizes, Biblio managed to overcome these vicissitudes with panache. He has already mentioned the grit, determination of the journal’s editorial board and the brilliance of its reviewers as contributors to its survival. I would, in addition, suggest at least four other factors that make Biblio different.

One, this was a journal conceived of by journalists – not academics, not literary enthusiasts, but journalists. This is a rare orientation for a literary and cultural journal and it meant that from the very beginning Biblio drew on the broad scope of a newspaper’s editorial vision: it gave as much weightage to books on politics and the environment as to, say, theatre and the arts. As with a newspaper, all topics from pornography to photography were of interest to us.

 

Two, at the same time, Biblio was – and is – quite focused in that it was a book review journal. How to think about books is central to its vision. Every other form of output – poetry, short stories, satire – is secondary. This narrow focus is both a strength and a weakness and we are still grappling with the question of how to arrive at the right balance on the question of ‘breadth versus focus’. A formula we have arrived at for now is to have about 16 of Biblio’s 40 pages dedicated to a particular topic in each issue – let’s say, gender or translation – while the other pages cover all the most interesting books of the season, Indian as well as international.

Three, Biblio is based in Delhi which actually graduated to becoming a major publication hub, especially for English language books, during the same years that this journal was ‘growing up’. This gave it some cache with publishers and advertisers. Also, India is one of those countries where the market for books in their paper versions is growing alongside digital formats. So Biblio was well located in this regard.

Four, Biblio itself is an English language journal, commandeering the most dominant and elite of the Indian languages which gives it the sort of metropolitan power and national readership to which very few journals in the bhasas have access. Biblio thus constitutes a natural and permanent ally for authors from all over India who are interested in reviews of their books that have wide outreach. And which author is not?

These four factors of wide topic range combined with a narrow focus on books and books alone, of location and of language are in my view crucial to making it the sort of modern (the Latin root of this word is, simply, modo or ‘just now’) magazine, with both a lively digital and stable print presence, that Biblio currently is. But what next?

 

Enter the modern reader. In his Preface to Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man wrote that his book had ‘started out as a historical study and ended up as a theory of reading.’ To my mind, all book review journals in fact offer us implicit ‘theories of reading’. They build an invisible community of book devotees, who tend to hold similar assumptions about history and about texts. We might infer this simply from the fact that Biblio has survived 21, not always easy, years. This must mean that it has retained many old readers and contributors and attracted new ones. During this period, those who know it will agree that it remains a seductively pretty journal as well as, for the most part, a reasonably accomplished one. Much comfort and strength is to be derived from this, of course, but there are also the dangers of complacency and implosion, of losing readers to less demanding forms of reading.

The book is both sacred object and vanishing point in India. This is a land where books may or may not be read, but an aura of holiness almost always surrounds them. Our roster of iconic ‘sacred books’ grows apace. The Constitution of India, for example, stands tall among books to be invoked at moments of crisis in recent times. Yet, we have to admit that the writ of the Constitution is as honoured in the breach as in the observance in our country. Illiteracy and deprivation abound and the ‘aam aadmi’ continues to suffer the twin burdens of real and epistemic hunger. Does a review journal written in elite English, with elaborate essays addressed to a minuscule audience, really address these big questions of relevance and access? Bibliophiles believe, against the odds, that it can.

When we draw on a variety of intellectual sources that are multiple and sophisticated; when we commit ourselves to reviewing books that range all the way from politics to poetry without fear or favour – well, mostly! – we affirm, in essence, a democracy of readership. Each issue of Biblio, in this sense, calls attention to the fact that even as a society – or a magazine – faces severe resource constraints, its allegiance to open, pluralist debate can remain secure. To preserve such a robust interest in, and ability to engage with, difficult ideas is, I’d want to argue on behalf of Biblio, the mark not just of a mature ‘civilization’, to reuse Mead’s vocabulary, but also of a mature review magazine. It does constitute a sort of ‘coming of age’.

 

True, we operate in a limited space but by carrying unabashedly expansive reviews of important books written not just in India but across the world such as, for example, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire or, more recently, Samshur Rahman Faruqi’s complicated recursive cultural translations in The Sun that Rose from the Earth, we believe we widen that space. We demonstrate our faith in the idea that territory of the book belongs to everyone in theory, if not entirely in practice. Indeed, among the reasons for our unreasonably lengthy reviews in the age of Twitter is the following: given the state of our libraries and universities, a good review can often be all that a reader sees. The book itself is often unavailable, expensive, distant.

This may not be the best of all possible worlds but by signposting superb, eccentric or even ghastly books rather than, let’s say, ‘world-class’ restaurants or malls, we could be underwriting certain endangered discourses of tolerance and engagement with ‘otherness’. But why are these modes of thought beleaguered? Well, the answer is clearly blowing in the wind, those sweeping winds of e-change Padgaonkar mentioned that have already rearranged so many objects in our hitherto slow moving book worlds. A rising tide of populist and simplified political discourse is another factor; Biblio has attempted to plug the overflow from this dyke of macho discourses.

 

Few would deny that the language games of reading and writing are undergoing a revolutionary transition at present, comparable to the way in which one-day cricket has elbowed test cricket into a particular public space. These formats exist alongside today and players engage in both. Analogically, a whole cluster of inter-subjective genres such as email, Face-book, Twitter, blogs, chat and graphic novels that fluidly mix story and text often in more than one language, now claim mental space side by side with print. Unlike the ‘pure’ literary forms of earlier periods, these new genres are strongly oriented towards visual cueing and dialogic interaction. The long distance loneliness of reading marathons has been replaced by the febrile excitement of SMS sprints. We believe that Biblio, like print journals everywhere, will have to meet these challenges by experimenting both with its online and paper avatars. It will have to prepare for a fresh generation of ideal readers, implied readers, traditional readers, alien readers – and online trolls.

Reading and writing are among the great metaphors of all time. We speak, for instance, in everyday language about ‘reading each others’ minds’, ‘reading the future’ and ‘reading between the lines’. Likewise, we aver that our fate is written on our hands and our foreheads, that life is ‘an open book’ and so forth. It is noteworthy that these images of reading and writing involve substantial reference to the unknown, to other minds and to the unforeseen future. So how do we interpret the mysteries to which these common tropes allude in an age of transition when striking new forms of ‘self’ and ‘other’ representation are emerging? How do we begin to understand the mind-changing, mind-exchanging and, oftentimes, mind-blowing acts of decoding ‘the book’ in its present multifarious forms?

Dorothy Parker once ‘reviewed’ a book by declaring that it was not a tome to be lightly tossed aside but rather to be flung with great force across the room. The point about books in virtual space is that they can neither be tossed nor flung aside. How do we deal with this sudden Alice-in-Wonderland change in the form of the book? This is the task before Biblio today and I would say it offers no mean conceptual challenge.

 

We have a wish list, of course. Like Oliver Twist, we’d like more. We’d like to include more translations, more original essays, experimental fiction, satire and poetry in forthcoming issues; we’d like to publish more reviews of books about science, technology and the environment and more interviews with writers. We recognize that it’s a miracle that Biblio has thus far survived, thrived even, into its 21st year but another miracle or two wouldn’t hurt – such as, for example, generous funding with no strings attached. At the moment, all we have is a shoestring budget and full-time jobs elsewhere polishing a different array of ambulatory accessories. Editing at Biblio would certainly be a lot tighter if we had a bit more free time to devote to it.

Personally, I’d like Biblio to perhaps leaven its high-minded prose with more acerbic commentary; and I’d want the authors whom Biblio reviews – and, on occasion, fails to review – to feel less mortally wounded when criticized or ignored. The former, after all, is the raison d’être of a review magazine; the second an existential limitation. Finally, we’d like the force-fields of argument around our enterprise to be vigorous so that we can continue to widen and deepen those basic debates around books – which are the foremost emblems of free speech that we have.

 

These ideals of unfettered speech that any book review magazine by its very nature upholds place Biblio at the centre of many critical discussions today. It seems to me significant here that the same Michel Foucault who eloquently describes the coercive systems of power exercised via the rulebooks of state, also characterizes ‘the book’ as the most liberating of modern day artifacts.

In The Archeology of Knowledge Foucault writes: ‘The book is not the simple object that one hold in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it. Its unity is variable and reflexive.’ Exactly. This insight is truer than ever today in a virtual world where a book morphs constantly and brings home to us the fact that it is no longer – and never was – a simple material object but a complex lattice of beliefs about imaginary and experiential worlds, offering readers infinite ‘moral choices’ and ‘cognitive maps’. As a wise online joke has asked: Would Anna Karenina really have been 800 pages long if its heroine had a cellphone?

Aye, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare would have said. In Biblio’s estimation, we need to respond to the expansive kind of fiction that Anna Karenina symbolizes just as much as contemporary flash fiction. Another line from Shakespeare also seems apposite at this point: ‘Come and kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’ Our hope is that Biblio, now past 20 and well into young adulthood will, with the help of its friends, endure many further glorious years to be a standard bearer of the ‘modern magazine’.

 

In a recent issue of the New Yorker (5 September 2016), there appears a magnificently long Biblio-style review of Anthony Gottlieb’s new book The Dream of Enlightenment. The essay is aptly called ‘Are we really so modern?’ and appropriately appears in a section starkly labelled ‘Books’. Its author, Adam Kirsch, argues that despite all those ‘technological breakthroughs, we’re still wrestling with the same basic questions as the Enlightenment philosophers.’ Well, perhaps. But is the Enlightenment model then the paradigm case of all modernity today? And are ‘modern magazines just clones, unrecognizably so perhaps but still clones if not poor cousins, of the New Yorker magazine? These are familiar enough postcolonial questions but they are ones that even the most culturally embedded journals such as the Bangla Desh, first published in 1933 and still going strong, have even today in the 21st century not quite come to grips with. This is evident from the Wikipedia entry for that modern journal which announces proudly that ‘Desh is often referred to as the "New Yorker of Bengal’’.’

Back to Mead. It is this coming-of-age transition, this confidence in the agentive freedoms of adulthood that are so qualitatively different from the carefree joys of give and take that characterize childhood and adolescence, that most modern literary magazines in India at the present time may not have quite achieved. We need still to overcome that juvenile strain in our mental attitudes, which the spectral phenomenon of colonization once imposed on us and that economic neocolonialism now reinforces. And yet, when I visit towns across India like Muzaffarpur in Bihar or Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and find that students there know Biblio although they do not have the remotest idea who I am or indeed who any of the distinguished board members and contributors to Biblio are, I feel exhilarated. A dream of empowered expression seems almost within grasp. To me, this is a token of sweet success: it is this fragile creation of an intellectual space in unexpected quarters that makes our journey at the magazine worth while.

 

In his enjoyable and expansive New Yorker piece, Kirsch strikingly pronounces: ‘Modernity is a vertigo that began in the sixteenth century and shows no sign of letting up.’ It seems to me that Biblio and the many other modern magazines committed to describing various patterns of thought and practice in India today are at a point where they could come together to perhaps identify the particular vertigos that vex our subcontinent and that ‘show no signs of letting up’. We are today in a space where discourses are not only to be reinvented but co-invented. True, these dizzying area of cultural freefall, of joint discoveries, could be markedly different from the West’s; they could be also be chimerical. Still, it would be exciting to try and identify them and give them page-space, virtual space and head-space, as we move further into this unstable new century.

 

* A version of this essay appeared in the March-April 2015 essay of Biblio, celebrating its 20th anniversary.