There was a time in this country when Urdu was a temperament. You could hear it in courtyards, you could find it on railway platforms, and most curiously, you could encounter it in the glossy covers of magazines. That time, of course, is over. The decline of Urdu magazines in India is as much about a language in retreat as it is about how a society defines culture, memory, and readership. For much of the 20th century, Urdu publications shaped the intellectual and cultural life of urban North India. Today, they are remembered largely as relics — pieces of nostalgia rather than living traditions. But to treat them as such is to overlook their significance, and more importantly, to ignore how and why they were pushed out of mainstream public life.

Let us begin in the domestic space. The inner courtyard; the zenana; the real theatre of women’s lives. Here magazines like Khatoon Mashriq, Pakeeza Anchal, and Bano made their homes. Cookery tips alongside translated crime thrillers, embroidery patterns with moral tales. Their pages reminded women that they weren’t alone — that their loneliness, their longings, their suspicions about their husbands’ fidelity or their mothers-in-law’s conspiracies, were part of a shared experience.

And yet, despite their tone, they were not harmless. They were subversive in their very existence. What does it mean for a woman to find herself in print — not as a stereotype, but as a protagonist; a narrator; an editor?

Publications like Ismat, Tehzeeb-un-Niswan, and Khatoon — born of nationalist ferment in the early 20th century — explicitly urged women to read, write, and form opinions. These journals saw the personal as the political. They talked about inheritance laws, the purdah system, swadeshi khadi, and even the colonial state. They chronicled women as citizens. They were manuals for becoming.

Shama, launched in 1939, straddled the literary and the glamorous, turning Urdu journalism into an art form as dazzling as a film set. It knew that language could seduce, and seduction could sell. Its pages carried the poetry of Sahir Ludhianvi and the heartbreak of Meena Kumari, crossword puzzles that offered gold bars as prizes, and a gossip column penned by ‘Musafir’ that knew who was sleeping with whom — but never said it outright. That restraint, that art of implication, was also part of Urdu’s signature. Shama helped shape the film industry. Stars courted its editors. Sanjay Dutt got his name through a contest run in its pages. Nargis wrote her eulogy to Meena Kumari within its margins. Cultural authorship at its finest, it was, at one point, the most circulated Urdu magazine in the country.

Likewise, Biswin Sadi reached tens of thousands of readers, particularly among the refugee Punjabi communities in Delhi after Partition, many of whom were Urdu-literate but alienated from both English and Hindi publishing. The magazine’s mix of fiction, humour, household tips, and serialised stories made it accessible, but its influence extended far beyond entertainment. Many of the most important Urdu writers of the 20th century — from Balwant Singht to Ismat Chugtai to Krishan Chander — were regular contributors.

But what happens when the language of glamour becomes a language of survival?

In the decades after Partition, many of these magazines — Biswin Sadi, Rumani Duniya, and Filmi Duniya — became vehicles of memory for uprooted communities. For Punjabi refugees in Delhi, for Muslims in small-town Uttar Pradesh, for those who found their mother tongues abandoned — these risalas became a kind of homeland. They were cheaper than books, easier to access than Urdu newspapers increasingly cornered by sectarian politics. And crucially, they were plural. Writers of all religions published in them. Their pages did not check for orthodoxy.

And yet, slowly, they diminished. Urdu was increasingly confined to madrasas and margins. The Hindi-English duopoly hardened. Commercial publishing retreated. As circulation plummeted, many risalas — even those with legacy names and loyal readers — folded. Today, Khatoon Mashriq is still published from Old Delhi. The circulation has fallen by more than two-thirds. Advertisers have moved on. And yet, women still wait for it like an old friend. 

There was the linguistic shift. Post-Partition, Urdu came to be associated increasingly — and unfairly — with Indian Muslims. Despite its deep roots in Indian culture, and its shared history with Hindi, Urdu was pushed to the margins of official language policy. The political framing of Urdu as 'foreign' or 'religious' played a major role in limiting its readership. While Hindi and English expanded their institutional support, Urdu was often left to survive through private initiatives.

Even in decline, these magazines leave behind a clear record of what mass readership once looked like in India. They were places where politics and poetry coexisted, where women’s voices appeared in print regularly, and where middlebrow culture was treated as worth preserving. They demonstrated that serious thought could exist outside of elite institutions, and that language, when given space, could bring together different classes and communities.

These magazines did not see themselves as radical. But they gave women stories in which they could locate their lives, even when the world around them ignored those lives entirely. They modelled sisterhood — not as slogan, but as practice.

We like to romanticise Urdu. We call it the language of sher-o-shayari, of tehzeeb, of courtesans. But we forget that Urdu was also the language of gossip columns, of children’s comics, of satirical crosswords, and sex tonic ads. It was robust, contradictory, and alive. When we eulogise it only in poetry, we betray the ordinariness that once made it revolutionary.

The truth is, no magazine ever really dies. Its tone, its form, its anxieties — they all linger. In the Facebook reading groups of Urdu-speaking women in Hyderabad and Lucknow, in PDF scans of Shama passed like samizdat — it continues.

But nostalgia must not become a substitute for revival. To resuscitate Urdu magazines means more than reprinting old issues in Devanagari script. It means recommitting to a form of publishing that trusts the intelligence of its readers, especially its women, and doesn’t reduce them to markets.

It means remembering that some revolutions don’t look like protests. Some begin with a woman sitting on a cement floor, flipping through a magazine, while the cooker whistles in the background. What disappeared might still return — if not on paper, then at least in spirit.

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