The residents of the Jhuggi Jhopri Resettlement Colony in Delhi’s Savda Ghevra are not residents by choice. They have been pushed to the outskirts of the city after waves of evictions, most recently in the run-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games. On 2 November, I visited the colony to meet a 16-year-old girl whose words had managed to find their way to central Delhi. Aanchal, an eleventh-standard student, had had her first story published, in the October issue of Hans, India’s most prestigious Hindi literary magazine.
Aanchal’s short story, titled “Saikal ke Sapne”—Dreams of a Bicycle—is about a young girl’s yearning for a bicycle, with an intensely detailed account of her thoughts as she waits for her parents to come home with it. “Like Premchand, I want to write to expose the truth,” she told me.
The story was published in a column called “Ghuspaithiye”—intruders—which features stories by authors below the age of 20 who come from the margins of society. “Their childhood,” the column declares, “is made not from books as much as from the struggles of their environment. These struggles are found preserved in their stories.” Writers like Aanchal do not belong to any literary circle, and in recognising that, their stories are published as intruders within the carefully guarded walls of literature.
The writer Munshi Premchand founded Hans—with MK Gandhi on its editorial board—in 1930, to promote writers of Hindi literature. In his first editorial for the magazine, Premchand wrote, “Hans will play a major role in inspiring the countrymen to mobilise themselves against British rule.” Sustaining the magazine, however, proved to be a struggle in itself, amidst financial woes and political pressure from colonial authorities. After Premchand’s death, in 1936, his son tried to run the magazine for a few years but, worn out from all the financial troubles, shut it down in 1956. Thirty years later, when the writer Rajendra Yadav wanted to run a monthly magazine, Hans, with Premchand’s vigour in its veins, proved to be the perfect fit.
Ever since its revitalisation in 1986, finding emerging writers was built into the ethos of the magazine; Yadav made sure of that. “It was like his passion to push everyone to write,” Yadav’s daughter Rachana told me. “On days in which he could catch hold of the newspaper boy, he would sit and teach him the elements of a good story.” Under Yadav, the magazine promoted a generation of female and Dalit writers. Maitreyi Pushpa, a writer and former chairperson of the Delhi Commission for Women, argues that Yadav’s work towards promoting women’s issues was a learning curve for her. “Before I got involved with Hans, I didn’t know what feminist thought was,” Pushpa said in a media interview.
In his acclaimed memoir Joothan, a pioneering work of Dalit writing in Hindi, the writer Omprakash Valmiki writes, “I kept feeling that the editors and established writers had conspired to prevent new writers from emerging. I am grateful to Hans, which published my short stories. The solicitousness with which Rajendra Yadav published my work gave me a new life, although the ones who wanted me dead left nothing to chance.”
The efforts towards publishing a diversity of writers continued at Hans. “Hans is not a magazine of stories. It is a magazine of social change,” the poet Ibbar Rabbi told me. Sanjay Sahay, the current editor, added, “We believe that literature cannot be separated from its placement in society.”
For 27 years, Yadav led Hans and turned it into one of the most prestigious magazines in Hindi literature, bringing to the forefront writers such as Uday Prakash, Mridula Garg and Ajay Navaria, among others, who are now revered names in Hindi literature. According to Veena Uniyal, the head of administration at Hans, it had a consistent readership of thirteen thousand readers, but the editorial team believed the number of people who actually read the magazine was much higher. “Hans is the magazine of poor people; it costs R40,” Sahay told me. “Yadav believed that, for every house that it goes to, at least ten people read it. That’s more than one lakh readers.”
The magazine currently has two and a half thousand annual subscribers, and around nine thousand copies are sold every month through vendors. “We can’t increase the prices much because, for some of our readers, even these prices are only barely affordable,” Rachana said. In the general trend of literary outlets struggling with finances, Hans has been no exception.
In 2013, when Yadav died, the magazine suffered a serious blow. “There was a feeling amongst the dedicated readership that their cherished magazine won’t stay the same,” Sahay told me. In his will, Yadav named Rachana the magazine’s manager and Sahay its editor. Rachana, a kathak dancer, had not shared her father’s literary interests. Over the next six years, she found herself stuck in the centre of a world she had no interest in, and which would not accept her easily. “People thought there were much better people who deserved it,” she told me. “I was seen as a dance, advertising girl who came in one day and took over.” However, she stuck it out. She said with a smile, “I’ve started to really enjoy it.”
In one of her monthly meetings with the editors, Rachana suggested that Hans should be translated into regional languages. That idea was deemed impractical, but it reminded Sahay of a similar prospect he had discussed with Yadav a while back: an English translation. Although he was well read in global literature, Yadav had been cautious about the prospect of an English edition in India.
When the writer Rajiv Malhotra asked him, in an interview, about the vitality of Indian writing in English, Yadav responded, “I’m sorry, that vitality… a commercially boosted vitality is one thing; natural vitality is another. I feel that it is a vitaminised vitality.” He felt, he said, that “the things written with pain, with suffering, we find in regional Indian languages, not at the Everest hotel. … We have not been able to come out of the grip of colonisation; otherwise, we would be searching for our roots in our own languages.”
Sahay told Yadav that if they were dedicated to the mission of literature, they needed to break these language barriers. “The urban youth doesn’t know Hindi, so we need to find a way to expose them to the great writing in Hindi,” he argued. The initial plans for an English translation were laid in 2017.
In January this year, the first English issue of Hans was published, with translations of selected stories from the Hans archive between 1986 and 1990. “The English issues will be published annually, and translations for the second volume are already underway,” Rachana said. In the first pages of the new translation, she wrote that while Hans “plays a torch-bearing role in promoting and preserving the Hindi language, it realistically recognises the limitations and is willing to foray into English to connect with the new non-Hindi speaking reader.”
When I asked Rachana if the job of running Hans would become more difficult over time, she laughed. “It won’t become difficult,” she said. “It already is.” Why, then, I asked myself, is it worth continuing a small, barely sustainable magazine?
When I went to meet Aanchal, I carried my copy of the October issue of Hans. It turned out that she had never received a copy of the magazine herself. Initially, she was ill at ease while talking to me, but when I showed her “Saikal ke Sapne” on Page 77, she took her time and could not care less that I was there. Her eyes gleamed like someone who had just realised the possibilities of the written word. In those eyes, perhaps, was my answer.