MODERNITY IN PRINT: MARG Magazine and the Negotiation of Aesthetics, Democracy, and Modern Life

Abstract

This thesis examines the magazine MARG, founded in Bombay in 1946 under the editorship of Mulk Raj Anand and devoted to art, architecture, planning, and cultural history, across the first fifteen years of Indian independence between 1946 and 1961, during which the newly sovereign nation confronted the immense labour of reconstruction and sought to translate political freedom into durable forms of collective life. Throughout these years the magazine functioned as an educational project that rendered the specialised knowledge of architects, planners, and art historians intelligible to a broad reading public, and that consistently presented the built environment as a matter of public and democratic concern, so that questions of housing, domestic life, museums, urban planning, and cultural heritage were repeatedly bound to larger discussions of citizenship, social responsibility, and democratic participation. Situating the publication within the Nehruvian commitment to planned development and within Anand's evolving humanism, the study traces the manner in which MARG cultivated informed readers capable of engaging critically with the transformations that were reshaping India, while drawing upon the first fifteen volumes and combining a close reading of editorials, essays, and articles with sustained attention to the drawings, photographs, plans, and page design through which a pedagogical and aesthetic language was gradually composed. In approaching the magazine as a site of transnational intellectual exchange in which contributors writing from positions at once internal and external to India held divergent visions of modernity in productive tension, the thesis argues that MARG sustained an understanding of modernity as something that had to be learned, practised, and inhabited, an understanding that found its fullest articulation in the magazine's presentation of Chandigarh as a documentary record, a pedagogical instrument, and a cultural manifesto through which the assimilation of international modernism into a national vision of urban order was carried toward completion.