Letters, Images and CDs
At present the Shodhagar includes significant Hindi journals (amounting to ca. 4500 issues), hundreds of hand-written letters of literary personalities (before the advent of the mobile phone effectively snuffed out the art of letter-writing in India!), about 300 photographs on CDs, an album of forty celebrated writers as well as laminated photographs of 20 writers.
Books and Sañcayan Śṛṅkhalā
Besides journals the Shodhagar contains some rare Hindi classics on history, culture, language, history of literature, art, music, poetry, novel, short story, drama, criticism, memoirs and folk literature etc. (for example, the first edition of the celebrated Hindi translation of the Majjhim Nikāy by Rahul Sankrityayan from Pali, 1933).
One section consists of exhaustively categorized newspaper clippings (about 5000 pages) on important literary issues and personalities. The material of the Sañcayan Śṛṅkhalā consists of articles, talks, book-reviews, interviews, reminiscences of/on authors and their works published in newspapers. They have been retrieved before they disappear from the Hindi literary world without a trace.
Rare Issues and Special Numbers
The oldest Hindi journals in the Archive include issues from Bhāratendu edited by Rādhācaraṇ Gosvāmī (1883), Ānand Kādambinī brought out by Bābū Badrīnārāyaṇ Caudharī (1883-1884), as well as Sāmyavādī (1926).
The Shodhaghar houses almost all Hindi literary magazines of significance brought out after India’s Independence (1947). A substantial section of the Laghupatrikās in this Archive has become rare in Indian libraries and archives. Normally these Laghupatrikās started off with great enthusiasm and limited resources, demanding immense sacrifice on the part of littérateurs and their close ones. Many of them stumbled through some years of publication until they were forced to wind up owing to lack of resources. A substantial part of them is not available even with their editors or publishers today.
Nevertheless, the historical importance of these rare issues is not to be underestimated as they effectively underline the dreams and aspirations of a literary or political personality, of a group or a section of society. The Laghupatrikās of the Shodhagar cover a wide range of issues and articles that may help the younger generation and scholars in locating the social and literary milieus and their sensibilities in proper perspective. A large number of magazines are special volumes focusing on a particular social or literary issue or celebrated personality or author; some of them are on Mahadevi Varma, Uday Prakash, Vijay Kumar, Nirmal Varma, Agnishekhar, Nayī Kavitā, 1857. Some journals survived only for a few years but they nevertheless left their deep mark on the literary landscape, for example Aṇimā, Abhirūci and Nayā Sāhitya etc.
For two important magazines, namely, Pahal and Dharmyug, detailed catalogues and indices are available in print. They not only indicate the contents of the magazines, but also provide information regarding the historical background and the personalities (editors, literary movements etc.) associated with them as well as the importance of the respective magazines.
The collection of magazines mostly available in libraries and academic institutions in India consist of widely read journals of well-known publishing houses. This Shodhagar, however, lays great emphasis on making the ‘insignificant’ voices of disparate regional and social groups equally heard. Some examples of these are:
- Yuddhrat Ām Ādmī from Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, brought out especially for and by (a sizeable number of contributors being) women, dalits and adivasis;
- Śeṣ from Jodhpur, Rajasthan specializing in translating regularly from Urdu literature into Hindi;
- Ādhī Zamīn representing the voice of the militant women’s movement;
- Filhāl for social and economic change;
- Farīdābād Mazdūr Samācār (since 1982) for autonomous social transformation anchored in the experiences of (60-70 percent of contributors being) workers from Gurgaon, Okhla and Faridabad close to Delhi. (To be made availabe online soon.)
Digitized Sections
The Shodhagar includes CDs containing photographs of writers of the earlier and the present generation. Photographs of editors of magazines included in this collection are accompanied by short biographical sketches. This section may be further developed and extended in course of time.