The Press of Allahabad and the Politics of Womanhood: Chand and Nationalist Print Culture, 1922–1940

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This article examines the development of the Hindi public sphere through the lens of Chand,a Hindi journal published from Allahabad between 1922 and 1940, which emerged as a distinctive site of women's engagement with nationalist politics. Tracing the journal's roots to the earlier print culture fostered in Benaras by Bharatendu Harishchandra and to the broader standardisation of Hindi as a marker of national identity, the article situates Chand within a genealogy of women-oriented periodicals beginning with Balabodhini (1874) and extending through Saraswati, Madhuri, and Stree Darpan. Edited by Ramrakh Singh Sehgal along with his wife, Vidhyawati Sehgal, and later by Mahadevi Varma, Chand also drew contributions from prominent writers such as Premchand. Unlike its predecessors, which largely confined women's writing to domestic advice and stri upyogi literature, Chand distinguished itself by cultivating female authorship and placing the "women's question" at the centre of nationalist discourse, providing Mahadevi Varma and other women writers a significant literary platform. The article argues that nationalism, rather than an autonomous feminist consciousness, served as the primary enabling condition for women's entry into the Hindi public sphere, as categories such as strijati, strisamaj, and narishakti were mobilised to articulate a collective female political identity in service of the nation. It further explores how Gandhian symbols, particularly the charkha and khadi, were appropriated by women contributors to legitimise their participation in public and political life and how reportage on women's imprisonment, satyagraha and political activism in sections such as Samachar Sangrah constructed women as active political subjects. Engaging with the work of scholars such as Francesca Orsini, Partha Chatterjee, and Nira Yuval-Davis, the article contends that while Chand enabled women's visible participation in nationalist life, it simultaneously reinforced a gendered framework in which women's political agency remained tethered to ideals of domestic duty and patriarchal sanction. A brief comparative discussion of contemporaneous Bengali and Urdu women's periodicals situates Chand's achievements within a wider, multilingual landscape of vernacular women's print culture in colonial India.