Far away from the mainstream, on the fringes a literary revival is taking place. Let us salute the little magazines.
It is not mainstream literature and the media hype that accompanies it, nor the glossy interviews and journalistic reviews in the print and broadcast media, that provide an authentic barometer to the health of a nation's literature. The true test and taste for literary climate reside within the unpretentious pages of literary magazines; here you can hear genuine outcries, conflicting unfashionable views, hard criticisms, cutting edge experiments in writing, opinionated editorials, and individual signatures which one respects in spite of one's personal views.
There are several publications that could have been featured in this essay—The Brown Critique (edited by Gayatri Mazumdar), Kavya Bharati (edited by Paul Love), Poesies (published by The Poetry Circle), The Indian PEN (edited by Nissim Ezekiel), The Journal (published by Poetry Society of India), Haritham, NIRIEL, The New Miscellany (edited by P Lal of Writers Workshop), Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi journal edited by K Satchidanandan) and Yatra (published by HarperCollins). Most of these are active, while some remain inactive (coming out occasionally). Others are defunct like the excellent The Bombay Literary Review (edited by Vilas Sarang) and Kavi India (edited by Santan Rodrigues).
So it indeed is great news that there has been a birth, rebirth and sustenance, in the last few years in South Asia, of a range of literary (and arts) magazines—traditionally known as 'little magazines'. A tiding all the more remarkable since most of these little magazines and annuals suffer from the problems of financial support, inefficient distribution networks, and the difficulty of having a consistent roster of dedicated contributors who will write regardless of payments.