Audiences of Print: Satyashodhak Reading Practices and the Emergence of Popular Print Publics

Letters to the editor of a newspaper are one gateway for readers to voice their opinions publicly. Curiously, such letters have received limited scholarly attention as a forum of critical engagement shaping the print public discourse. In this article, I focus on a Marathi newspaper, Deenmitra, to argue that everyday readers with limited literacy skills in colonial western India actively shaped print discourse around three themes: caste, religion and Brahmanism. I argue that readers were not just passive consumers of ‘news’ but were active contributors to the emerging ‘opinion’ in the Marathi public sphere. Focusing on a period from 1910 to 1930, I show how everyday readers with ideological allegiance to the Satyashodhak (Truth-Seeking) movement demonstrated their analytical prowess in unravelling everyday social, cultural and political developments. In the process, I show how these readers’ emerging notions of non-Brahman social and political consciousness influenced the Marathi public sphere of the time.