How community journals are fighting the winds of change

In a city where identities jostle as tightly as commuters on a local train, Mumbai’s regional, community-based publications continue to thrive—quiet sentinels of memory, language and belonging.

- Yogesh Pawar

While ‘Parsiana’, the polished SoBo journal of Zoroastrian life, is perhaps the most well-known with its global readership, it is within the pages of the less celebrated but equally vibrant Marathi, Gujarati and Konkani periodicals that the city’s diverse inner lives find an expression.

Consider ‘Marmik’, the Marathi weekly founded in 1960 by Bal Thackeray. Initially conceived as a political cartoon magazine, it quickly transformed into a platform for Marathi pride and grievance—what the late Sena supremo described as “anxieties of a community pushed to the margins of its own city”. It eventually galvanised a linguistic identity into a political force, showing the mettle of regional publications.

But beyond political assertion lies a quieter world of Marathi magazines and journals, “Society newsletters, temple magazines and monthly cultural journals continue to hum gently,” says Dr Vidyesh Kulkarni, a Pune-based scholar who chronicled these for his doctoral thesis in 1991. He points to titles such as ‘Sahyadri’, ‘Antarpat’ and ‘Deepstambh’, which offer poetry, short fiction, essays on saints and rituals, and commentary on theatre and literature. “Produced by cultural mandals, these magazines circulate through homes, temples and libraries—carrying the scent of agarbatti and old paper. They are cultural bridges between generations.”