Dharmayug

About Dharmayug

Overview

Dharmayug was a Hindi-language pictorial weekly published from Mumbai by The Times of India Group. It was published from 1949 until the 1990s, when it was closed during the group's restructuring of its magazine portfolio. Under the long editorship of the noted Hindi writer Dharmveer Bharti from 1960 to 1987, it became one of the most widely read and influential Hindi weeklies of its time. This profile is a historical account of a publication that is now defunct.

Origins

Dharmayug was originally published by a Dalmia press in Bombay from 1949, just after India's independence. It incorporated an earlier pictorial magazine, Nav Yug, which had begun in 1932. When the Dalmia group divested its stake from Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. in 1948, Dharmayug remained with the Times of India group, and it continued as a Times Group publication for the rest of its life.

Early years and editors

One of the magazine's chief editors in its early decades was Pandit Satyakam Vidyalankar. As a Hindi pictorial weekly from the country's leading English newspaper group, Dharmayug occupied a distinctive position, bringing illustrated journalism in Hindi to a mass readership at a time when few Hindi publications had the resources of a major publishing house behind them.

The Dharmveer Bharti era

The magazine became popular and widely read in 1960, when the noted writer and playwright Dharmveer Bharti was appointed chief editor. Bharti, best known for his play Andha Yug (1953), was a distinguished Hindi poet and author, and he served as the magazine's chief editor from 1960 to 1987 — a tenure of 27 years. He was a dedicated and widely admired editor, though fellow journalists sometimes considered his style authoritative. Under Bharti, Dharmayug combined literary distinction with mass appeal, publishing fiction, poetry, reportage and commentary that shaped Hindi public discourse for a generation.

Later editors

After Dharmveer Bharti's retirement in 1987, Ganesh Mantri, a Hindi journalist, was appointed editor. Vishwanath Sachdev subsequently took over from Ganesh Mantri. The magazine continued through the late 1980s and into the 1990s under their editorship, but it faced the same commercial pressures that affected the group's other magazines in an increasingly competitive publishing market.

Editorial character

Dharmayug was a Hindi pictorial weekly, distinguished by its use of illustration and photography at a time when such production values were rare in Hindi publishing. Its content spanned literature, culture, current affairs and general-interest features, and its pages carried work by leading Hindi writers of the day. The magazine's visual character was part of its identity: notable cover art — such as a 1959 Diwali cover featuring a painting of the goddess Lakshmi by A. A. Almelkar — gave the "pictorial" in its description real substance. Under Bharti, the combination of literary distinction and visual appeal made the magazine both a cultural institution and a commercial success, reaching a wide readership across the Hindi-speaking regions.

Place in Hindi journalism

Alongside its sister publications Sarika, Dinaman and Parag, Dharmayug was part of a stable of Hindi magazines published by the Times of India press and edited by distinguished authors including Dharmveer Bharti, Agyeya and Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena. These titles represented a high point of Hindi magazine journalism, backed by the resources and prestige of one of India's largest publishing houses, and they nurtured generations of Hindi writers and journalists.

Closure

Dharmayug was closed in the 1990s as part of the Times Group's withdrawal from magazine publishing. Sources differ on the exact final year: the publication's encyclopaedia entry gives its run as 1949 to 1993, while the history section of the same entry and the Times Group's own history record its closure in 1997. What is consistent across accounts is that the Times of India decided to close the magazine in the 1990s, alongside The Illustrated Weekly of India and other titles, as the organisation faced financial difficulties and chose to concentrate on its newspapers. The decision ended a publishing run of more than four decades.

Legacy

Dharmayug is remembered as one of the great Hindi weeklies, above all for the Dharmveer Bharti years, when it set a standard for literary journalism in Hindi that later publications measured themselves against. Its closure, together with that of its sister magazines, marked the end of an era in which India's largest newspaper groups sustained ambitious Hindi literary magazines. Back issues of the magazine remain sought after by collectors and researchers of Hindi journalism.

Dharmveer Bharti: the writer behind the editor

Dharamvir Bharati was born on 25 December 1926 in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. After losing his father at a young age, he continued his education through financial difficulty, receiving a Master of Arts in Hindi from Allahabad University in 1946. He worked for more than five years as a sub-editor of the magazines Abhyudaya and Sangam, earned his doctorate in 1954, and joined Allahabad University as a lecturer — a post he left in 1960 to become chief editor of Dharmayug in Bombay. As a writer, Bharati was a renowned Hindi poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and social thinker. His novels Gunaho Ka Devta (1949) and Suraj Ka Satwan Ghoda (1952) became classics, the latter adapted into a National Film Award-winning film by Shyam Benegal in 1992.

His single play, the 1953 verse drama Andha Yug, set on the last day of the Mahabharata war as an allegory for the 1947 Partition, is regarded as a turning point in modern Indian theatre. It first gained attention as a radio play on All India Radio, Allahabad, was staged by Satyadev Dubey in 1962, and was famously directed by Ebrahim Alkazi in 1963 amid Delhi's monuments — a production watched by Jawaharlal Nehru that became a national theatrical milestone and a staple of the "theatre of the roots" movement. For his literary contributions Bharati was honoured with the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for playwriting in Hindi in 1988. He died in 1997 of heart disease. His 27-year editorship of Dharmayug, from 1960 to 1987, remains one of the longest and most consequential in Indian magazine history, and it is inseparable from the magazine's identity: a literary sensibility applied to a mass-circulation weekly.

The Times Group's magazine stable

Dharmayug belonged to a remarkable stable of magazines published by the Times of India press in the twentieth century. Alongside the English Illustrated Weekly of India (1880–1993) and the science monthly Science Today, the group published Hindi magazines including Dharmayug (1949–1990s), Sarika, Dinaman (1965–1990s) and Parag (1958–1990s), edited by distinguished authors including Khushwant Singh, Dharmveer Bharti, Agyeya and Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena. These titles represented a high point of Hindi magazine journalism, backed by the resources of one of India's largest publishing houses, and they nurtured generations of Hindi writers and journalists.

However, the organisation faced financial difficulties, and most of these magazines were closed down during the 1990s as the group, under Samir Jain and Vineet Jain, pivoted to a newspaper- and advertising-led strategy that revived its financial fortunes. The closures — Dharmayug's among them — were widely lamented as a narrowing of India's media diversity, and they closed a chapter in which a single publishing house had sustained literary journalism in both English and Hindi at national scale. Dharmayug's end thus belongs to a larger story: the passing of the era of the great general-interest magazine in Indian publishing.