Din Dunia
Din Dunia is a historic Urdu magazine published from Old Delhi, New Delhi, India. Established in 1921, it began as a weekly tabloid covering politics, films and society gossip, and it survives today as a monthly journal covering Islamic matters. Few Indian magazines can show so complete a transformation across a century: founded by Mufti Shaukat Ali in the Delhi of the early 1920s, suspended in the years following Partition, and restarted with a single-minded focus on Islam, the magazine passed in 1987 to the founder's son, Asif Fehmi, under whom it continued. Its longevity was the subject of admiring attention from the national press, including a 2016 account in Mint that described it as the Urdu magazine that refuses to go away, and coverage in Outlook and the Hindustan Times.
Founding in 1921 by Mufti Shaukat Ali
Din Dunia was founded in 1921 in Old Delhi by Mufti Shaukat Ali. In its first form it was a weekly tabloid, and its subjects were society, politics and films: the talk of the city, the affairs of public life and the new world of cinema. That mixture placed it in the lively Urdu periodical culture of Delhi in the 1920s, when the walled city supported a dense world of Urdu newspapers, magazines and publishing houses, and when a tabloid that combined politics with film news and social gossip addressed readers as citizens of a modernising city. The founder's title, Mufti, a scholar qualified to give rulings on Islamic law, adds a notable detail to the magazine's origin: the man who created a weekly of politics, films and gossip in 1921 belonged to the religious scholarly class of Old Delhi, and the magazine's later turn toward an exclusively Islamic focus under his family can be read as a return to that inheritance after an interruption of decades.
The first Din Dunia: politics, films and society
The original Din Dunia belonged to a period when Urdu journalism in Delhi covered the full range of public life. The city was the capital of British India, a centre of the freedom movement and of the film world's publicity, and Urdu readers followed politics, cinema and society in the same pages. A weekly tabloid was the natural vehicle for such coverage: frequent enough to follow events, light enough in format to carry gossip alongside serious reporting, and cheap enough for a broad urban readership. Din Dunia's documented beginnings in that world are important because they record the breadth of early twentieth-century Urdu magazine culture, in which a single popular weekly could treat a political meeting, a film release and the doings of society as parts of one reader's world. Later accounts of the magazine, in Outlook and elsewhere, preserve this origin as the first chapter of its story, before the upheavals that changed both the city and the journal.
Partition, suspension and a new focus on Islam
The Partition of India in 1947 struck Delhi's Urdu world with particular force. The city's Urdu-speaking population was violently displaced and transformed, publishing houses closed or moved, and many Urdu periodicals ended. Din Dunia was among the casualties in its original form: publication was temporarily suspended during the years following Partition. When the magazine was restarted, it was with what reference accounts describe as a single-minded focus on Islam. The weekly tabloid of politics, films and society gossip became a journal of Islamic matters. That change reflected the altered circumstances of its community and its founder's family: in the Delhi that emerged after Partition, the magazine re-founded itself as a religious monthly serving readers for whom Islamic learning, practice and community life were the centre of their periodical reading.
The transformation is also a document of its time. Many institutions of Muslim Delhi that survived Partition did so by narrowing to the essential work of sustaining religious and community life, and Din Dunia's second life fits that pattern. It did not attempt to recreate the vanished world of the 1920s tabloid; it accepted the new reality and published accordingly, and it is in this second form, as a monthly journal on Islamic matters, that the magazine has continued into the present century.
Asif Fehmi takes over in 1987
In 1987, owing to his father's ill health, Asif Fehmi took over Din Dunia from the founder, Mufti Shaukat Ali. The succession kept the magazine in the founder's family into its second century's approach, a pattern Din Dunia shares with several long-lived Urdu periodicals in which editorship passes from father to son and the magazine survives as a family trust as much as a business. Under Asif Fehmi, the magazine continued as a monthly. His stewardship drew the attention of Delhi's chroniclers: the Hindustan Times, in its Delhiwale series in June 2017, profiled the Urdu publisher and his personal world, and Mint's earlier account of the magazine portrayed a publication persisting, against the economics of Urdu print, through the commitment of the family that owned it. Such coverage treated Din Dunia not simply as a magazine but as a survival: a piece of Old Delhi's Urdu civilisation still in production.
Old Delhi and Urdu publishing
Din Dunia's base in Old Delhi places it in one of the historic heartlands of Urdu print. The walled city and its adjoining areas, including Daryaganj, were for generations the centre of Urdu newspapers, book publishing and literary life in north India: the Latifi Press in the area printed prominent newspapers and magazines in pre-Independence India, and Urdu publications such as the dailies and weeklies of the freedom era were produced in its streets. After Partition, much of that world contracted, as publishers migrated and readerships dispersed, and Delhi's Urdu publishing never recovered its former scale. A magazine founded there in 1921 and still publishing from Old Delhi a century later is therefore more than a business record; it is a thread of continuity through the most disruptive century in the city's history, linking the Urdu Delhi of the 1920s with the smaller but persistent Urdu publishing culture of the present day.
From weekly tabloid to monthly journal
The change in Din Dunia's frequency records its change of character. As founded, it was a weekly tabloid, a format of news and gossip that depended on pace. In its restarted form it became, and remains, a monthly journal. A monthly rhythm suits a magazine of Islamic matters, whose content of religious learning, reflection and community concern is meant to be kept and reread rather than discarded with the week's news, and the monthly form also fitted the economics of a small family publication in the later twentieth century. Reference listings accordingly record the modern Din Dunia simply and consistently: an Urdu magazine, published monthly from Delhi, devoted to Islamic subjects, with a history reaching back to 1921.
Attention from the national press
Longevity made Din Dunia a subject in its own right. Outlook magazine profiled it, the Hindustan Times visited its publisher in 2017, and in August 2016 the business newspaper Mint published Mayank Austen Soofi's account under a headline calling Din Dunia the Urdu magazine that refuses to go away. That framing captures how the magazine is generally understood in the wider Indian press: as an improbable survivor of Urdu magazine publishing, carried across a hundred years, through Partition and through the long decline of Urdu print readership, by the persistence of one Old Delhi family. Such coverage has fixed the essential facts of the magazine's record, its founding in 1921, its first life in politics, films and gossip, its suspension and religious rebirth, and its passage to Asif Fehmi in 1987, in the national record.
Significance
Din Dunia's significance lies in its span and its transformation. It began in 1921 as a weekly tabloid of politics, films and society in the exuberant Urdu press of colonial Delhi; it was suspended in the catastrophe of Partition; it was restarted by its founder's family as a monthly devoted to Islam; and it continued under his son into the era of digital media, when national newspapers wrote about it as a marvel of endurance. As a historical Urdu magazine of Old Delhi still in publication, it stands as evidence of the adaptability of Urdu periodical culture and of the family publishing model that sustained so much of it. Its name, joining din, religion, with duniya, the world, came in the end to describe its own journey: a magazine of the world that became a magazine of religion, and endured as both a publication and a piece of Delhi's living history.
