Parag

About Parag

Parag was a monthly Hindi children's magazine published from Delhi by The Times Group (Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.). Launched around 1958, in the early years of independent India's magazine boom, it was aimed at children aged nine and above and grew into one of the most popular children's magazines of its time. Its editors included the noted Hindi writers Kanhaiyalal Nandan and Harikrishna Devsare. Parag published for more than three decades before it was closed down in the 1990s, when the Times Group shut most of its magazines amid financial difficulties — the same retrenchment that ended storied titles such as Dharmyug, Sarika and Dinaman. Though long defunct, it is remembered as a landmark of Hindi children's publishing, and surviving issues are traded today as collectibles.

Launch and the Times Group

Parag was launched by Bennett, Coleman & Co., the company behind The Times of India, as the group's Hindi children's magazine. The late 1950s and early 1960s were expansive years for the Times Group's magazine division: the press that would later be remembered for influential English and Hindi titles was building a portfolio that eventually included the Illustrated Weekly of India, Dharmyug (1949–1997), Sarika, Dinaman (1965–1990s) and Parag (1958–1990s). These magazines were edited by distinguished authors — figures such as Khushwant Singh, Dharmveer Bharti, Agyeya and Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena passed through the group's editorial chairs — and Parag was the children's entry in that stable, bringing the group's editorial standards to young Hindi readers.

Editors: Kanhaiyalal Nandan and Harikrishna Devsare

Parag's editorial leadership drew on established names in Hindi literature. Kanhaiyalal Nandan and Harikrishna Devsare served as editors of the magazine. Their stewardship gave Parag a literary seriousness unusual in children's publishing: the magazine was shaped by writers who understood both the Hindi literary tradition and the minds of young readers. That editorial quality was widely credited for the magazine's standing — it was not a throwaway children's comic but a monthly that parents and teachers trusted and that children genuinely looked forward to.

Content and readership

Parag was a general children's monthly in Hindi, aimed at readers nine years old and above. Its pages carried the classic mix of children's magazine fare — stories, poems, features and illustrations — pitched at school-age children across the Hindi-speaking belt. In an era before television reached most Indian homes, magazines like Parag were a principal source of reading pleasure for middle-class children: the monthly issue was awaited, shared among siblings and friends, and often bound and preserved. Parag's popularity put it among the leading children's magazines of its generation, a Hindi counterpart to the English-language children's titles of the time.

Place in Hindi children's publishing

The Hindi children's magazine space in which Parag thrived included long-running titles that shaped several generations of readers. Parag's distinction was its Times Group parentage and its literary editorial line, which set it apart from more purely commercial children's magazines. For the children who grew up in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Parag belonged to the small set of magazines that defined childhood reading in Hindi — titles remembered with the same affection that English-reading children reserved for their own favourites. Its role in building Hindi reading habits among the young, at a time when children's publishing in Indian languages was still finding its feet, was significant.

The Times Group's magazine era

Parag's story cannot be separated from the rise and fall of the Times Group's magazine empire. Through the mid-twentieth century, the Times of India press published some of the most influential magazines in the country. The Illustrated Weekly of India (1880–1993) was a national institution in English; Dharmyug, launched in 1949, was the great Hindi weekly of ideas; Sarika and Dinaman served Hindi readers in their own registers. Parag held the children's corner of this empire. The group's magazines shared editorial talent, printing infrastructure and a common belief — characteristic of that era of Indian publishing — that a newspaper company should also be a magazine publisher of record across languages and age groups.

Decline and closure in the 1990s

The organisation behind Parag ran into financial difficulties, and most of its magazines were closed down during the 1990s. Dharmyug ended in 1997 after nearly five decades; the Illustrated Weekly had closed in 1993; Dinaman, Sarika and Parag — listed as running from 1958 into the 1990s — were shut as the group retrenched around its profitable newspaper and newer ventures. The closure marked the end of an era in Indian magazine publishing: the great multi-title magazine houses of the twentieth century were giving way to a leaner, more commercially driven media business. Parag's end, after more than three decades in print, was part of that industry-wide transformation rather than a verdict on the magazine itself.

Legacy and nostalgia

Defunct for three decades, Parag lives on in memory and in the second-hand market. Old issues — a June 1989 edition here, July to September 1982 issues there — surface regularly on collectibles sites, bought by readers seeking to recover the magazines of their childhood. That afterlife is itself a measure of the magazine's place in Hindi reading culture: few defunct children's titles sustain a collectors' market decades after closure. For historians of Indian publishing, Parag's run offers a case study in how a major newspaper group approached children's publishing, and in what was lost when the economics of the 1990s swept the old magazine stables away.

The children's magazine landscape after Parag

Parag's closure came just as the children's magazine market was entering a difficult period. Commentators on the trade noted that after an initial spurt in the 1970s, children's print publishing hit a lull: established titles such as Champak, Chandamama and Tinkle saw readership decline as television, video games and later the internet competed for children's attention, and advertisers shifted their spending to television. New launches in the space struggled. In that context, Parag's three-decade run looks all the more remarkable — a product of an era when a children's magazine could be sustained by a great publishing house as a matter of institutional pride, before the economics of children's print became unforgiving.

Editorial character and the Hindi literary connection

What set Parag apart from many children's titles was its closeness to the Hindi literary world. The Times Group's Hindi magazines were edited by writers of real stature, and Parag inherited that culture: its editors moved in the same literary circles as the editors of Dharmyug and Dinaman, and the magazine benefited from the group's ability to attract established authors. This gave Parag a distinctive editorial character — stories and features chosen with literary judgement, language kept at a high standard, and an assumption that children deserved writing of genuine quality rather than simplified filler. In the landscape of Hindi children's publishing, where many titles were produced cheaply and anonymously, Parag's literary lineage was a mark of distinction that readers and parents recognised.

Remembering Parag

Parag is now a closed chapter in the history of The Times Group and of Hindi children's literature, but it remains a touchstone for discussions of what Indian children's publishing once achieved. Its editors, Kanhaiyalal Nandan and Harikrishna Devsare, its more than thirty years of monthly issues, and its status among the most popular children's magazines of its time secure its place in the record. The Times Group itself was later split, in 2023, between the print and broadcast businesses of the Jain brothers — but the magazine division that produced Parag belongs to an earlier age of the company, when Bennett, Coleman & Co. saw children's publishing in Hindi as part of its calling. Parag's archive, scattered across private collections and second-hand dealers, is the surviving monument to that ambition.