Ammu Joseph Collection
Scope and Contents
The Ammu Joseph Collection currently contains 179 Eve's Weekly (EW) magazines. EW, a leading Indian women’s magazine, began publication in 1949 in Bombay (now Mumbai); it was one of the four magazines owned and published by the J.K. Somani Group. This collection brings together EW editions published between the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Ammu Joseph was Assistant Editor of the magazine. EW ceased publication in the late 1980s. The magazine provides an invaluable historical record of post-Independence India’s print culture, gender politics and middle-class social life. Published for several decades and widely read across urban India, the magazine documented changing ideas of womanhood/femininity, fashion, marriage,domesticity, sexuality, work and citizenship. It brought together journalism, fiction, advice columns, humour columns, photo features, coverage of cinema and social events, guides to fashion,needlecraft and cooking, as well as readers’ letters, offering historians rich insights into the everyday worlds and aspirations of women readers of the time.
The digital copies of EW in this collection are additionally valuable as a resource that provides glimpses into the changes taking place in Indian women’s lives during a period marked by growing consciousness about the need for women’s liberation/empowerment and for questioning the prevailing patriarchal order. The late 1970s and early 80s witnessed the emergence of the contemporary women’s movement and feminist public discourse in India. Print media, including women’s magazines, were the main source of information and ideas for the public at the time, before the expansion of television and, later, the advent of digital media.
Traditionally seen primarily as a commercial publication reaching out to urban, educated Indian women who were also consumers of goods and services, the magazine evolved during this period into a platform that sought to expose its readers to contemporary debates about women’s roles in families and society, about gender-based hierarchies and barriers, about women’s autonomy, and about current affairs, laws & policies, modernity, consumption and more. Thus, this collection of Eve’s Weekly at a particular moment in its history and that of the country provides a rare view of the social, cultural and political change happening in India at the time, as well as public conversations around a range of related subjects.
Dates
- Creation: 1977-1983
Creator
- Ammu Joseph (Donor, Person)
- Meghashree Dev (Processing Archivist, Person)
Biographical / Historical
Ammu Joseph (b. 1953) is a journalist, author and media-watcher based in Bengaluru. Much of her work since the 1980s has focused on the media and, especially, on how the Indian media cover women and their concerns, and how women fare within media institutions.
After completing her undergraduate degree in English Literature at Women's Christian College, Chennai, she earned a post-graduate diploma in Social Communications Media at the Sophia College Polytechnic, Mumbai, and then went on to journalism school at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Her encounters with the founders of Ms. magazine in New York in the mid-1970s gave early shape to her interest in and understanding of women’s magazines and their role in women’s lives.
On her return to Mumbai in 1977, she rejoined Eve’s Weekly (where she had interned and worked for six months before the Syracuse stint), this time as Assistant Editor. Along with a couple of colleagues who were also influenced by the feminist worldview, she set about working to transform what had till then been a traditional women’s magazine into one that reflected current, feminist ideas about women’s lives and society as a whole.
Between 1981 and ’84 she was a visiting lecturer in journalism at the Sophia College Polytechnic. In 1986, after working with a couple of other magazines and another year of teaching, she joined a new newspaper in Mumbai, The Indian Post, as the editor of its Sunday magazine section. A media fellowship took her to Cambridge University in 1988 and she moved to Bangalore the same year, choosing to work from then on as an independent journalist (one of the first journalists to make that professional choice).
The decision to function independently enabled her to pursue different kinds of work without institutional constraints. Her first book, “Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues,” co-authored with Kalpana Sharma (1994, 2006), remains a landmark in Indian media studies. It looked at the coverage of five key “women’s issues” covered by the Indian media (newspapers and magazines in English and four other Indian languages) over nearly a decade (1979-88). It also included a section that analysed the several women-centred television series broadcast by Doordarshan during the same period.
“Making News: Women in Journalism” (2000, 2005) followed, drawing on interviews with about 200 women journalists across India to document women’s growing involvement in the press, the challenges they faced and their opinions on various issues – including structural barriers, pay gaps, harassment, etc. That book catalysed the process that led to the creation of the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) – launched in 2002. The network now comprises nearly 1000 members and, over the past quarter of a century, has evolved into a leading Indian feminist media collective.
Ammu Joseph has also carried these concerns into international work, contributing to UNESCO initiatives on gender and media, including the development of gender-sensitive indicators for media, anchoring gender-media research in India/South Asia and helping to coordinate the Global Media Monitoring Project in India on behalf of the NWMI. Over the years she has also worked on and contributed to several other books and documents; among them are publications on women in diverse cultural fields, ranging from literature to cinema. She continues to be active, with her critical attention to the relationship between journalism and gender remaining consistent across nearly five decades of work.
Full Extent
2.5 Gigabytes
Language of Materials
English
- Title
- AJ-002
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the NLS Law and Society Archives Repository