Analysis of English language women’s magazines in India since the 1990s requires a
framework that not only questions the ‘representation’ of women but also probes beyond
the symbolic and addresses issues of cultural production as being located in a larger web of
material concerns. The issue of convergence of various related industries becomes
important – the beauty contest, cosmetics industry, the advertising, fashion and film
industry, is one network that stands out – and makes even a preliminary engagement with
these women’s magazines a tool for analyzing the larger web of ideologically determined
cultural production in modern India. What is of concern is also the fast proliferating
projection by these magazines of a ‘globalising Indian woman’. While this is an image that
proliferates within visual culture in modern India, there are other cultures of reading
which reveal a different kind of engagement with gendered identity and with the public
sphere.

Through a comparative analysis, this paper will be an attempt towards understanding the
widely varying cultural and political concerns that govern divergent magazine reading
cultures, with particular reference to English language ‘glossies’ (a word often used as a derogatory
shorthand for women’s magazines) and to women’s magazines in Marathi. While
the subject of analysis will be magazines for women, the attempt will be to really ask what
cultural, political, and material dimensions mark these visual and ideological public
spheres, whether these are mutually exclusive linguistic realms, and why, if at all, they
reflect different approaches to larger economic processes that implicate and shape cultural
production in India today.