Alter Magazine is a monthly publication bringing to the world new literary writing on science, technology, and progress from South Asia.
A quarter of humanity live in the Indian subcontinent, undergoing one of the fastest economic & technological transitions in history. While the subcontinent faces its own existential crisis, from the social alleviation of poverty to managing the deluge of climate change, it’s also pioneering the codes underlying new payments infrastructures and the rockets enabling us to become a multi planetary species.
This year’s Economics Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr’s big idea is that history moves when ideas move. He shows how the Industrial Revolution was a factor of its scientific and literary societies, its flair for publications and sharing ideas.
Before we had a nation-state in India, we had journals, pamphlets, weeklies: producing new ideas, organising knowledge and distributing it.
In the 1800s, Raja Rammohan Roy (one of India’s most important public intellectual and social reformer) launched 2 magazines: Sambad Kaumudi (in Bengali) and Mirat-ul-Akhbar (in Persian). This started the Bengal Renaissance.
Following on these footsteps, there was a burst of intellectual entrepreneurship— Bal Gangadhar Tilak launched Kesari and Mahratta, Bipin Chandra Pal started the newspaper Bande Mataram, Rabindranath Tagore revived Bankim Chandra’s monthly Bangadarshan, Maulana Azad penned the Urdu pamphlet Al-Hilal, Gandhi launched multiple weeklies during his life.
The Indian freedom struggle wasn’t just a story of marches, jails, and speeches. It was a story of ink, words, and ideas that led us to a special midnight in August, 1947.
The future is happening here, once again. It calls for a platform for India’s scientific and literary communities to birth, debate, and publish new ideas. Alter Magazine is dedicated to providing ink, paper, and screen pixels to these intellectual entrepreneurs imagining alternative futures.
Every month, we will publish one long-form, deeply researched, and beautifully designed piece. Each story will shift how readers see our vast and diverse subcontinent, bringing to you contemporary geniuses, cutting-edge ideas, and pathbreaking discoveries. This is a living journal documenting the dreams and dilemmas shaping our subcontinent’s aspirations for progress, the attempt to blend together tradition & technology to undertake development, capturing the region’s herculean effort to undertake advancement not just for itself, but to help write the next chapter of long-term planetary evolution.
We believe that a world of abundance is possible. It requires audacious thoughts & imaginative action— led by scientists, reasoned by philosophers, imagined by artists, implemented by technologists, debated by citizens and realised for everyone. Alter Magazine will document the stories and pursuits of all those working towards this shared vision — answering the question posed by one of India’s founding fathers at the stroke of the midnight hour.
Watch out for Issue #1: The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction.
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