“Thanks to an MoU of the University of Pune (where she teaches French) with Lausanne University, I co-authored a French text-book. This gave me valuable insight into the publication industry, and at least I came to know the steps involved in launching a magazine,” she says. A lot of work followed, including one aborted attempt to launch the magazine, but Manjiri’s dream refused to fade away.

“India is such a treasure-house of heritage, but most of the knowledge is restricted to scholars and academicians. With fewer and fewer students taking up subjects like ancient Indian culture and history, I fear this rich heritage will just die away,” she says. “Moreover, it is mostly the locals who speak in regional languages who are the custodians of this enormous wealth. Disseminating it in English, I feel, will make it available to a wider audience.”

Launched in Pune recently, the magazine’s maiden issue, with 100-plus pages, has all the appeal of a glossy and includes articles on the Hoysala temples of Karnataka, the Hemis festival of Ladakh and on Lachit Barphukan, the brilliant 17th-century Assamese general who led his men into war against the mighty Mughals and won. The articles are well researched, written by experts in the respective subjects and accompanied by brilliant photographs, maps and sketches.

Once again, the family’s army contacts from far-flung places have helped Manjiri source interesting features on original subjects — men, women, customs and traditions quite unheard of in most parts of the country. In addition to the features on personalities, monuments, festivals, performing arts, ethnic groups and arts and crafts, each issue will have at least one ‘Heritage story’ drawn from popular folklore.

For Manjiri, the glossy quarterly marks both the culmination of a long-cherished dream as well as the beginning of a long, arduous journey. “I know what I have undertaken is a mammoth, mammoth task. Apart from getting the issue together, there’s marketing to be done and finances to be raised before ensuring that it gets to the shelves of select bookstores across the country. But I also know that if I were to bring out an issue every three months for the next 200 years, I will still not run out of material to write.”

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