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An Indian Legacy

01 Sep 2009 | Liz Thomson

Long before the marketeers and the admen began their slick promotion of “incredible India”, the world’s largest democracy held the Brits in thrall. Travellers in the 1960s approached the country with open hearts and minds, aware at least through the prism of popular culture of just how much it had to offer the West. For long decades before then, Britain’s relationship with India had been one of expedience. Cynics might argue that expedience still prevails, as more and more companies “outsource” to offices in New Delhi or Bombay for the simple reason of economics. Only this summer, one UK publisher announced that staff in its New Delhi office could double over the course of three years. But – and here’s the rub, 61 years after Independence – “it is important to make clear that creative and managerial leadership will remain in London.”

While acknowledging that Penguin led the way by putting down roots in India over 25 years ago, setting the scene for other trade publishers to (somewhat belatedly) follow, and raising both the bar and the profile of publishing in India, there are many indigenous publishers who bristle at the headline-hogging activities of such companies.  “The most exciting publishing, the new areas, are actually being carved out by a whole range of Indian independents”, said Urvashi Bhutalia. “Let me name just a handful: Navayana, Tara, Tulika, Karadi Tales, Leftword, Social Science Press, Seagull, Zubaan, Stree, Samya, Women Unlimited, New Horizon Media, Westland, Roli Books, Mapin, Rupa, India Book House… The list goes on and on. Indeed, before Penguin even entered this market, some of the houses were working hard to open the market up and today, while the biggies do their stuff (and it’s all good and excellent), it is the independents who are really the cutting-edge people.”

No one is quite sure how many independent publishers there are in India, possibly around 16,000. Just as in Britain and America, there are niche operators with just a handful of books but there is also a good deal of local (very local) publishing – original fiction and non-fiction produced cheaply and priced low in one of the country’s 20-odd languages. For while English is the lingua franca of the aspirant middle class, it is likely that each individual language has a far higher readership than English. There is also an increasing number of titles published in English by Indian publishers which cater to the growing demand for books as entertainment. Rupa, for example, was early into the mass-market, making a bestseller of Chetan Bhagat, whose books include One Night at the Call Centre (since published in the UK by Black Swan) and who is now said to be the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history. Clearly, Rupa’s rationale of pricing it low and piling it high, the better to sell more copies, has worked.

As Bhutalia noted in a lecture she delivered at LBF ’09 (the text of which will be published in Logos), when she set up Kali, a women’s press in 1984 – at much the same time as similar companies were beginning to flower in the West – she was seen as “a bit mad”. A quarter-century on, many young people, men and women, set up as publishers, the point of entry cheaper now thanks to the march of technology. “It is the independent, small (sometimes not-so-small) Indian publishers who are really the ones who should be credited with putting Indian publishing on the international map,” she asserts.

This year’s India Market Focus went a long way to showing how richly contoured the map of Indian publishing has become.  The joint LBF-British Council cultural partnership initiative brought some 50 authors, with 15 published languages between them, and around 90 publishers to Earls Court last spring. There was a good deal of highly positive media coverage and a benediction from both the British and Indian governments. As with all such events, the many seeds sewn will take root and flower over a period of months, if not years, but it’s already clear that the meeting of minds and cultures is yielding results, not least among them invitations to India to be the market focus country in Moscow this month and in Turin and Beijing next year, while the LBF will act as facilitator between Indian and international publishers at LBF 2010. New business is notoriously hard to quantify, but the aforementioned Zubaan signed upwards of 25 contracts, while Motilal, the UK-based distributor of books from India, estimate it generated around a dozen new contracts (including one with Waterstone’s for children’s books), as against the usual “three or four”.  Sahitya Akademi, India’s literary academy, has digitised 60 titles for the blind in Hindi and English, while Ratna Sagar laid plans to collaborate with Oxford Brookes on a publishing course (though the Institute of Book Publishing website reveals the many training initiatives already available in India). Bhavit Mehta and Jon Slack of the Society of Young Publishers have started to plan a South-Asian literary festival to take place in 2010, and discussions are in train to set up a BookScan India, possibly as early as next year.

As always, there remains a need to change perceptions. Just as, over the last 25 years or so, publishers in Australia and Canada and, more recently, Ireland, have asserted their right to be treated as independent territories, not merely an add-on to UK contracts or (more insultingly in many ways) as a bargaining chip in the so-called Turf Wars between British and American publishers, so Indian publishers are increasingly asserting their independence.

Seagull Books, launched in 1982 to specialise in arts and culture (it also runs an arts centre and, like many publishers, a bookshop, which is, declares the website, “Independent. Fiercely so. Constantly battling the Lords of Stationery and the Coffee machines”) is now an international publisher which just happens to be based in Calcutta.  A London office was established in 2005, its board comprised of “people I was close to, among them Tariq Ali,” Navin Kishore explained. Backlist, “certain European literature”, was “simply disappearing” – not only was he not able to order it (Indian wholesalers handle only what sells in quantity), he wasn’t able to find it. So he decided he would buy world rights to books by such figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Tzvetan Todorov and Slavenka Drakulic, books which mesh with Seagull’s mission to document “cultural history in the making as well as building a climate of critique… its focus firmly on the alternative and the experimental, and on the socially committed”. With Ali (whose Verso titles can be ordered via the Seagull website), Kishore also commissioned a series of monographs to commemorate the events of 1989, offering 2,500 euros to each author. The first four books in the series, What Was Communism? will launch in November.

Sales and distribution outside India are handled by University of Chicago Press, working out of the UK where Seagull mostly prints, using Biddles – a reversal of the norm. In the grand scheme of things, he is catering to a niche market, but that niche among middle-class Indian intellectuals is not inconsiderable.  A man who grew up according to Gandhian ideals he still adheres to, Kishore doesn’t believe every book has to be its own profit centre, which means “it’s taken me 17 years to get out of the red”. Each of his books, and the Seagull catalogue, is designed and produced to a standard of which any Western publisher would be proud. “If you’re going to look at a structured, accountant-based business then you’re going to compromise.” Kishore works with a staff and with translators whose judgment, instincts and skills he trusts completely. “It took two trips to Frankfurt and half-a-dozen visits to Paris to show what we can do and, after 18 months, the floodgates opened.” So far, Seagull is unique in Indian publishing, with authors from across Europe and Africa, but he believes that “what we do is an exciting model for a possible – possible – way forward for publishers, be they India-based or wherever else, to explore.”

Zubaan, which grew out of Kali, itself co-founded by Bhutalia, and whose name means tongue, voice, language, speech and dialect, is a non-profit house specialising in a range of gender issues, from reproductive health/sexuality, to gender and law, economics and architecture. It still seems quite radical given that when Bhutalia began her publishing career at OUP India in the early 1970s, her father escorted her to her first day at work and told her new boss that here male colleagues were expected “to behave”. Which is what the boss told her, by which he meant she was not get married immediately and become pregnant! These days, Bhutalia noted in her lecture, “not only are increasing numbers of small- and medium-sized houses headed by women… but women are the decision-makers in many of the larger houses as well… Several of the bookshop chains are headed by women… and there are women printers, designers, typesetters – indeed the feminisation of Indian publishing is remarkable.” Women in Publishing was recently established in the country.

Many of those women have taken Indian publishing (which, until 30 years ago, was focused on education and textbooks) into new areas, among them children’s publishing where there is, at last, the beginnings of a picture-book culture. In India, it is words that matter, so babies and toddlers are still largely entertained by traditional oral storytelling. Even books for children tend to the wordy, but that is beginning to change with publishers such as Karadi Tales, Tulika and Tara, which published Tiger on a Tree by Anushka Ravishankar. Published internationally, it won the 2005 New York Book Show Award.

The aforementioned Bhavit Mehta of Saadhak Books, published his first title this summer, a lavishly illustrated version of Laghu the Clever Crow, an animal fable originally written in Sanskrit. “Every time I went out to a wedding or family function in India, I would look for good local picture books, but all I found were either really cheap, computer-generated products or anthologies of tales for older children,” he has explained. So Mehta decided to fill the gap on the shelves himself – working from London, where, in his day job, he is a scientist. Back home, his hand-sewn, perfect-bound 32-page book would be stapled, produced as cheaply as possible, and price is of course an issue. So the challenge for Mehta now is to publish the book in India at an affordable price without decimating standards, and he’s been back to the country to visit printers and booksellers. At LBF, where he attended numerous seminars, he found the Market Focus very useful in that it enabled him to make any number of contacts, including a mobile apps company which converts books into affordable downloads. In a country where computers are still for the few but mobile phones for the many, Mehta believes that digital technology – including, soon, a cheap e-reader – will transform the publishing and bookselling scene in India, making it easier for independent publishers to compete with the major players. “It will mean other ways of getting to the market.”

He believes the LBF-British Council Market Focus opened the eyes of British publishers and booksellers to the vast untapped possibilities of the Indian book trade and he hopes that one consequence may be the importing of Indian books in greater numbers into the UK. “Motilal are effectively local distributors and they bring in regular shipments but we need competition because there’s a ready market, and not just among people who don’t read in English. There are many who want to read in the original language because the essence is lost in translation. That means there’s growth potential for local and regional Indian publishers.”

As Emma House, International Director of the UK Publishers Association notes, independent publishers in India have a ready market in terms of both rights and export – the challenge lies in making the contacts, setting up the networks. That is of course easier in the digital age and easier still in forums such as that provided by LBF. As Bhutalia said, it’s too soon yet to assess the impact of the Market Focus in India. “The book market follows its own logic. What LBF did do was to open up the British market to Indians who were unfamiliar with it, and to open up Indian publishing to Britain, which has traditionally looked at India as a market but not really paid much attention to what Indian publishers are doing… Most of the books by Indian authors published in Britain happen to be writers in the diaspora, very few Indians living [in India] get published in Britain, and that was what LBF has helped to begin to change.”

And, she concluded, “I’m not a rabid chauvinist Indian publisher but I do think it’s important to see the nuances in this market. We, the Indian lot, are doing as much for it as the Brits, and it’s good to notice that.”

UK Publishing, the PA and LBF are organising a UK Pavilion at the New Delhi Book Fair in February . If you are interested in exhibiting or being part of the PA/Oxford Brookes Delegation which will be participating at the event, please contact Amy Webster +44 (0)20 8910 7872.

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