India Perspectives 10/2008

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SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008

IndiaPerspectives

ISSN 0970 5074



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EditorialIndian authors have, of late, become quite the rage internationally. Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor and Amitav Ghosh, Shobhaa De and Jhumpa Lahiri. The list has been impressively expanding. It is important to recall that these are all authors whose original writing is in the English language. Several years ago, in 1912 in fact, a 51 year old relatively unknown writer decided to try his hand at translating some of his own work while on a trip to London; it was his way of passing time. He scribbled his translations in a notebook. Legend has it that one day while alighting from the London subway, he left his briefcase behind which had the notebook. It was discovered and returned by a good and kind soul. A few months later, the scribbling was seen by W.B. Yeats, who was mesmerized. The rest, as we know, is history. In 1913, the writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; his name was Rabindranath Tagore.

It is argued that Tagore might never have won the prize and thus, the international recognition if his writings were not available in the English language. The key, thus, lay in translations and in the availability of Indian writing in the English language. Without translations, a huge wealth of Indian writing remains denied to the world. This is true of other international languages as well. Imagine if we were denied the translations of writings by Hermann Hesse and Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Marquez and Paolo Coelho!

Indian book publishing has come a long way over the last sixty years. Today, over 90,000 books in English and in Indian languages are published annually in India of which only around twenty per cent represent English language book publishing. In other words, what is available to the public as ‘contemporary Indian writing’ is, thus, only a mere fraction of what is produced.

This Special Issue offers a glimpse into the world of Indian book publishing.

Amit DasguptaNew Delhi, September 2008

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008VOL 22, NO. 5

IndiaPerspectives

EditorAmit Dasgupta

Assistant EditorNeelu Rohra

Consulting EditorNewsline Publications Pvt. Ltd.C-15, Sector 6, Noida-201301

India Perspectives is published every month in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Sinhala, Bahasa Indonesia, Persian, Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. Views expressed in the articles are those of the contributors and not necessarily of India Perspectives.All original articles, other than reprints published in India Perspectives, may be freely reproduced with acknowledgement.

Editorial contributions and letters should be addressed to the Editor, India Perspectives, 140 ‘A’ Wing, Shastri Bhawan, New Delhi-110001. Telephones: +91-11-23389471, 23388873, Fax: +91-11-23385549, E-mail: [email protected], Website: http://www.meaindia.nic.in

For obtaining a copy of India Perspectives, please contact the Indian Diplomatic Mission in your country.

This edition is published for the Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi, by Parbati Sen Vyas, Special Secretary, Public Diplomacy Division.

Designed and printed by Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., Delhi-110052.

Publishing in Indian languagesINDRA NATH CHOUDHURI 2

Indian FictionK. SATCHIDANANDAN 6

Book publishing in humanities and social sciencesSRIDHAR BALAN 11

Bollywoodie Books!SURESH KOHLI 18

A Concise History of Illustrated BooksKISHORE SINGH 21

Magic in Words and PicturesANANT PAI 26

New Age BooksS.K. GHAI 30

Curry and rice and other things niceKISHORE SINGH 32

Educational PublishingAJAY SHUKLA 38

Publishing: Forward to Greater HeightsD.N. MALHOTRA 44

Mahatma Gandhi’s LegacyEDITOR 46

Writing for ChildrenPARO ANAND 48

The Indian Print IndustryVIREN CHHABRA 54

Copyright Laws in India 58

New Delhi World Book FairNUZHAT HASSAN 62

A Writer and His WorkshopTIRTHANKAR GHOSH 16

INDIA PERSPECTIVES SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008 2 INDIA PERSPECTIVES SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008 3

25 per cent of the total publishing done in all the languages. English follows with 20 per cent. Next in line is a group of six languages: Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu. After that the other fi ve languages – if we club them on the basis of the number of books published – would be Assamese, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu. Following this group are four languages: Kashmiri, Dogri, Konkani and Sindhi. The last is Sanskrit.

Again, if we take a look at the readership fi gures, it is fascinating: there are more than 3306 universities, numerous colleges and schools and lakhs of private centres which have never been enumerated. Add to that the adult population of millions of people who read and buy all sorts of books. Indian publishers provide books not only for the organized educational sector and to book-lovers both young and

adult but also to neo-literates as well as illiterates too who do not read books by themselves but buy books to get these read out to them.

Even with a literacy fi gure of 65 per cent, India has a huge sea of humanity whose hunger for reading material cannot be adequately satisfi ed by books annually. To augment this defi cit, Indian publishers have to come to the fore and publish books in Indian languages because 80 per cent of the demand for books is in Indian languages. A book-reading nation is an enlightened one and such a society is sure to create a place of honour for itself in the comity of nations. In fact, to give a meaning to Indian Independence through education for all, it is necessary to encourage publishing in Indian languages.

The promotion of the reading habit of good books is an

Publishingin Indian languages

Book publishing in Indian languages has assumed great importance in view of the emphasis that has been laid on literacy and the tremendous explosion of knowledge that we

witness today all over the world. The growth of the book industry is stupendous and according to a computed fi gure 82,537 books were published in all the Indian languages, including English, in the year 2005. The job was actively performed by 16,000 publishers. According to this computed fi gure, English language publishing that is confi ned to a few metropolitan cities, actually represents only about 20 per cent of the total Indian book publishing. Even then, it is a belief – a mistaken one – that only English language publishing represents Indian publishing. This hinders unwittingly a proper assessment of Indian language publishing in 22 Indian languages recognized by the Constitution of India.

Looking at the language-wise fi gures for the year 2005, we realize that the largest numbers of books are published in Hindi, i.e. about

The Indian book publishing industry has seen rapid and steady growth. Even so, there is abundant scope to improve language publications which need a more professional approach.

INDRA NATH CHOUDHURI


essential part connected with book production. The London Declaration ‘Towards a reading society’, adopted at the UNESCO World Congress on Books in 1982 points out, “We seek a world in which the ability to read and the will and desire to enjoy the fruits of reading are more widely sought by all societies. We seek a world in which there are indeed books for all, but one also in which all can read and all accept books and reading as a desirable part of daily life. We look forward not merely to a literate world but towards a universal society”. The UNESCO, working on this thesis, declared that even for economic and social advancement, all developing countries should give priority to literacy and education and for that purpose encourage indigenous book publishing.

The Indian language publishing world has yet to show concern for developing its own concept though the six decades after independence have seen the language publishing industry

grow in terms of title output and business returns. Today, Indian publishing is one of the largest in the world and can be counted among the fi rst seven publishing nations. Professionalism, however, has not yet entered the publishing industry. The producer-consumer ratio is erratic; no concentrated research is done to know what a reader wants. The industry rests on public expenditure and the demand from individual buyers is small. However, the Kolkata Book Fair that has three million book lovers year after year with sales over $ 568181.82 per day (in the 10-12 days of the fair) amply debunks the above thesis. The general picture seems to suggest that a lot more books of a serious nature related to political theories, scientifi c subjects, science fi ction and history will be the future demand in Indian languages. It is also speculated by experts that books on subjects like communication networks, science, environmental economy and behavioural cross currents,

will be in great demand. In fact, social engineering is the topic of the day, apart from indology and spiritual continuity.

The prospects of paperbacks and e-books are also increasing everyday. In the last two decades, the communication revolution has changed the perspective and lifestyle of people in the developed as well developing countries. But coping with the information revolution has created more problems rather than solving them particularly in the fi eld of education, children’s education and literature. In this information madness, the market has been fl ooded with quiz books and books of general knowledge disseminating information in a foreign language, which do not touch the minds of children. As a result most of it becomes irrelevant for them. Children today are overfed on information, but starved for knowledge. They need the support of good literature, especially created for them, keeping their needs

in mind. According to a rough estimate, approximately 10,000 titles for children are published every year in English and all the Indian languages put together. This number is inadequate considering there are over one million primary schools in India.

The need for professionalism and organized activity in the language publication is the most essential prerequisite. A weak link in the book publishing chain in Indian languages is the editing of manuscripts and proper expertise in the production fi eld and marketing. It is said that in Indian language publishing we start with publishing and end with publishing, doing nothing much before or after publishing. Introduction of professionalism can be a great help in solving all these related issues in Indian language publication.

One very important point is that in the West, Indian literature is generally taken to be Indian-English literature which is only a minute fraction of the total

literary output. Even several Indians have very little idea about literature written in languages other than their own. However, one can notice a multilingual translation boom in the country but the picture still remains lopsided. The Indian language publishing industry needs to focus on intra-lingual translations as well as for translations in English for the huge English-oriented market. One can already fi nd translators exploring ways in which the English language can be stretched to contain ‘authentic Indian expressions’. Unless awareness is created about our literature on the home front, we cannot think of any promotion of our literature abroad. Along with that, let us try to enlarge our taste which is primarily a literary objective connected with the development of a critical apparatus that will help us to place our literature alongside the literature from Western countries. Only then will the Western reader go beyond translation as a colonial curiosity and accept it as a comparative discipline – which continues to coexist simultaneously in European practice today – and understand our literature in a convincing way.◆The author has taught in universities in India and abroad and has held the post of Secretary at the Sahitya Akademi (Academy of Letters).


The ever-inventive Indian imagination has been weaving an endless web of

tales from time immemorial, from the tribal tales and the fables of Panchatantra, the stories of Brihatkatha, Brihatkathamanjari, the Jataka tales and the tales of the Vikramaditya to the novels and stories of our own traumatic times. Modern fi ction emerged in India from an intimate interaction between this storytelling tradition and the Western, especially British, fi ction in the Nineteenth century. Despite Milan

K. SATCHIDANANDAN

Indian FictionTHE CHANGING LANDSCAPE

Indian fi ction the product of a marriage between the traditional form of story-telling and the Western fi ction of the Nineteenth century, has indeed come a long way.

Kundera’s claim that the novel is essentially a European form, Indian novelists have handled the genre with aplomb and have made novel and short story to a lesser extent, the chief mode of articulating their visions of life and society. In the post-colonial era, Indian fi ction, both in Indian languages and in English entered a process of self-renewal in content as well as in form, in its attempt to grasp the profound contradictions of India’s fast-changing socio-political and psychological reality, its new

mores and modes of perception and the fresh social dynamism set in motion by the emergence of hitherto marginalised sections of the society into democratic awareness. While the new Indian novel in English has attracted international readership, more novels in the languages too are getting translated into English and European languages than ever before. The Frankfurt Book Fair in 2006 with India as the ‘Guest of Honour’, a second time, and the Paris Book Fair with accent on Indian writing that followed have both demonstrated the new enthusiasm Indian fi ction has generated among readers and publishers in the West.

It has become a cliché of literary criticism to say that the novelists in the so-called Third World ‘narrate the nation’; however, on closer scrutiny we fi nd that the novelists narrate not one, but many nations, each imagining

the nation and conjuring it into being in his or her own way, and often bringing a multiplicity of perspectives into play through a variety of characters from different strata of society. An activist Bengali writer like Mahasweta Devi or an Assamiya writer like Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya privileges the tribal perspective (the former’s Aranyer Adhikar or Right to the Forest) or the latter’s Iyyaru Ingam (People’s Region); a Tamil writer like Bama (Kurukku – which in Tamil means the sharp-edged stem of the palmera tree) and (Sangati or Events), a Marathi writer like Lakshman Gaikwad (Uchalya – a wandering tribe whose main profession for ages has been stealing) or Saran Kumar Limbale (Akkarmashee), a Gujarati writer like Joseph Macwan (Angaliyat or The Stepchild), a Kannada writer like Siddalingaiah (Ooru Keri – an autobiography of a Dalit boy from the poverty-

stricken landscape of rural Karnataka to its urban capital) or Devanoor Mahadeva (Kusumabale) an Oriya writer like Gopinath Mohanty (Paraja or The Outcaste) or a Telugu writer like Unnava Lakshminarayana (Malappally or The Harijan Colony) might portray the reality of the Dalit (downtrodden, untouchable) life with its sense of disgrace, its moral beauty and its desire for social emancipation. There are regional novels where particular regions and local histories are at the centre of attention like Phaniswar Nath Renu’s Maila Anchal (The Soiled Border), Rahi Masoom Raza’s Adha Gaon (A village divided) in Hindi, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Arogyaniketan (Unknown Binding) or Shivram Karanth’s Chomana Dudi (Choma’s drum) or U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Bharatipura in Kannada, or M.T Vasudevan Nair’s


Krishna Baldev Vaid and Vinod Kumar Shukla in Hindi have all contributed to the modernisation of the genre by bringing in the complexities of modern life – particularly its angst and alienation – and inventing new structures and idioms that best express their fresh perceptions of life and mind. The rise of a number of women writers in the languages in recent years has ensured the representation of women’s issues and women’s perspectives in Indian fi ction. They reexamine the patriarchal canons and literary practices, re-vision myths, reinterpret epics and forge a counter-language and found an alternative semiotics of the body and beyond. Established women novelists like Kamala Das, Amrita Pritam, Krishna Sobti, Ashapurna Devi, Ajeet Cour, Lakshmikantamma, Lalitambika Antarjanam, Pratibha Ray, Indira Goswami and Nabaneeta Dev

Sen have now been joined by scores of new and powerful writers from Sara Joseph, Gracy and Sitara of Malayalam to Ambai of Tamil, Volga of Telugu, Bani Basu of Bengali, Moushmi Kandali of Assamese, Sania of Marathi and Geetanjali Sree of Hindi. There is a whole new generation of talented writers in all the Indian languages from Nabarun Bhattacharya in Bengali (Herbert) and Alka Saraogi in Hindi (Kolikata via Byepass or Kolkata through the Bypass) to Jayamohan in Tamil (Vishnupuram) and K.P. Ramanunni in Malayalam (Jeevitathinte Pusthakam, The book of life) who have already proved their credentials as novelists of great talent. While a few of these masterpieces are available in English – thanks to publishers like Sahitya Akademi, National Book Trust (NBT), Katha, Macmillan, OUP (Oxford University Press), Penguin, Affi liated East-West, Orient

Longman, Rupa, Seagull and several others, a greater part of the excellent Indian writing in the languages is waiting to be discovered by the larger world.

Indian fi ction in English began receiving wider international acclaim with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. This is not to forget the contributions of pioneers like R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mulk Raj Anand, Nayantara Sehgal, Anita Desai and others. But there certainly has been a paradigm shift with the appearance of Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Allan Sealy and Arundhati Roy who are free from the self-doubt that seemed to have tormented their predecessors. These writers and those who follow, like Kiran Nagarkar, Kiran Desai, Rohinton Mistry, Gita Hariharan, Mukul Kesavan, Shama Futehally, Amit Choudhuri, Rukun Advani,Vikram Chandra, Altaf Tyrewala, Shashi Deshpande, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manju Kapur, Ruchir Joshi, Radhika Jha, Hari Kunzru, Anita Nair, Attia Hosain and several others are not apologetic about writing in English; they consider English a legitimately Indian language and use it with great ease and creativity. They share discoursal devices and genres with their language-counterparts. If R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things are Sthalapuranas or local histories, Allan Sealy’s Trotternama follows the pattern of the nama or the Indian chronicle. Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold is a new form

Nalukettu (Ancestral house), S.K. Pottekkaatt’s Oru Desathinte Katha (The story of a village), Thakazhi Sivasankarapillai’s Kayar (Coir) or M. Mukundan’s Mayyazippuzhayude Theerangalil (On the banks of River Mayyazhi) in Malayalam or Sundararamaswamy’s Oru Puliyamarathin Kathai (The story of a Tamarind Tree) in Tamil. The partition of India is a recurring theme in post-Independence fi ction as in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Purab-O-Paschim (East and West) in Bengali, Khushwant Singh’s A Train to Pakistan in English or Yashpal’s Jhoota Sach (The False Truth) in Hindi or Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag ka Dariyaa (The river of fi re) in Urdu as in the Urdu stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Kishan Chandar and Rajinder Singh Bedi.

The historical novel has remained a favourite genre with Indian writers right from the beginning of novel in India. Shyamal

Gangopadhyay in Bengali (Darashuko), Vrindavan Lal Verma in Hindi Jhansi ki Rani, (The Queen of Jhansi), Masti Venkatesha Iyengar in Kannada Chikkaveera Rajendra (Life and struggle of Kodava King Chikkaveera Rajendra), Ranjeet Desai in Marathi Swami (The lord), Surendra Mohanty in Oriya Nila Saila (The blue mountain) and Viswanatha in Telugu Ekavira (The Solitary Hero) are some examples. Together such writers have covered a long span of history from the twelfth century to the present with rare imagination and historical insight. O.V. Vijayan, M. Mukundan, Sethu, N.S. Madhavan and Paul Zacharia in Malayalam, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Chandrasekhara Kambar and Poornachandra Tejaswi in Kannada, Sundararamaswamy and Jayamohan in Tamil, Suresh Joshi in Gujarati, Bhalchandra Nemade in Marathi and Nirmal Verma,


of hagiography, Sashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel is a mock-epic and Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate is in the verse narrative tradition. The direct use of Malayalam words in The God of Small Things and the employment of native usages and proverbs as well as local customs and manners in the works of Khushwant Singh, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Raja Rao, Kiran Nagarkar, Kiran Desai, Kaveri Nambisan and Vikram Seth point to a process of the nativisation of English. Works like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies demonstrate a self-conscious questioning of linguistic boundaries. The new novelists interrogate the ‘purity’ of Indian culture, accept English as part of a sub-continental polyphony and refuse to privilege either tradition or modernity. The thematic range of the new

English novel is astonishingly wide: the fi ssures in the body-politic (Beethoven Among the Cows), rising communalism (The Little Soldier), Emigration (The Glass Palace, A Sea of Poppies), the? divided immigrant self (Satanic Verses), disorienting loss (Afternoon Rag), post-colonial history (Midnight’s Children, Shame, Trotternama), the celebration of hybridity (Moor’s Last Sigh, The Enchantress of Florence), the question of identity (Namesake) and the changing Indian village (Nectar in a Sieve, Sunlight on a Broken Column) are only some of the major thematic concerns raised by these novelists. A new and lighter kind of writing seldom worried about literariness has also emerged with the work of writers like Chetan Bhagat, Samit Basu and Meenakshi Madhavan. Blogs, e-zines and Internet are also fast changing the nature of literary communication in India.

It is quite likely that unexpected pathways may open up under the pressures of the market economy, globalisation and forced homogenisation of cultures. The inner cartography of liberalised India is likely to foreground new ethical questions about our social behaviour towards refugees, immigrants and the still un-mainstreamed populations, like the questions already raised by Rana Dasgupta and Kiran Desai in their recent works.◆The author is a Malayalam poet, bilingual critic, former Secretary, Sahitya Akademi (Academy of Letters), New Delhi

There is a tongue-in-cheek remark by the protagonist Agastya Sen in Upamanyu

Chatterjee’s ‘English August’ while walking past the offi ces of two prominent publishers in Delhi’s Ansari Road, ‘huge show-windows proudly displaying lethally dull titles’. Publishers of academic titles in India, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, have always been thought of as a singular and rare breed. A senior

A Tradition of ExcellenceBOOK PUBLISHING

IN HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCESSRIDHAR BALAN

Publishers of academic titles – especially humanities and social sciences – in India have for a long time travelled a lonely path. But that was yesterday. Today, there is a slew of new work from old authors as well as new.

colleague in the industry once remarked that publishers are incorrigible optimists and I think this is best illustrated by the nature of publishing in the social sciences. Publishing here has been traditionally characterized by low print-runs and even lower margins. It’s almost as if every publisher seems to want to ride his own hobby-horse and worse, there are left-over stocks in spite of the modest print-run. The scene seems to have been very


What could be the reasons for this change? For one, the market for these books has expanded both at home and abroad. We have seen an expansion of higher academic institutions across the country and more are in the pipeline, going by the Prime Minister’s recent speeches to the nation. The setting of libraries in these institutions has increased the demand for academic books. Secondly, there has been a prodigious amount of scholarship both at home and abroad on India. Earlier, when our institutions were in a nascent stage, scholarship was propelled by ‘Area Studies’ departments

in universities abroad. Today our authors are internationally renowned scholars in the social sciences and we also have an impressive number holding academic chairs abroad. Thirdly, there is much more increased retail visibility for our academic books today. As publishers broaden their list to include both academic and general books in the humanities and social sciences, they fi nd that the books gain ready acceptance in leading bookstores. Fourthly, there is much more visibility in the print media through reviews and publication of extracts. Fifthly, academic publishers have been

true of Agastya’s observation. In the seventies and early eighties, these modest print-runs were fi xed on the basis of forecasts by the sales department and that too for an eighteen month period.

In the last two decades the situation for books in the humanities and social sciences has changed radically and for the better, in fact for much better. If we have to put this chronologically, we would say from the mid-eighties to the present. India was accorded the Guest of Honour status at the Frankfurt Book Fair for the fi rst time in 1986. It was an occasion for a larger than usual delegation of academic publishers to attend along with an impressive array of authors who were given quite a reception. The year 2006 marked the second occasion when India was accorded the same status at Frankfurt and led to an even bigger delegation of publishers and authors, this time with an

impressive itinerary of launches and talks across Europe.

This period saw the fl owering and maturing of publishing in the humanities and social sciences. Old authors have produced new work, new authors have been discovered and some mighty fi ne books have been produced. What is even more remarkable is that in this period it’s not just the big publishers like Oxford and Cambridge who have grown and expanded their list but many new imprints have come up in the last decade like Permanent Black, Academic Foundation, Yoda Press, 3 Essays Collective, Indialog, Tulika and feminist publishers like Zubaan and Women Unlimited. What is even more remarkable is that an established distributor like Bahri has turned academic publisher and a senior journalist has now an academic list, Imprint One.


and 95000 copies in paperback. These fi gures are remarkable considering that Penguin had selling rights only for South Asia. No academic publisher will commission books to only add to the front list; most of the titles must have backlist potential, that is, they must have prospects of being reprinted and must sell year after year. In short, they must become works ‘of enduring value’. Older academic publishers have established a relationship with their authors for the last thirty years or more and some of their works have attained the status of classics. The most remarkable example of this is of course the Jim Corbett corpus (not strictly academic). ‘Man-Eaters of Kumaon’ was fi rst published in India in 1944 and the rest as they say is history. All of Corbett’s works have been continuously in print ever since, a remarkable saga of publishing continuity.

A comparative newcomer in academic publishing, Permanent Black has succeeded in establishing an impressive corpus

in the social sciences in the last decade. Many of the books have gone into successive reprints and the list is now over 200 titles strong. Its rapid success resulted in one of the partners being chosen for the prestigious ‘Young Publishers’ Award’ by the British Council recently.

The growing has also resulted in established imprints like Routledge to commission authors in the humanities and social sciences from India. We may yet see more academic imprints specializing in the humanities and social sciences as the market continues to grow. The recent interest in translations from the regional languages into English has allowed regional classics to access a bigger market, and this has led some publishers to include translated works in their humanities list.

Publishing in the humanities and the social sciences in India needs to be sustained. While international book fairs like Frankfurt, London, the Salon du Livre in Paris, Beijing, Tokyo and more recently, Abu Dhabi

are important, we must explore additional ways of exhibiting and exposing our academic list abroad. This is fuelled by the belief that these books (with world rights) are of use to the international community and will fi nd their place in a reading list for academic courses on South Asia. ◆The author was formerly Director, Oxford University Press.

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The business of publishing can enrich your life in

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able to tap into a growing export market as well. Lastly, technology has helped to improve our production standards and as a result, our books are more elegantly designed and produced. The new ‘Print on Demand’ technology (POD) has resulted in an academic book never going out of print provided it’s in a digital format.

The contributions of authors from India in the social sciences and humanities have substantially added to our knowledge in these subject areas and have also enhanced their academic reputation both at home and abroad. Mention may be made of the contributions of scholars like Amartya Sen, Sukhamoy Chakravarty, K.N. Raj, Amit Bhaduri and Kaushik Basu in Economics, D.D. Kosambi, Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, Mushirul Hasan and Ranajit Guha in History (in fact, Guha’s editorship of the volumes under the ‘Subaltern Studies’ series was a seminal and pioneering piece of scholarship, M.N. Srinivas, Andre Beteille, Ashis Nandy in Sociology

and Sudhir Kakar in Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Rajni Kothari, Francine Frankel and Randhir Singh in Political Science and A.K. Ramanujan, Balachandra Rajan and Nissim Ezekiel in Literature.

The academic success story has prompted even avowedly trade publishers like Penguin to add on a general list by academic authors to their growing fi ction and non-fi ction trade list. Oxford University Press began its Oxford India Paperbacks (OIPs) list in a new avatar (it had paperbacks before), about two decades ago. Originally, it started to put successful hardbacks into the paperback format. It has now acquired a status and distinct identity of its own. Some new titles are commissioned into the OIP format straightaway. The list is now over 500 titles and still growing and has established a fi rm clientele among academics and general readers.

Let us try and illustrate this growing market. Amartya Sen’s ‘The Argumentative Indian’ commissioned by Penguin UK through its Allen Lane imprint sold 25000 copies in hardback


A Writer and His Workshop

TIRTHANKAR GHOSH

What is the connection between rejection slips and Professor Purushottam Lal in Kolkata? Well, a lot. Professor Lal, a teacher of English literature, runs Writer’s Workshop,

described as “the iconic literary publishing house”. In its fi fty years

A true patron of literature, the Kolkata-based Writer’s Workshop, has provided the springboard for some of the best

Indian writers in English for the last fi fty years.

of existence, Professor Lal has single-handedly encouraged, published and even projected writers, who would otherwise have stopped writing after receiving rejection slips from publishers. Among them are Vikram Seth, Asif Currimbhoy, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Ruskin Bond, Pritish Nandy, Chandrakant Bakshi and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

It was Professor Lal – a poet best known for his “transcreation” (as he terms it) of the entire Indian epic poem Mahabharata into English – who could foresee the creative talent of all those who had been rejected by established publishers. Credited as “the rare lover of literature who can spot beauty before glowing blurbs have been written about it and the rare publisher who doesn’t shudder at the thought of poetry”, Professor Lal along

with seven other writers, some of who are well-known names today – Deb Kumar Das, Anita Desai, Sasthibrata Chakravarti (Sasti Bratha), William Hull, Jail Ratan, Kewlian Sio and Pradip Sen – got together to start a magazine which would publish their work and so, was born Writers Workshop Miscellany and later Writer’s Workshop.

In the fi ve decades of its existence, WW has produced books which are virtual works of art. Each book is bound in hand-spun saree cloth and printed on handmade paper with their titles inscribed with Professor Lal’s calligraphy.

Driven by schoolboyish enthusiasm, Professor Lal espoused the cause of what he terms “alternative publishing”. Such publishing is “desperately needed wherever commercial publication rules. WW is not a professional publishing

house. It does not print well-known names; it makes names known and well-known, and then leaves them in the loving clutches of the so-called ‘free’ market (which can be and is very cut-throat and very expensive). It is not sad, it is obnoxious, to plead, as publishers do,’ I will not publish poetry because it does not sell.’… In the words of Professor Lal “Because WW goes in for serious creative writing, and because there is no satisfactory distribution network for such writing, its terms of publication are unique, I must be the only publisher in the world who knows when and where every book is sold.”

May the uniqueness of Writer’s Workshop live on!◆The author is a senior journalist with Newsline Publications Ltd.

❛❛Translations are the next big thing for the

Indian publishing industry.

❜❜Mita Kapur

Siyahi Literary Consultancy

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Deepa Gahlot

Shah Rukh Khan’s career is the kind of success story that

colours movielore – the outsider who gatecrashed into

Bollywood and stayed on to reach superstardom, leaving all

his contemporaries behind.

Over the last decade or so, as Hindi cinema has grown

and reached out to audiences across the world, especially

the South Asian diaspora, Shah Rukh’s fame and popularity

have grown in proportion. He personifies the media-savvy,

money-smart, focused professional that today’s world

idolizes. He made movies that were blockbusters, he

created the SRK brand, and with a production company in

place and a special effects set-up and a studio in the works,

his aim of becoming the complete movie moghul now

looks achievable.

When a star of his stature approaches a career

milestone of sixty films, and gets to a stage where he

clearly needs to chart unexplored territory, it is perhaps

time for a mid-career assessment. That is what Deepa

Gahlot, journalist, critic, columnist, editor, author and

screenwriter, attempts to do in this book, by analysing the

various phases of Shah Rukh’s life and career and putting

them in perspective.

ISBN: 978-81-7436-503-3



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Not many books have succeeded nationally but many of them have worked their magic overseas. Despite the Rs. 3,000 (US$ 70) price tag and a weight of almost four kilograms, Still Reading Khan is hugely popular globally. Not many authorized biographies of some popular stars have worked with the readers, though Jerry Pinto’s racy book on the gorgeous Helen became a runaway hit despite the author never having met the subject!

Although it all began many decades ago when, a raw, unemployed, ambitious and hungry youngman called Vinod Mehta (editor of the weekly Outlook) took a plunge and published an ill-researched biography of Meena Kumari.

He started a trend. Even though several other biographies of fi lm personalities followed soon after – notably Nabendu Ghosh’s non-commissioned volume on Ashok Kumar and the “authorized” Dadamoni by Kishore Valicha, Raju Bharatan’s Lata Mangeshkar and Rachel Dwyer’s book on Yash Chopra – they all suffered from the same malady: they were lifeless and based on unconfi rmed material. Though Bharatan scored on facts, he was spurned by Lata. She, therefore, felt compelled to commission an authorized book by Harish Bhimani. And that attempt was worse. This was all so very appetizing. Bollywood, like Hollywood, thrived on gossip and characters that were larger than life!

There has been a steady stream of books on Bollywood. But, despite continuing craze among the young about fi lmstars, the response – with the possible exception of the ones on Shah Rukh

Khan – hardly justify the retrace and one-upmanship that the trade has been witnessing for the past couple of years. Perhaps, the only book that defi ed sceptics – and those who are ruing their stars for not gauging its potential – is Dev Anand’s autobiography, Romancing with Life, which did remarkably well. Unlike his recent fi lms, the response to the book has been astonishing. It has sold more than 20,000 copies in less than a year! Books on Shah Rukh Khan seem to have bettered that performance.

Bollywoodie Books!SURESH KOHLI

Filmstars will continue to generate interest – on-screen and off-screen – and publishers have found that their personal lives make good material for books. Often hurried and off-the-cuff, most of these books do not click in the market but authors and publishers remain unfazed. Yet, Big B and the great Khan sell!

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F o r e w o r d Ismail Merchant

I n d i a n C i n e m a

THE BOLLYWOOD SAGA


As in acting, the Big B or Amitabh Bachchan, has the maximum number of books written on him. It began with a much-hyped, crude-compilation of random interviews, fi ve more have since followed and some more are round the bend. Well, what a man!

In recent times, countless coffee and non-coffee table books have hit the book stalls, and many more are to follow. There are at least four books on Dilip Kumar, narrative books on Pran, Amrish Puri, Vyjantimala and Rajinikanth, an awful coffee table book on Hema Malini, two ‘semi’-

coffee table books on Kishore Kumar and one on Dev Anand, a memoir of Mrinal Sen and an autobiography of Manna Dey.

Bollywood is big. It is here to stay. The lives of those who created Bollywood legitimately remain a matter of interest both within India and abroad, where they have captured hearts even among those who rarely wept or smiled in public! Who knows, someday we may get Bollywood speak. Kya baat hain!◆The author writes on cinema.

When you think that for hundreds of years the ateliers of Indian rulers engaged quite literally thousands of cartographers and illustrators to create books with the most exquisite

images, and that printing became a force to reckon with, when

A ConciseHistory of Illustrated Books

KISHORE SINGH

What illustrated books, produced in India, lack by way of a long past, they have more than made up for in content. Slick and beautifully illustrated, in full colour, with pictures taken by Indian photographers, these are expensive tomes but hugely popular.


the painter Raja Ravi Varma bought a German printing press for fl ooding the market with inexpensive copies of his paintings, …then the hysteria in India that surrounded the publishing, in the early eighties,

of the fi rst illustrated books, was perhaps overstated.

Indian publishing in non-academic subjects and books may have dealt in low volumes but, nevertheless, catered to

a robust reading public. But here, beautifully illustrated, in full colour, with pictures taken by Indian photographers, were books that – well, getting down to brass tacks: who did they cater to? They were expensive. They were on Indian subjects that many would take for granted but hardly knew enough about. So were they intended as ready-reckoners for domestic

consumption, or as referrals for the expat community in residence in India, or as souvenirs for returning tourists?

When one marvels at the plethora of illustrated books in the market today, it is diffi cult to imagine that these were quite legitimate questions that publishers were racked by. The answers often impacted printing decisions – for

there were hardly any printing presses of quality at the time, and the few that did deliver international (often erratically) quality were expensive because of the high duties charged on imported art paper and printing inks. Publishers, therefore, found it less expensive to print overseas, seeking out markets as diversifi ed as Scandinavia, Dubai, Hong Kong, Thailand and


Singapore – the last becoming the most popular.

But what of the books themselves? Initially at least it seemed that most publishing houses seemed to fi nd the tourist markets most attractive, and the titles that appeared seemed to cater to this: there were books on the Taj Mahal (oh, a lot of books on the Taj Mahal) and on Agra, on Rajasthan, on Goa, on India (the ultimate take-home), on the Ajanta and Ellora caves... and as ambitions grew, specialisations grew too, so there were books on the Himalayas, on wildlife, on the beaches, on railway journeys, and later, as markets expanded, on books that had nothing to do with tourists at all: on the Sikhs, on local customs and practices, on ritual and art... And, of course, there was the Kamasutra.

If the tourist books required translations into French and German and Italian and Spanish, the more specialised books (sometimes even on familiar subjects) created legends around

And, what a rich array of content they provide us with! There is Bollywood and its stars, there’s ancient India, the past so ripe with nostalgia as commemorative anniversaries keep the printing presses spinning overtime, there is a vibrant culture, there’s design in architecture and interiors, the evergreen maharajas and their storehouses of wealth and heritage, of palaces and collectibles, vintage cars, musical instruments, of fashion and fashion designers…

The art books are another matter altogether. Seemingly impervious to costs, or size, or extent, they pay homage to artists, or genres, or exhibitions, or periods such that they are a pleasure no less equivalent to possessing a rare painting. They foray into artist’s studios, study their best years, capture different moods, or even into different mediums, each work precious beyond compare (particularly if you’re resourceful enough to also have them signed by the artist(s) in question – Satish Gujral, S.H. Raza, Thota Vaikuntam, Paresh Maity, Sunil Das, M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta… Sometimes these books fi nd professional publishers, but often they have been created and promoted by art galleries.

What a long journey it has been in a short time. Maybe it’s time someone wrote an illustrated book on the illustrated books of India!◆The author is a senior editor with the fi nancial daily Business Standard.

Indian lensmen – Raghu Rai was feted for the quality of his pictures; the Bedi brothers became celebrated for their books on wildlife (the fi lms were to follow), and some of India’s best writers began their forays into writing supporting texts for these tomes (Khushwant Singh, Ruskin Bond).

There are certain inherent strengths in the Indian

publishing industry – language, chief among them, but also adaptability, design aesthetics and the technology to support it, the ability to work fast, and to oversee production down to the last detail. It is these that have marked the growing phenomenon of illustrated books becoming part of the mainstream with some of the world’s most phenomenal books now being published from the subcontinent.


It was just another day in 1967 and I happened to be witness to an inter-school quiz

competition. The perky twelve year olds in their smart uniforms were an inspiring sight as they confi dently responded to a range of diverse questions from the World Wars to Greek mythology. However, when it came to Indian history and mythology, the same twelve year olds seemed quite stumped. It was a moment of revelation for me. I felt it my duty to acquaint this generation of future Indians with the whole world of heroes that I had come to know through stories from my parents and grandparents.

That was how Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) was born. Starting off as a single thirty two page comic book on Lord Krishna (for what better a medium than comics to connect to the youth!), ACK has culminated in a treasure trove of Indian culture – over 400 titles on Indian epics & mythology, bravehearts, visionaries, fables, folklore and literary classics in over 20 Indian languages! For 40 years now, ACK has helped Indians, both living in India and abroad, to discover a route to their roots. It has fi lled a gap that the advent of nuclear families

created in the lives of young children, depriving them of their grand-mothers fascinating tales. However, what was meant to be a source of knowledge for children, is now read by adults as well. With several PhD dissertations and books written on ACK, by both Indians and foreign nationals alike, the brand has gone on to acquire a cult status like no other Indian publication before. It is probably the only Indian imprint to have sold over 90 million copies worldwide.

ACK has had a deep impact on people across all walks of life,

as well as on popular culture. Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and former President Abdul Kalam have praised ACK for the infl uence it has had in shaping generations of Indians. Captains of industry like Infosys founder N.R. Narayan Murthy have gone on record saying, “Amar Chitra Kathas are a glorious tribute to India’s rich cultural heritage. These books have been an integral part of my children’s early years, as they have been for many families across India and the world.”

Religious leaders like Cardinal Lawrence of the Catholic Bishops Conference have also lauded ACK. Several schools in India use ACK as part of their history curriculum and experiments have shown how students absorbed a lot more when taught through comics. What set ACK apart were the world class illustrations, some titles taking as many as two years to draw! ACK has, hence, found a unique place in popular art and culture. ACK recently inspired a modern art exhibition at the National Art Gallery and is used as reference material by all the major graphic design institutes of the country.

Magic in Words and PicturesANANT PAI

It has a status that can rival global brands like Superman and Batman. Steeped in the timeless folklore and mythology of India, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) has transcended every conceivable barrier to create a place for itself in the hearts of most Indians.


ACK is available in over 1500 bookstores across India – right from Srinagar to Tiruvananthapuram and Ahmedabad to Guwahati. Titles have been translated into French, Dutch, German, Bhasha Indonesia, Swahili and even Serbo-Croat!

ACKs next challenge is being relevant to today’s internet

generation. We have realised that to effectively pique the interest of today’s youth, ACK has to be present in multimedia formats. Hence, the team is now working on creating multimedia versions of ACK stories for TV, online services, mobile applications and strategy games. ACK has two studios – in Bombay and Bangalore – that are developing this new content. In addition,

the company plans to launch campaigns with social messages like “Know India” in schools and bookshops across the country.

In line with its philosophy of providing wholesome edutainment, the ACK family has grown to include several other imprints – the most popular being Tinkle – India’s largest selling English children’s magazine, founded in 1980. With the motto of “Where Learning Meets Fun”, Tinkle is a magazine in comic form for pre-teens and receives over 200 letters from readers every week. Tinkle characters like Suppandi, Shikari Shambu, Kalia the Crow and Tantri the Mantri have acquired an iconic status of their own, akin to the Disney and Hannah Barbara characters from abroad. After 28 years, the Tinkle family of magazines continues to have an annual circulation of 2 million copies and several parents confess to reading their children’s Tinkles and reliving their childhood!

Another imprint from the ACK family is Karadi Tales – the pioneer in audio and video books from India. Narrated by some of the best known personalities from cinema like Naseerudin Shah, Usha Uttup and Shekhar Kapur, Karadi Tales presents Indian mythology and folklore in audio and video formats, that children can learn to read along with. In fact, a methodology to teach children a second language based on audio books, called the Karadi Path has been devised. This has been successfully piloted as an English learning aid in government schools in Tamil Nadu and Goa, and can also be used to teach Hindi and other regional languages to children of Indian origin whose fi rst language is English.

Karadi Tales also has an imprint called Charkha Audio Books for adults. The constantly expanding catalogue includes biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, JRD Tata and Abdul Kalam, as well as epics

like Shakuntalam. Charkha has also released audio books on “Listening to Poetry” narrated by leading orators including Tom Alter – these cover the poetry prescribed in the class 9-12 CBSE syllabus and aim to make the subject more interesting for children.

It has been 40 years since it all began and ACK continues to be the leader in high quality India-centric family edutainment. Happy reading my dear friends – Know India!◆The author is founder editor emeritus and chief story teller of Amar Chitra Katha.

❛❛Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was

born in another time.

❜❜Rabindranath Tagore


In today’s stressful times people are looking for more natural and holistic ways to maintain good health; not only their physical health but also their mental and spiritual health.

New Age is based on a back to nature philosophy and a quest for spiritual ideals and beliefs that contributes towards creating a healthy mind, body and spirit. Increasingly, our work is becoming more and more demanding. Keeping our stress at healthy levels becomes a daunting task. Well-being encompasses all parts and not just the physical. It is important to create a balance in life by nurturing our whole person which includes spiritual, mental, emotional and physical needs.

New Age BooksS.K. GHAI

New Age is about getting back to nature, the way we were meant to be, by rejecting values and lifestyles that harm nature, both within us and outside of us. The ultimate aim is to attain optimum physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social health and it is primarily through a new genre of books that information about this lifestyle is being propagated.

Vegetarianism too is a part of this balance. More and more people all over the world are turning to vegetarian cuisine. Medical studies demonstrate that a vegetarian diet is easier to digest, provides a wider range of nutrients and impresses fewer burdens and impurities on the body. Vegetarians are less susceptible to all the major diseases that affl ict present-day civilization; as a result they live

❛❛When disappointment stares me in the face and I see not one ray

of light, I go back to the Bhagvad Gita. I fi nd a

verse here and a verse there and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of

overwhelming tragedies.

❜❜Mahatma Gandhi

Given the sudden surge in interest in New Age books, they are now increasingly being translated in large numbers worldwide. The books from India have great potential.

The Indian saints, spiritual gurus, ayurvedic and yoga practitioners have played an important role in creating the market for such books. Indian philosophy has found new meaning and readership especially at a time when the world seeks peace, understanding and humanism.◆The author is a leading publisher and is on the editorial board of Publishing Research Quarterly, New York.

longer, are healthier and have more productive lives.

New Age books play an important role in creating that balance in life. These books discuss nontraditional therapies to promote health and wellness. These include Metaphysical healing, faith healing, spiritual healing and self-help.


Curry and riceand other things nice

KISHORE SINGH

Indian publishing is fattening on the spoils of the kitchen. As cookbook writers – there are as many accomplished ones as there are wannabes – vie with each other to dish out a variety of recipes with the most enticing photographs, readers are lapping them up with equal speed.

If there is at least one (thankfully unwritten) book in every person, it is equally true

that everyone wants to write a cookbook, or a book of recipes, or something nostalgic about the way mummy-made-it.

Housewives, celebrity chefs, students, food journalists – almost everyone is churning them out faster than you can count them. With the food industry booming with groaning shelves of processed food packages,

restaurant openings, a greater availability of ingredients (local as well as imported) and a growing taste for exotic foods, it is inevitable that the written word that holds them together in a complicated skein will itself grow.

But who is a cookbook writer? Or more pertinently, who is best equipped to write cookbooks?

Ismail Merchant, who gave us cinema’s most beautiful, most enduring images – along with James Ivory – became an icon

equally for his meals with which he admittedly seduced impossibly highly-paid Hollywood stars to act in their celluloid productions. And he often rustled up these meals, so he himself said on occasions, with almost nothing in his refrigerator, or at best hurriedly-purchased from the corner stores. But Merchant-Ivory’s food, like their cinema, was ephemeral, a moment of magic construed up with cinematic fl ourish – they were clearly more innovative than purist chefs. It was inevitable that they should write a cookbook or two and they did, and like most such books, these fl ew off the shelves, to be devoured by those who call this kind of reading gastronomic pornography.

But here comes the crunch: try and follow Ismail’s recipes and you will wonder what the fuss was all about. You will fi nd his recipes easy enough, but the result too is equally simple and, perhaps, less impressive than you might have thought. That

is because Ismail’s personality is missing – what he served up, and how, his witty conversation, his fl ourish and the magic that summed up his chimera-like persona can hardly be breathed into the experimentation you see before you on your kitchen counter. Proving not that you yourself are bad but that, ergo, the best mysteries of food remain just that: better to read.

Yet others translate their efforts into words, pages, memories, recipes, so much more effortlessly. Madhur Jaffrey, the actress and grande dame of cookbooks, turns out reams of pages almost like a one-woman factory, her anecdotes allowing us as much pleasure into our own childhoods of stolen mangoes cooling in buckets of water, as her recipes that actually work! And yet, when Madhur started off in London, she barely knew how to brew herself a cup of tea.

Ritu Dalmia, the eponymous diva of Diva (an iconic Italian restaurant in Delhi), who turned


a nation of dal-makhni diners into Italian gourmands, has just had her book on Italian cooking published – and what a delight it is! The girl-from-a-vegetarian-household who turned hobby chef writes just as brilliantly as she cooks, and it shows in her recipes, with the helpful hints and suggestions allowing you enough confi dence to replace one ingredient with another, one herb with another, without the unpredictability of results. Now, that is a cookbook!

on how to make an instant dhokla, turn out a meal for six in a half-hour, turning nervous newly-weds into almost faultless chefs with whom even the most demanding of mothers-in-law could fi nd nothing to cavil about.

How far we in India have travelled from the cookbooks from foreign shores that would land up in our bookstores, pretty with pictures, great as housewarming gifts, but oh, how impractical! The ingredients, especially back then, were hardly available. Besides, did anyone know what margarine was? Or shortening? But because we loved all food books, loved them almost more than our other books, we had shelves full of them: books on children’s party menus, fi ve-minute snacks, cocktails and main courses with pork, chicken, fi sh, seafood; we had the Reader’s Digest compendium that told us how to make the perfect brown

India has had its legions of food writers. Tarla Dalal and Nita Mehta have for years held the mythical hands of nervous brides and fi rst-time party-throwers through the mysteries of everything from mutton do-piyaza to paneer jalfrezi, from tacos to tiramisu, with such élan, you wonder at their industriousness. Their recipes are simple and, what’s more, adaptable: the Italian, Mexican, Greek, Thai, Burmese, Japanese are almost as easy as the Gujarati,

Chettinad, Syrian Christian, Punjabi, Bengali or Rajasthani. These aren’t pretty books to be read for sheer pleasure, but instructional, practical ones that tell you how to make a souffl é that will rise, and a caramel pudding that will set.

Only Sanjeev Kapoor does it with more fl ourish. The chef whose awkwardness showed when he fi rst made an appearance on television, may have shed some of that tentativeness, but he created a legion of millions of fans who craved for instruction


sauce; and prettily illustrated ones on how to make an upside down pineapple cake, muffi ns and breads.

It was the nineties before we saw the arrival of the Indian equivalents, the small handbooks of handy recipes for gulab jamun and rassogolla, for chole bhature and parathas and daals, rice and biryanis. That was when the cult started too of ambitious, but also lush, cookbooks, where photography was even more important than the recipes. And there we were, suddenly bewitched by how the tadka daals that we hadn’t even glanced at, now served up so appetisingly in their glossy pages. The meats glistened (with

a little help with brushes of oil) and just as suddenly, food stylist was a job description. Food photographers needed to be trained, artful devices were needed to make the food stand out, and it became impossible to imagine a cookbook without pictures.

The exciting thing was that foreign readers (and publishers) loved Indian cookbooks with just as much passion as we in India did. No longer put off by the exotic ingredients (or maybe the growing diaspora meant you could fi nd it anyway in all the little Indias springing across continents and cities), you couldn’t fi nd enough people to write them for you. Chefs – and

perhaps rightly so – were called in to contribute their secret recipes to collective efforts, or given over complete and quite lavish books to assemble, and they did it with aplomb.

Specialist publishing houses hunted out the names that counted for something from the world of Indian cuisine – sometimes they were professionals, such as Karen Anand or Rashmi Uday Singh or Camellia Panjabi who made the gourmet Indian restaurant fi rst possible in London; at other times, they were simply people who knew how to cook an awesome meal, throw an awesome party. Popular publishing houses looked at anthologies on food writing, and went to experts to deliver gourmet reads on travelogues that were based on the discovery of regional cuisines. Everyone found their own followers, but housewives who knew, swore

still by the fabulous recipes fi rst put together by those demi-gods of Indian cooking: the perniticky Jiggs Kalra and Digvijai Singh Sailana.

Our shelves swelled some more with hard bounds and paperbacks, and we read more and more about food (did we cook less and less in the bargain?), and as we surrendered to the pleasures of imagined gastronomic heavens, it became clear that there were other stars waiting on the horizon to be

launched: scholars and stars in equal measure, Kulsoom Begum and Salma Hussain edging off Monish Gujral and Rakhi Dasgupta, behind whom, I fi nd, turmeric-stained pages of frequently-visited books by Jasleen Dhamija and Megha Patil and Bilkees Latif. There, a book on Goan cooking, here a page-turner on royal recipes – and how could I miss the one on curries and rice?◆The author is a Senior Editor with the fi nancial daily Business Standard.

❛❛I feel the future lies in

going global… The Indian publishing industry is in for a major growth due to the large addition of

retail space and here the future lies in packaging the

material for the masses.

❜❜Pramod Kapoor

Roli Books


Educational PublishingA WEALTH OF OPPORTUNITIES

AJAY SHUKLA

No international publisher can afford to ignore the opportunities that are available in India. With one of the largest and fastest growing publishing markets in

the world, the country’s educational publishing is “Open for Business”.

The strides made by India in the education sector in its sixty two years

of independence have been impressive. Our literacy level, around eighteen per cent at the time of independence in 1947 rose to nearly sixty fi ve per cent in 2001. There is a sense of recognition and urgency amongst the policymakers that education at all levels through improved access, quality and relevance is critical to achieving India’s vision of being a knowledge society in the 21st century.

The government policy direction is focused on increasing the budget allocation for educational infrastructure development, reforms in the education sector to encourage private participation, enhanced quality through skill up-gradation and use of information and communication technology and inclusiveness through affi rmative actions to encourage ‘education for all’.

There are several success stories of the hugely successful Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for

All) initiative that has helped double the enrolments at the primary school level and new plan outlays to create world-class centres of higher learning like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).

Creation and dissemination of quality educational content is a key component of upgrading our knowledge assets, and the Indian book publishing industry has played a vital role in the creation and management of the


knowledge resources at all levels of the education system.

Thanks to the government policy to promote free fl ow of knowledge, there are no “regulatory” or “entry restrictions” to enter the educational book publishing market. As a result, it is estimated that there is a thriving population of around 10,000 global and local educational publishers who bring out over 50,000 new titles every year.

India has 22 offi cial languages, and books are published in all these recognised languages. However, it is estimated that nearly 50 per cent of all educational books are published in the English language.

With school and college enrolments growing between fi ve to eight per cent per annum, and an increasing propensity to buy textbooks, the industry is reporting growth in the range of

ten to twenty per cent per annum. Such growth trends are expected to continue in the next fi ve to ten year horizon with planned increases in education sector investments and budget allocations. These growth trends are amongst the highest anywhere in the world and hence, offer exceptional business opportunities for educational publishers. Incidentally, the size of Indian educational publishing market is estimated to be US$1.5 billion with school books constituting

US$ 1 billion (500 million in English) while higher education and professional segments are worth $ 500 million (300 million in English).

There are nearly one million schools, 400 universities and 16,000 colleges. However, since most colleges enjoy the freedom to determine the curriculum within broad norms, the education publishing output is highly customised with several regional/local titles for the same subject area.

Total school enrolments in India are 170 million, college enrolments 10.4 million and an estimated 2.5 million knowledge professionals (IT, Software). This makes India one of the largest education markets in the world. Affordability is the top consideration for textbook purchases due to India’s low GDP/per capita of US$3,800. Prices range between $2 and $10 and textbook prices are amongst the lowest the world! Most publishers align the production values appropriately through black and white printing, soft cover and cheaper paper to meet price. Professional books, especially medical, scientifi c and technical books forms the majority of these books, and are priced between $10 and $30 depending on the size and production specifi cations.

It is estimated that the educational publishing industry in India employs over 10,000 sales and distribution staff who promote the textbooks at schools,


colleges, retail bookstores and libraries.

Globally renowned educational publishers like Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, McGraw-Hill Education, Macmillan, Pearson Education, Wiley, Elsevier and Springer, to name a few, have had direct presence in India spanning several decades through reprints and special priced import editions. In recent years, these global publishers have invested heavily to build local editorial capabilities to develop world-standard titles through local authorship from globally renowned institutions like Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). Some of these titles are now fi nding markets in US, UK, Latin America, China, Australia and South-East Asia through translations and reprints.

India has arguably one of the fi nest copyright laws in the world. Improving enforcement is a key priority. Key concern areas are photocopying and piracy of best-selling textbooks and cases of plagiarism from established textbooks of international and local publishers by small-scale owner-managed publishers. However, with concerted legal action and enforcement through collective industry action, there is a general improvement in copyright protection for textbook publishers.

As mentioned earlier, there are no restrictions or entry barriers to enter the Indian publishing market, so several options exist to ‘export and import’ from India.

Publishers can assign rights to Indian publishers and Frankfurt, London and World Book Fairs in New Delhi are excellent venues to negotiate such rights. Given the prolifi c publishing output of Indian education publishers seeking reprint rights or translations of Indian original work is also gaining ground rapidly.

Given the complexity and diversity of India’s geography, language and education system, it is relatively easy way to enter the market through signing of sales and distribution arrangements with reputed publishers and distributors who can promote the list within the assigned territory (usually the Indian subcontinent).

Again, various options ranging

from liaison offi ce (branch), joint venture or 100 per cent subsidiary operation are perfectly within the rules and are typically the step foreign publishers take after testing the market through the previous two options.

As one of the world’s largest, fastest growing and ‘free-est’ publishing markets, no publisher of global ambition can afford to

exclude India as a top priority market. Given the high standards of the Indian education system especially in Engineering, Computer Science, Indian educational content including textbooks are rapidly gaining global acceptance.◆The author is presently with McGraw-Hill Education India.


India is one of the seven top countries in the world in terms of the number of books

published as per UNESCO’s statistics. Over 80,000 new books are published annually in India in 24 languages. While there is no dearth of good writers, both in the academic as well as the technical fi eld, there are authors in every language.

With more than a whopping 80,000 new books published every year, the publishing industry in India is one of the most vibrant. Spanning a host of languages, the country’s book publishers provide opportunities to little known, as well as, acknowledged and accomplished writers.

D.N. MALHOTRA

Publishing:Forward to Greater Heights

There was a time when Indian publishing was known to the world only through English books by known authors like R.K. Narayan, Bhabani Bhattacharjee, Kam1a Markandey and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas. Indeed, there was lack of knowledge about the total Indian publishing scenario, which witnesses publications from

a wide variety of authors and languages.

Sahitya Akademi, that is the Academy of Letters, encourages authors of all the languages and awards them honours on a yearly basis. This was established at the initiative of India’s fi rst Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Sahitya Akademi publishes books in 24 languages and has added four more from the tribal areas.

That provides a pan-Indian picture of Indian authorship and publishing.

The National Book Trust, established in 1954, organises book fairs in New Delhi and all over the country to propagate the cult of reading books. The National Book Trust also publishes in a number of languages and all good literature at very reasonable prices.

Indian publishers are provided facilities for training in publishing through a number of organizations. Firstly, the Institute of Book Publishing has been doing training programmes for publishers for a long time at a very high standard. Many publishers, not only from India but from a number of Asian countries, also benefi t.

India’s literacy rate of 65 per cent throws up a vast number of persons who are available to read books. Equally true are the tremendous opportunities for writers and publishers. It is no wonder then to fi nd that many international publishing houses are keen to set up their units in the country. ◆The author is a pioneer of paperback publishing in the country and the recipient of the prestigious UNESCO’s International Book Award, 1998.

❛❛Publishing is never ending

and needs continuous attention… The art of

publishing is dissemination – bringing books to the

readers. If the book is good (interesting content) and

the price reasonable, it will be a success. It will sell.

❜❜The late Tajeshwar Singh

Sage India


There is a growing interest in Mahatma Gandhi and his writings. This may

or may not be a backlash to the events of 9/11 or the hugely divisive culture that it appears to have spawned globally. Today, intolerance of other cultures or other ways of thinking appears to characterize human contact and relationships. The fear of the stranger, the unfamiliar. All this appears to have drawn people – common people – and more importantly, young people – to the words of ‘the naked fakir’, the fragile man with an open smile, who brought an empire to its knees with his words and

Mahatma Gandhi’s LegacyIt is ironic that the man who said, “My writings should be cremated with my body”, continues to be the most read, analysed and written about historical personality.

his deeds. Could this truly be possible? Could the power of conviction bring about change without violence, without the bullet, without anger, animosity or hatred?

Navajivan in Ahmedabad and Publications Division in Delhi are amongst the two major publishers of Mahatma Gandhi’s organised work. Founded by Mahatma Gandhi, Navajivan Trust was meant to create public opinion. During the Gandhi Centenary Year, Navajivan published the Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi at a subsidised price. The set was reprinted in Gandhi’s 125th birth anniversary year. To meet the demand of regional languages, Navajivan has embarked upon another ambitious project to publish Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi in regional languages. It has already published these books in Malayalam, Telegu and Bengali. They may be contacted at http://www.navajivantrust.org.

The Publications Division (http://www.publicationsdivision.nic.in) is one of the leading publishing houses of the country and the largest in public sector. It is a repository of books and

journals for highlighting matters of national importance and India’s rich and diverse cultural heritage. It holds the exclusive mandate for disseminating information through the production and sale of low priced, quality reading material on various aspects including the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Their work includes 100 volumes of Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, eight volumes of Mahatma: his life and times by D.G. Tendulkar, pictorial albums

on Gandhiji by B.R. Nanda and their recent work on Satyagraha by Savita Singh are of great importance.

National Book Trust, India (NBT), instituted by India’s fi rst Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, has also published a number of books on Mahatma Gandhi in English, Hindi and other regional languages.

– Editor

❛❛I read various newspapers

every day. I also read books everyday. I put them both in my head and let them

fi ght it out.

❜❜Mahatma Gandhi


“Why?” she asks in Mahashweta Devi’s book Why-Why Girl (Tulika). “Why? Why? Why?”

The Why-Why girl is the essence of today’s child, asking questions and demanding a hand in carving her destiny. This quest and insistence for an independent identity forms the core of contemporary Indian children’s literature.

While Devi’s protagonist demands to be educated, there are child characters conceiving their present and future too. A case in point is Sumati Sudharkar’s Paromita (Rupa) where a young girl in feudal Bengal fi ghts her family’s efforts to make her a child bride and instead gains an education!

No longer are books for children funny or mysterious. Today, they deal with subjects as varied as terrorism and disability. The face of children’s literature is changing rapidly.

Writing for ChildrenPARO ANAND

No, it is not all serious stuff, either. Stories revolving around adults, out to fulfi ll a child’s whimsy, also fi nd place here. In Young Uncle Comes to Town by Vandana Singh (Young Zubaan), the adventurous Young Uncle survives every obstacle, including stealing a hair from a tiger’s tail for a baby who ‘wanted it’. Yes, the child in India today ‘demands’ and more important, ‘gets’. The face

of Indian children’s literature is changing because our children, thanks to the social milieu, are also changing.

Content is not the only aspect to have improved in Indian books. There is a signifi cant leapfrog in quality of illustrations, design and production values as well. The audience is increasingly demanding and publishers are focusing their attention on a book’s visual appeal. A


book like The Princess Who Never Smiled CLR (Common Language Runtime) has excellent illustrations in folk-art style. Other well-known publishers like NBT (National Book Trust), CBT (Children’s Book Trust), Tulika and Tara have experimented with equally varied styles without

compromising on quality or reasonable pricing.

Certainly, literature for the young is growing older in the sense there is recognition of childhood over a longer period. ‘Childhood’ now extends to the ’tween – teen and young adults – and rightly so!

The Indian book scenario is well equipped with pre-school literature/concept books for 3-5 year olds, picture books for 6-7 years, light readers for 8-10 years and more serious/mixed fare for older readers.

One of my favourite stories is ‘Fire’ from Deepa Agarwal’s Not Just Girls (Rupa). I love it because of its ability to

confront reality head on and the questions that it raises. Not moralistic, not guilt-inducing, just gently prodding the reader to think, that’s all. Similarly, there are books dealing with failings and foibles of human beings rather than perfection of gods and evilness of demons. Anveshi’s title Chaakkupranthan by Jayasree Kalathil deals with

diffi cult issues such as how we treat people with mental illness, death, depression and alcoholism. But the one who brings about a change, or at least tries to, is a little girl who is the main protagonist.

Such stories go a long way in empowering the young reader to follow his/her heart and stand up for what she/


he knows is right, against all odds. In Assamese, a book titled Ekhon Circus Ashisil (A Circus Came) by Bandita Phukan, has a group of children, buffeted by the strains of growing up, visiting a circus. The beautiful Armani Champar Gaachi (The Armenian Champak Tree) by Mahashweta Devi weaves a story around the life of a little boy and his trusting, mother in

Behrampore, bringing to the reader, through translation, a culture we may otherwise never learn about.

Many mystery stories also abound in Bengali literature. The sci-fi Paramaanu Lokadalli (In the world of atom) by Rajashekhara Bhusanurmatha is about a girl, her brother and their dog venturing into

an atomic city. Then there is humour in the works of Satyajit Ray and Sukumar Ray, and in Kuttichathan by V. Narasimhan (Tamil). There are also new titles like Adbhut 14000 Thi Vadhu Banti Vartao by Chandra Trivedi or Dabbuji ka Khazana (The Treasures of Dabbu) by Abid Surti in Gujarati and Anushka Ravishankar’s Moin and the Monster (Puffi n).

Anthologies are being published by many publishers. Scholastic (India) is bringing out a successful series of themed collections on humour, fantasy, science fi ction as well as children’s own writings in For Kids by Kids. Rupa brings out a series edited by celebrated author, Ruskin Bond and Katha has published the Rosalind Wilson series.

Moral and folk stories have long been the backbone of Indian children’s literature and to an extent, continue to be so. While most of these are retold, some publishers have experimented with fresher forms.

The future is indeed bright for children’s literature in India, and with publishers becoming more experimental in terms of content and illustrations; children should have a lot of reading to look forward to.◆The author has written a number of books for children.


The Indian Print IndustryVIREN CHHABRA

From many accounts India’s print market is poised to grow at a faster rate than India’s GNP growth-rate! A recent study by Pira International: PRIMIR World Wide Market for Print also projects

India’s world market ranking from twelfth position in 2006 to eighth by 2011.

The printing industry in India has assumed growing signifi cance during the last decade and is one of the biggest and fastest growing sectors in

India. There are more than 150,000 printing presses in active operation all over the country with 1.3 million work force. There are eighteen printing engineering colleges, several diploma schools and many print training institutions.

The growth of the Indian printing industry is, however, limited to major metropolitan cities and the fruits of the latest technologies have not percolated down to a large majority of India’s small and medium size printers in smaller towns yet.

It has recently been announced the Government of India plans to create fourteen world class universities in India, which would be multi-faculty including social sciences, humanities, engineering


production is completed more rapidly.

Indian printing companies are offering greater fl exibility in the processing of a large variety of substrates, inks and methods of printing fi nishing. There is a trend for all print products to employ multicolor as well as decorative and special colors. In addition, run lengths are getting shorter, the greatest chance of growth lies in the market for small, color work with a fast turn-around time. The use of computer to fi lm, computer to plate and computer to press systems is already widespread and is under going continuous growth. The Printing Industry is currently experiencing many transitions in the form of ‘Digital Printing’.

Digital technology, economic restructuring global competition, market changes, emerging new media and other market forces are combining to dramatically transform the operating environment of the printing industry and to make it world class. The quality of printing particularly colour has improved and matches offset quality and an increasing number of printers are installing digital production machines and catering to print on demand and other advantages offered by the latest state-of-the-art digital press.◆The author was President, All India Federation of Master Printers.

technology etc., in collaboration with international universities. This is likely to give an even greater fi llip to the Indian printing industry.

Increasing number of printers in India are concentrating on exports and are also winning awards for excellence. Indian

export of print materials grew from US$ 9.63 million in 1991-92 to US$ 255.78 million in 2006-07.

Printing processes are being increasingly controlled and adjusted electronically, which leads to consistent high quality and greater productivity. Digital workfl ow also means that


Copyright is a legal right given to creators of literary works. Copyright ensures safeguards of the rights of authors over their creations, thereby protecting and rewarding creativity.

If, however, copyright protection is applied rigidly, it can hamper progress of that society. Therefore, copyright laws are enacted with necessary exceptions and limitations to ensure that a balance is maintained between the interests of the creators and of the community.

Copyright Laws in IndiaAs India races ahead towards globalization, creativity in all forms of arts needs to be protected from multiple copyright violations. Though the copyright laws of the country are stringent, affected bodies need to resort to collective management of copyright.

To strike an appropriate and viable balance between the rights of the copyright owners and the interests of the society, there are exceptions in the law. Many types of exploitation of work, which are for social purposes, such as education, religious ceremonies, and so on, are exempted from the operation of the rights granted in the Act. Copyright Act confers upon the owner of the work a bundle of exclusive rights which enables him to get fi nancial benefi t by exercising rights in reproduction, communication to public, translation, publication, assignment etc. If any of these acts relating to the work, if carried out by a person other than the owner without a license from the owner or a competent authority under the Act, it constitutes infringement of copyright in the work.

The Copyright Act, 1957 protects original literary work from unauthorized uses. Unlike the case with patents, copyright protects the expressions and not the ideas. There is no copyright in an idea. Copyright does not ordinarily protect titles by themselves or ideas or concepts. To get the protection of copyright, a work must be original. “Work of joint authorship” means a work produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of one author is not distinct from the other. Copyright subsists throughout India in original literary works. Ordinarily the author is the fi rst owner of copyright in a work. In the case of a government

work, government shall be the fi rst owner of the copyright. In the case of a work by public undertaking, such public undertaking shall be the fi rst owner of the copyright.

In the case of a literary work made by the author in the course of his employment by the proprietor of a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical under a contract of service or apprenticeship, for the purpose of publication in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, the said proprietor shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the fi rst owner of the copyright, but in all other respects the author shall be the fi rst owner of the copyright in the work.

The owner of the copyright in an existing work or the prospective owner of the copyright in a future work may assign to any person

the copyright either wholly or partially. It shall be in writing signed by the assignor or by his duly authorised agent where the assignee does not exercise the rights assigned to him within a period of one year from the date of assignment, the assignment in respect of such rights shall be deemed to have lapsed after the expiry of the said period unless otherwise specifi ed in the assignment. If the period of assignment is not stated, it shall be deemed to be fi ve years from the date of assignment. If the territorial extent of assignment of the rights is not specifi ed, it shall be presumed to extend within the whole of India.

The author of a work may relinquish all or any of the rights comprising the copyright in the work by giving notice in the prescribed form to the Registrar of Copyrights. The rights vary according to the class of work. All the rights of the original work apply to a translation also. The right of reproduction commonly means that no person shall make one or more copies of a work or of a substantial part of it in any material form without the permission of the copyright owner. The most common kind of reproduction is printing an edition of a work. A person cannot translate a work enjoying copyright without the permission of the copyright owner. Copyright comes into existence as soon as a work is created and no formality is required to be completed for acquiring copyright. The entries made in the Register of Copyrights serve as prima-facie


evidence in the court of law. The Copyright Offi ce has been set up to provide registration facilities to all types of works.

Both published and unpublished works can be registered. Copyright in works published before the Copyright Act, 1957 came in force, can also be registered, provided the works still enjoy copyright. When a work has been registered as unpublished and is subsequently published, the applicant may apply for changes in particulars entered in the Register of Copyright in Form V with prescribed fee. Copyright is protected for a limited period of time. The term of protection for copyright in literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works is life and 60 years

The government has set up a Copyright Enforcement Advisory Council (CEAC) to review the progress of enforcement of Copyright Act periodically and to advise the government

regarding measures for improving the enforcement of the Act. All the State governments and Union Territories have set up Enforcement Cells for this purpose and they have also appointed Nodal Offi cers to deal with enforcement issues. There are no special courts for copyright cases. The regular courts try these cases. The Copyright Act provides for a quasi-judicial body called the Copyright Board for adjudicating certain kinds of copyright cases. The Registrar of Copyrights has the powers of a civil court when trying a suit under the Code of Civil Procedure.

Copyright of nationals of countries who are members of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Universal Copyright Convention and the TRIPS Agreement are protected in India through the International Copyright Order. To secure protection to Indian works

in foreign countries, India has become a member of the international conventions on copyright and neighbouring (related) rights.

Collective administration of copyright is a concept where management and protection of copyright in works are undertaken by a society of owners of such works. Obviously no owner of copyright in any work can keep track of all the uses others make of his work. When one becomes a member of a national copyright society, that society because of its organisational facilities and strength, is able to keep a better vigil over the uses made of that work throughout the country and collect due royalties from the users of those works. A copyright society is a registered collective administration society. Such a society is formed by copyright owners. There are registered copyright societies in India. In many cases, it is necessary to

obtain licences from more than one society.

The author of a work has the right to claim authorship of the work and to restrain or claim damages in respect of any distortion. Moral rights are available to the authors even after the economic rights are assigned. The moral rights are independent of the author’s copyright and remains with him even after assignment of the copyright. Failure to display a work or to display it to the satisfaction of the author shall not be deemed to be an infringement of the moral rights of the author. If a person permits for profi t any place to be used for the communication of a work to the public, where such communication constitutes an infringement of the copyright in the work he will be deemed to have committed an offence under the Copyright Act.

A copyright owner can take legal action against any person who infringes the copyright in

the work. The District Court concerned has the jurisdiction in civil suits regarding copyright infringement. Where, in the case of a literary work, a name purporting to be that of the author or the publisher appears on copies of the work as published, it be presumed, to be the author or the publisher of the work Where any person claiming to be the owner of copyright threatens other person with a legal proceedings, the aggrieved may institute a declaratory suit that the alleged infringement was an infringement.

Knowing infringement of copyright is a criminal offence. Copyright infringement is a cognizable offence. A police offi cer, not below the rank of sub inspector, may seize without warrant, all copies of the work. The Court may order delivery to the owner of the copyright all such copies or plates. Every person, who at the time the offence was committed, was in charge of the conduct of business of the company, as well as the company shall be guilty of such offence. No court, inferior to that of a Metropolitan Magistrate or a Judicial Magistrate of the fi rst class, shall try any offence under the Copyright Act. ◆Extracted from the Handbook of Copyright Law, Ministry of Human Resources Development, Copyright Division, Government of India.


New DelhiWorld Book Fair

NUZHAT HASSAN

For over three decades, the New Delhi World Book Fair has been bridging the gap between publishers and readers. The largest book fair in the Afro-Asian region, it has acquired the status of a ‘treasure trove’ for book lovers all over the world.

The New Delhi World Book Fair (NDWBF), organised by the National Book Trust, has emerged as the largest book fair in the Afro-Asian region

INDIA PERSPECTIVES SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008 64

The fi rst NDWBF was held in 1972 at Windsor Place, in the heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, and had nearly 200 participants from India and abroad. However, it was in 1976 that NDWBF acquired a full fl edged professional look as it moved to the sprawling complex of Pragati Maidan, or the Exhibition Grounds. From 1976, NDWBF became a biennial affair. In 2006, it had 1,293, participants which has kept increasing every year and has also begun to attract foreign exhibitors.

While some of the major international book fairs, are generally speaking, rights-oriented, NDWBF has emerged as a platform for national and international publishers and as an opportunity for the general reader and intellectuals alike to browse through a canopic range of titles.

It has also become the interface between all authors, publishers, exhibitors, translators, editors, literary agents from India and abroad.

NDWBF introduced the Guest of Honour concept in 2008 with Russia as the fi rst Guest of Honour country.

The 19th edition of NDWBF will be held from January 30 to February 7, 2010 at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. ◆The author is Director, National Book Trust.

Documents

India Perspectives 10/2008