Sahitya Akademi | Jaya's blog

Literati: “For the price of a book…” ( 13 September 2015)

My monthly column, Literati, in the Hindu Literary Review was published online ( 12 September 2015) and will be in print ( 13 September 2015). Here is the http://www.thehindu.com/books/literary-review/jaya-bhattacharji-rose-on-the-hunger-for-books-in-india/article7641333.ece. I am also c&p the text below.

How can you argue with the low prices, especially in a nation where such a hunger for books exists?

This year the Delhi Book Fair held at Pragati Maidan was held on a much smaller scale than previous years. It was dominated by stalls put up by publishers of school textbooks. Government institutions were represented by the National Book Trust, Sahitya Akademi and Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts with their reasonably priced publications in many Indian languages and dialects. Religious organisations too displayed their publications, some of which were being distributed free. Most of the larger publishing houses were conspicuous by their absence (preparing for the next edition of the World Book Fair 2016).

But it was the smaller stalls of remaindered books that were fascinating. These are books that are scheduled for

Visitors having a close look at the books available at the 21st Delhi Book Fair at Pragati Maidan, in New Delhi in August, 2015. Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma ( The Hindu)

pulping in other book markets and are also disposed off by weight. These titles are brought into local markets, usually priced very low. Three books for Rs.100 or for Rs. 500, depending upon their condition and interest in the book or author. It is not unusual to find books with labels from overseas school libraries and institutions, personal inscriptions or treasures like the one Jairaj Singh, a journalist, found at the Delhi Book Fair — an autographed first edition of Kingsley Amis’ Memoirs for Rs. 50 only.

People noodle through these stalls, trailing bags on wheels. Within a limited budget it is possible to acquire a pile of books till the next book fair comes around. It is to these remaindered stalls that the maximum number of buyers— teachers, parents, school children, students, librarians — go. In fact, the presence of these stalls, piled high with books, thrown in an untidy heap, was frowned upon by established publishers at the World Book Fair, February 2015. But how can you argue with the low prices, especially in a nation where such a hunger for books exists? This is borne out by the Amazon India spokesperson who says, “the number of books sold per day has grown by 1400 per cent over the past two years. Over 2500 sellers today offer lakhs of books to their customers across India on amazon.in. The portal has the largest online selection of books in India across languages, including three major regional languages — Hindi, Tamil and Kannada — which have found a huge audience, especially in non-metro cities where regional language books have featured in the top 10 bestsellers list. Over 50 per cent of the orders are coming from outside of the top eight cities.” According to informed sources, online book portals in India are growing at the rate of 12 to 15 per cent per annum.

In August 2015, the longlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction was revealed. It is a fabulously diverse list, exciting for the range of debut and experienced writers, geographical regions, varied writing styles and publishers it showcases. A handful, such as Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter, Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, Marilynne Robinson’s Lila and Anne Enright’s The Green Road are readily available. But try getting hold of Leila Lalami’s The Moor’s Sigh, Chigozi Obioma’s The Fishermen or Anna Smaill’s The Chimes — you either have to pay for it online (there seems to be no fixed price for the edition even on the same portal, so a comparison of prices is advisable) or bide your time till it is available at a brick-and-mortar bookshop. Recently, there have been discussions on ebook sales plateauing, primarily because of price fluctuation and smartphones replacing ereaders. (“The plot may be unravelling for e-books” Aimee Picchi, CBS News, 4 September 2015, http://cbsn.ws/1XJDgCf )

This is a trend apparent in India too, as is evident with the launch of the non-profit trust Pratham Books’ open source digital platform, Storyweaver (https://storyweaver.org.in/ ). It features 800 stories in 26 languages (14 Indian and 12 international languages), with an image repository of over 2,000 images. It can be viewed on desktop computers, laptops, tablets or mobile phones. Users will be able to read, download, translate, create, print and publish new stories through the platform using the Creative Commons licensed content on the site. Similarly, Daily Hunt (http://dailyhunt.in/ ) offers news, free and some nominally priced books, in 12 languages and has had 2.3 billion views a month.

Freshly published print books continue to be unaffordable for many readers in India, as is evident from the rush to buy cheaply priced, sometimes weathered, remaindered books. Yet, it is significant to note that most Indians, despite being economically challenged, possess a handheld device. Hence, innovative ways of bringing together literature and technology to whet a ferocious book appetite at affordable prices have to be explored. It is also a tremendous way of giving neo-literates a chance to practice their literacy too, instead of it stagnating. As Amartya Sen says in his introduction to The Country of First Boys “…having an educated …population can be a major contributor to enhancing steady and sustainable economic growth.”

12 September 2015

Literati – “A look at the world of books, publishing and writers” ( 2 June 2014)

02 06 , 2014 1 Comment

My monthly column, Literati, in the Hindu Literary Review was published online ( 31 May 2014) and in print ( 1 June 2014). Here is the url http://www.thehindu.com/books/literary-review/literati/article6069748.ece?textsize=small&test=2 . I am also c&p the text below.

In translation

I am reading a terrific cluster of books — Rakhshanda Jalil’s A Literary History of the Progressive Writer’s Movement in Urdu (OUP); A Rebel and her Cause: The life of Dr Rashid Jahan, (Women Unlimited); and two simultaneous publications of the English translation of Angaarey — nine stories and a play put together in Urdu by Sajjad Zahir in 1932 (Rupa Publications and Penguin Books). Angaarey includes contributions by PWM members such as Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmuduzzafar. As Nadira Babbar, Sajjad Zahir’s daughter says in her introduction to the Rupa edition: “The young group of writers of Angaarey challenged not just social orthodoxy but also traditional literary narratives and techniques. In an attempt to represent the individual mind and its struggle, they ushered in the narrative technique known as the stream of consciousness which was then new to the contemporary literary scene and continues to be significant in literature even today. …they saw art as a means of social reform.” She says that her father did not consider the writing of Angaarey and the subsequent problems they faced as any kind of hardship or sacrifice; rather “it provided them with the opportunity of expressing truths simply felt and clearly articulated.” It is curious that at a time when publishers worry about the future of the industry, there are two translations of the same book from two different publishers.

Translations are a way to discover a new socio-cultural and literary landscape. Last month, the English translation of Joel Dicker’s debut novel The Harry Quebert Affair (MacLehose Press), which has created one of the biggest stirs in publishing, was released. A gripping thriller, originally in French, it has sold over two million copies in other languages. A look at some other notable translations published recently:

Mikhail Shashkin’s disturbing but very readable Maidenhair (Open Letter), translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz, about asylum-seekers in Switzerland.

Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Quesadillas (And Other Stories) translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey is about 1980s Mexico.

Roberto Bolano’s The Insufferable Gaucho (Picador), a collection of short stories, translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews.

There is a range of European writers to be discovered in English translation on the Seagull Books list, Indian regional language writers from Sahitya Akademi, NBT, Penguin Books India, OUP, HarperCollins, Zubaan, Hachette, Navayana, Stree Samya, and Yatra Books.

Oxford University Press’s Indian Writing programme and the Oxford Novellas series are broader in their scope including works translated from Dogri and Konkani and looking at scripts from Bhili and Tulu.

Translations allow writers of the original language to be comfortable in their own idiom, socio-political milieu without carrying the baggage of other literary discourses. Translated literature is of interest to scholars for its cultural and literary value and, as Mini Krishnan, Series Editor, Oxford Novellas, writes, “the distinctive way they carry the memories and histories of those who use them”. Making the rich content available is what takes precedence. Within this context, debates about the ethics of publishing a translation such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 prose translation of Beowulf (HarperCollins), 88 years later, seem to be largely ignored though Tolkein described it as being “hardly to my liking”.

***

Linguistic maps available at http://www.muturzikin.com/ show the vast number of languages that exist apart from English. In the seven states of northeast of India alone there are 42 documented languages. Reports such as http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/ all indicate that content languages (all though with strong literary traditions) such as Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Punjabi and even Irish are used by less than one per cent of websites. Google India estimates that the next 300 million users from India won’t use English. It isn’t surprising then to discover that Google announced the acquisition of Word Lens, an app which can translate a number of different languages in real time. For now users can translate between English and Portuguese, German, Italian, French, Russian, and Spanish. Indian languages may be underrepresented on the Internet but, with digital media support and the rapid acceptance of unicode, an encoding which supports Indic fonts, translations will become easier. Soon apps such as Word Lens may expand to include other languages, probably even circumventing the need of publishers to translate texts.

National Book Promotion Policy: Where Are We? ( Nov 2011)

01 08 , 2013 No Comments

( My comments on the Indian Government’s National Book Promotion Policy. This is from my column, PubSpeak, in BusinessWorld, 18 Nov 2011. The original url is: http://www.businessworld.in/en/storypage/-/bw/national-book-promotion-policy-where-are-we/r361073.37487/page/0 )

The Indian government’s National Book Promotion Policy enshrines a number of good ideas that are bound to have a positive impact on the publishing industry

The demand for books is being propelled by India’s 8.8 per cent growth in 2010 and the reading habits of the burgeoning Indian middle class. Publishers forecast India will be the biggest English language book-buying market in the world. Today, it is the third largest after the US and the UK; but ahead of major Asian competitors such as China and Japan. The good news is that India is poised on the cusp of a great educational revolution. Today, if one averages seven textbooks per literate student, the agencies of the Indian government print 1.8 billion books per year. Plus another two billion exercise notebooks. The downside however, is that more than seven million children in India drop out from schools. And all they need is a book. For that to happen, these books have to be created. In India, the government has made a commitment of $7.56 billion every year for a period of five years and has set aside $3.33 billion for 2010-11. Today, the demand drivers for education are based on the fact that it’s a young nation which has a population of 400 million between the age group of 5 to 24. Of this, 220 million attend schools and colleges. The “guesstimate” for the Indian book publishing is US$1.9 billion. Of this, educational books and higher educational books dominate 60 per cent of the market share. Some of the other prominent segments or lists are trade/fiction, business and dictionaries. There are 19,000 publishers in the country. Trade books account for 30 per cent of output by value (at Rs 4,200 crore), of which local publishing makes Rs 700 crore. Trade in English-language publishing-including fiction, non-fiction, and textbooks-is equivalent to Rs 9,800 crore of the total value of Rs 14,000 crore.

These are only some of the statistics that are being bandied about the Indian publishing industry. A publishing eco-system in any territory is vast and complicated. The verticals in it are not as clear as in any other industry, but this unique interdependence between different departments in a publishing firm is also its strength. Editors are dependent upon sales and marketing departments to keep them informed about reading trends in the market and bookstores and if there is any growing demand. Similarly, editors are able to commission and select manuscripts that not only cater to existing demands, but anticipate and predict future trends. In order to allow for such experiments to happen, editors and their publishing houses are dependent upon decisions like the recent Government of India’s draft National Book Promotion policy. Policies, such as these, help in creating and sustaining new markets which in turn, help in the growth of the industry.

For this first article in a series devoted to the publishing industry (domestic and international), its various aspects and the business thereof, I will focus on the National Book Promotion Policy. There are some good ideas enshrined in the policy that are bound to have a positive impact on the industry. For instance, strengthening the library movement; making books available for the differently-abled, women, children and in the rural areas; collecting authentic statistics about books and publishing; promotion of reading habit; fostering a translation programme; offering reasonable postal rates and elimination/reduction of duties and finally, capitalising upon technological changes.

In order to be effective and link publishers with the intended readership, there must be a census of the book industry in India, beginning with who is originating, to who is writing, and who is reading. If this is undertaken first, it will determine everything else. Equally, we need to study what our national institutions such as the National Library, NBT, NCERT, Raja Ram Mohun Roy Foundation, Sahitya Akademi etc. achieved in all these years. Similar initiatives like this have been implemented with a fair degree of success in countries such as Australia, Singapore and Canada. Australia has a grants system at national and state levels and they have proved very beneficial. Writers compete for grants under criteria that do not exclude emerging writers. In India, project grants awarded on merit and timelines (for the author) would greatly assist the development of works and writers.

The Canadian Council is one example of where this has been achieved successfully. I will quote (with permission) an excerpt from an e-mail that I received from Shauna Singh Baldwin. My experience with a great National Book Promotion Policy that works is the Canadian System. The Canada Council is an independent agency that makes grants to writers from tax money. I have served three times on the grant juries for writers, and found them fabulously objective. They have three grants — to emerging, mid-career and advanced writers. The Canada Council administers the Governor General’s prizes (like the Sahitya Akademi) for the past 75 years and having served on that jury in 2008 and read 137 novels submitted by publishers, I can tell you GG award money is hard won. The Canada Council also funds publishers and what is really important as an example to India: translators in other countries. For instance, my novels were published in Dutch by de Geuss in Holland under a grant from the Canada Council. The Canada Council pays for writers’ honorariums at readings – not a lot, but enough to promote the concept of respect for the artist. As you know, if you don’t pay for work, you won’t value it.

It is a combination of various kinds of initiatives that will strengthen the publishing eco-system in India and make it an integral part of the global publishing industry. Different aspects of this industry will be discussed in subsequent articles. – See more at: http://www.businessworld.in/en/storypage/-/bw/national-book-promotion-policy-where-are-we/r361073.37487/page/0#sthash.eILAfoem.dpuf

Sahitya Akademi Posts

Literati: “For the price of a book…” ( 13 September 2015)

Literati – “A look at the world of books, publishing and writers” ( 2 June 2014)

National Book Promotion Policy: Where Are We? ( Nov 2011)

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