Let the world read us

Perhaps there are some signs that the dreary state of English-language books in India is about to change.

Perhaps there are some signs that the dreary state of English-language books in India is about to change. The lack of imagination in the major publishing houses is certainly a significant contributor to this dreariness, but 2006 is likely to see some welcome upheavals. The world’s largest books publisher, Bertelsmann, will launch its Indian operation: Random House India; Sonny Mehta, the head of Bertelsmann’s flagship publishing house in New York, is personally involved in the project, and the company is likely to make strenuous attempts to overturn the existing insularity of corporate publishing in India – and the unimpressive sales figures that are its result. The recent reshuffle at HarperCollins, which included the appointment of a new CEO, may have been a pre-emptive response to the new competition, or just another sign of international publishers’ rising expectations of publishing in India; either way, 2006 will be a year of change.

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I hope the change is radical. So far, big Indian publishers have largely failed to access the immense energy of what is happening in our cities; and they now need to think harder about what purpose the book serves in India today, and what it is exactly they are seeking to “publish” — or “make public”. They need to build networks that are flatter and more tentacular, less genteel and more electronic; better placed, in sum, to capture the vast waves of thought, conversation and affect that are sweeping the country in these heady times.

One of the issues I hope publishers will address as they face the new climate of 2006 is that of translation. The large English-language publishers in India produce more titles translated from Spanish or Portuguese than they do from Punjabi or Hindi; and they make almost no effort to get their successful English-language titles translated into other Indian languages. Everything is therefore condemned to parochialism. If we saw simultaneous launches of books in several languages (just as Europe often sees books launched almost simultaneously in English, French and German), they would generate much larger debates, transcending region and class – and publishers, incidentally, could make a lot more money.

The year 2006 is also likely to see the continuation of the quiet but encouraging diversification of fiction writing in India. “Genre fiction” — thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, graphic novels, etc — has already established itself: 2005 opened with Vikas Swarup’s best-selling quiz-show thriller, Q&A, and closed with Samit Basu’s The Manticore’s Secret, the sequel to his lively 2004 fantasy, The Simoqin Prophecies. Inspired, perhaps, by these and other recent genre trailblazers like Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel, Corridor, a number of writers are working on further explorations of such forms that we’ll get to see in 2006 and the years following. These are positive signs. It’s good to see writers rejecting the high seriousness with which the country is usually discussed, and finding fresher tones; it’s good that the idea of this continent seems to be able to sustain more and more stories. Moreover, in these times when reality seems unable to generate any grand political vision to compete with total neo-liberal capitalism, it is often fantasy that produces the most sophisticated and subversive literature; and perhaps these fresh forms will eventually introduce a new critical edge to fiction in India, as they have elsewhere.

But a lot more needs to happen; for fiction alone is inadequate to deal with the enormous changes that are happening all around us. It is really in the area of quality non-fiction that our writers and publishers need to deliver a whole lot more. Look at the questions that haunt our days — Do we have any idea how to live in cities of 50 million people? Is a country that is used to thinking of itself as a victim at all prepared for the era of its own global rapacious dominance? — We have woefully little non-fiction writing that can help us respond to such questions, and this is the most pressing need that writers and publishers must now fulfil. We need more history, more imaginative studies of our cities and ways of life, more unheard-of utopias — in short we need a much richer set of resources from which to think through this country’s past and its future. This cannot be satisfied simply by importing more books; for India now faces unique and unprecedented challenges that can only be addressed by a serious local culture of thinking, writing and discussion.

These are heavy demands to make on a year. But big things are afloat, and maybe they will happen. Happy reading.

Rana Dasgupta is author of Tokyo Cancelled