The Publishing Horizon

Indian fiction market in English - going from back-list to front-list?

So says Thomas Abraham, head of Hachette India.

Commercial fiction will be a significant genre in India. “We may not have a first- mover advantage but the market is changing from being a backlist one to a frontlist one,” said Mr Abraham. At 60-40, the ratio in favour of backlists (classics or bestsellers), India still compares badly to the rest of the world where 75-80 per cent of the business comes from new books. Mr Abraham also feels pricing, which hasn’t changed in a few years, will need to be raised steadily.

The mega promotion (author tours, publicity hype, and awards won by the authors) the front-list fiction titles in recent years might well be driving this trend.

The report also adds,

The Indian business under Hachette UK is already in discussion with authors and will be launching 20-25 books in 2009, with the full programme bringing out 75-80 titles a year by 2010, said Mr Thomas Abraham, Managing Director, Hachette Book Publishing India.

How to write a novel

Amitava Kumar explains how he went about writing his novel, Home Products - just published by Picador India.

But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

.......

And I began to write various opening lines. In my mind there was an image of a man sitting in a room in a prison near Patna. When he gets out, he would like to make a film. But nothing I wrote promised a swift entry into a fictional world that already existed, and I went over the same lines for at least a fortnight without any success.

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Outlook reviewed the book and Jai Arjun Singh interviewed Amitava Kumar recently.

Who publishes English poetry in India?

Adil Jussawalla, poet and critic, asks who published English poetry in India then (1950s to 1980s) and who does so now.

But let's talk, once again, not about who reads poets but who publishes them. Between 1952 and 1982, Nissim Ezekiel brought out seven books of poems. How many people know that he paid for five of them to be published? Agha Shahid Ali paid for his first two books to be published. So did Suniti Namjoshi and Meena Alexander. Gopal Honnalgere was not alone in having to pay for practically all his nine books.

My point in mentioning a few names from a long list — it includes me — is not to single them out as pathetic examples of what the public calls "vanity publishing", but to show that such a form of publishing has been vital to the survival and growth of many of our best-known poets.

After all, the marketing possibilities of Indian fiction in English changed after Midnight's Children, but not those, perceptibly, of poetry. The publishing scene here would be inconceivable and greatly impoverished if poets didn't have to publish themselves. So would the history of Indian poetry in post-Independence India.

It's quite likely, for instance, that Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri, now a New York Review of Books classic, would have remained an uncollected poem-sequence, like The Boatride, available only in anthologies, had not a group of poets formed Clearing House in the mid-seventies.

If my claim sounds bizarre, consider this: Those who gain from this state of affairs, apart from poets, are those who believe that poetry doesn't sell for our big publishers. The anthologies they publish are filled with work that first saw the light of day in books they rejected as bad investments, but which, when used selectively in anthologies, brought them steady profits. Isn't it time publishers changed their line from 'Poetry doesn't sell' to 'Poetry doesn't sell but somehow the poetry we publish in our anthologies sells very well indeed?'

The "IIT genre" in Indian publishing

Jai Arjun Singh interviews Amitabha Bagchi, ex IITian, currently an assistant professor at IIT Delhi about his debut novel - Above Average, set in IIT. This's the second novel in the "IIT genre" following Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone.

Was it frustrating to be “scooped” by Chetan Bhagat?
To an extent, but it doesn’t really matter as long as people are buying and appreciating my book. I had finished the first draft by early 2004 and was looking for a publisher when a friend called and told me that Chattu [Chetan Bhagat, who was a year senior to Bagchi in IIT] had a book out.

My heart sank, but in a way it’s good that it’s taken this long for me to get published because there’s been no head-to-head competition with Five Point Someone.

Was Above Average an IIT book from the outset?
No, it began as the story of a guitarist, set in Mayur Vihar. When I began writing it I realised I had to bring IIT into it to provide a concentrated setting for all my characters and their aspirations.

There’s a lot of reflection about the things you dream about when you are young and what eventually becomes of them.

Some of the disappointments and setbacks are my own. The writing process was therapeutic for me. When I was younger I had no model for dealing with failure, and I resolved some of that while writing this story.

Also, around the same time, I realised that the trajectories of many of my friends’ post-college lives were similar to mine — they were faced with the same questions, and I worked some of those issues in through the various characters.

My editor was looking to market it as an IIT book, which made me a bit uncomfortable, but at one point she told me, “Amitabha, there’s a deep sadness in this book.” And I said to her, “Yes! You’ve finally got it!” (guffaws).

The book’s website (http://aboveaveragebook.com/) has a page with “deleted scenes” from the book. Your idea?
Yes, it’s like the extras you get on a DVD. When my editor asked me to tighten up the book, I took a few passages out, and now I’m putting those up on the site.

The Internet is wonderful that way — it gives one the opportunity to share a lot of material around the book. I’ve also uploaded an audio clip of me reading from the book and [music director/guitarist] Pankaj Awasthi performing alongside.

A German view of English fiction from India

Claudia Kramatschek, a german literary critic, writing for a German audience about the English language fiction segment of the Indian book industry, says

These are thrilling times for all things literary, and the excitement is tangible to anyone spending time in India these days and speaking with writers, publishers and literary critics about recent developments and tendencies in book publishing. For India's breakneck transformation of recent years has made itself felt in the world of publishing as well, if only indirectly.

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Here in Germany, "Indian literature" is still perceived through a distorting lens. Today, just as earlier, German reception is conditioned by the works of English-language authors, many of whom live abroad. On the Indian book market, all of these writers enjoy advantages about which their colleagues writing in regional languages can only dream. This is all the more absurd once we realize that popular authors writing in Hindi or Bengali have for their part attained sales figures and readerships that seem almost inconceivably large to their English-language colleagues. In terms of reader numbers, English-language Indian literature plays an extremely limited role on the Indian book market.

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But a younger generation of authors now appears to have emerged in the English-language literary sector whose common development manifests a kind of caesura. All are between 25 and 35 years of age – a fact while in and of itself represents a minor revolution in a country where the aura of the senior writer has always shaped the literary canon. All came of age in an India where access to the wider world was available via mouseclick, and all feel at home within the most divergent cultures – and they play with this intercultural network in their literary work as well. At the same time, nonetheless, they are rooted in India to an astonishing degree, and they write about this sense of connection in new and innovative – and at times surprising - ways. A marked turn toward localism is observable, meaning toward the microcosmos of one's own lived world, to the history of the individual towns where these authors lead their lives. In literary terms, this return is associated with an opening toward genre literature and toward what might be referred to as the small form.

Some of the writers mentioned include

Altaf Tyrewala, whose debut novel "No God in Sight" has also recently appeared in German. Just 170 pages in length, the slender novel is a slap in the face to the tradition of the "Great Indian Novel", the favoured form of Anglo-Indian literature.

...

With "Corridor", Sarnath Banerjee, who was born in Calcutta in 1972 and lives in Delhi, for example, has not only published India's first graphic novel. In it, he combines the motif of city life with a loving search for traces among the local aromas and social milieus which he perceives as doomed to perish in the wake of India's globalisation and homogenisation.

...

Chetan Bhagat, born in Delhi in 1974, has captured the voice of an entire generation in his "one night @ the call center". His novel which sold 100,000 copies in a single month, and this in a country where the best-seller threshold is 5,000 - is set in the world of the call centre, where ever growing legions of well-educated urban Indians waste their talent and knowledge.

In stylistic terms, Bhagat’s novel is conspicuous for its use of colloquial English, the true lingua franca of the urban middle classes, and for its renunciation of the type of elaborate diction associated with the works of many Anglo-Indian authors.

It may well be that novels such as "one night @ the call center" are less concerned with literariness as such and far more with the possibilities of identification.

...

Samit Basu, (his blog) born in 1979 and currently a resident of Delhi, has certainly performed a service by providing Indian literature with its first fantasy novel, "The Simoqin Prophecies". Here, we find an arresting and innovative melange of myths new and old, Indian fables and Western pop culture, the Mahabharata and James Bond.

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This spirit of freedom, which allows the local to mingle with the global, is exuded in particular by Rana Dasgupta's (website) first novel "Tokyo Cancelled", which quickly made it to the top 10 list of Indian bestsellers. All traces of an Indian setting have been virtually eliminated - although the now 35-year-old author emphasizes the importance for his writing of Delhi, his home since 2001. Nonetheless, his novel mirrors in an exemplary fashion a contemporary world in which life - whether in London, Paris or Lagos - is subjugated to the conditions of the global marketplace.

Kramatschek concludes by saying

When it comes to English-language literature from India, the approaching years are indeed likely to show evidence of a fresh wind.

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Literary online magazines and blogs are flourishing – and in regional languages as well, incidentally.

Literature, with its numerous and at times contradictory facets, finally, mirrors the situation of the country as a whole, which seems to be developing in a perpetual contradiction to itself. Given this situation, we can only wait expectantly to see which new and unexpected pathways will be opening up within the landscape of Indian literature.