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.

English translations of Tamil pulp fiction

Mukul Kesavan gains access to the world of Tamil pulp fiction through recently published English translations (published by Blaft, a Chennai-based publishing house) and is overwhelmed.

But like many Anglophone Indians, I find reading in an Indian language a chore. The reason our reading lives aren’t nourished by popular novels set in locales we know is not because they aren’t written, but because they aren’t translated.

Which brings me to this anthology, a riveting collection of stories written by 10 bestselling Tamil writers. They are real professionals who make Stephen King and Barbara Cartland look like amateurs. Indra Soundar Rajan, who is represented here by a splendid story on the theme of reincarnation, has written 500 short novels. If that sounds like fiction manufactured on an industrial scale, wait till you get to Rajesh Kumar, who has published 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories in 40 years.

To the discriminating Anglophone desi, who buys Rushdie for literary sustenance and Dick Francis for base narrative pleasure, this suggests that everything they write is awful. Not so fast. He might consider the fact that during the boom years of Tamil pulp fiction, the mid-’90s, Rajesh Kumar’s novels sold in millions. Then he might actually read the stories and novellas in this anthology. My personal favourites are two private-eye tales: Hurricane Vaij by Subha (pen name for two writers, Suresh and Balakrishnan) and Sweetheart, Please Die! by Pattukkottai Prabhakar, but a reader looking for romance should read Dim Lights, Blazing Hearts by Ramanichandran, while someone in the market for lurid, "real-life" squalor might sample My Name is Kamala, a massively popular novel about prostitutes in Delhi.

I don’t know Tamil so I can’t tell what’s been lost in translation, but the magical thing about this anthology is that I never once thought of the stories as Tamil stories. In Pritham Chakravarthy’s translations, the characters in these stories live and breathe an English that smells like a neutral ether: neither elaborately English nor annoyingly vernacular.And it’s hard to convey the delight I felt in reading time-pass fiction where the starlets, the hard-boiled detectives and the vengeful goddesses came from the world I inhabited, were mine.

There are two reasons to buy this book. One, it’s a wonderful read and, two, it’s the best-produced paperback in the history of Indian publishing. From the luridly brilliant cover (complete with gun-toting, full-breasted Tamil rose) to the colour plates, the line drawings, the perfectly judged author introductions and the high-quality paper inside, this book is an object lesson in how publishing is done.

The Hindu describes the origins of the idea for a publishing initiative like Blaft.

“I got interested in Tamil pulp fiction novels after moving to Chennai in 1998,” says Rakesh Kumar Khanna, a mathematician from U.C. Berkeley and IIT Madras.

“But I found that none of these books were being translated, and I really wanted to read them!”

So, he began a personal project to translate the treasure trove of pulp literature in Tamil. That morphed into Blaft when his wife Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and their friend Kaveri Lalchand came on board.

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.