PUBLISHING
Making a difference
RITU MENON
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Twelve independent women publishers have changed the name of the game.
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Illustration: Surendra
Amid the cacophony of sounds that now accompanies each new “success story” in Indian publishing and writing in English, one little song remains mostly unsung: the presence of a dozen independent and autonomous women publishers, and the se
a-change they have wrought in the trade. Between them, they do much of the most interesting and important publishing in India today, and they have pioneered several publishing projects once thought untouchable. “Untouchable” in the caste hierarchy of publishing means “unmarketable”.
The oldest of these is Kali for Women, set up in 1984 as India’s — and Asia’s — first feminist press; the youngest, Yoda Press, begun by two twenty-nine year olds in 2004. In the intervening 20 years, 10 others came into being, a publishing phenomenon with no parallel in any other part of the world: Twelve publishing enterprises created and run by women, covering every area of academic, trade and specialist publishing, including the earliest book reviewing periodical — The Book Review, now 32 years in existence — and the most highly regarded art magazine in the country, International Gallerie.
They’re household words now, in a way: Kali, Katha, Stree, the two Tulikas, Tara, Yoda, Karadi, the little magazine, Zubaan, Women Unlimited, Social Science Press, Biblio… What they publish: the best in children’s books, cutting edge social science, path-breaking feminist studies, high quality translations, bold and innovative books on popular culture and sexuality, hugely successful audio books, pioneering Dalit writing, critically acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, reissues of hard-to-find archival material…From Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai.
Breaking the rules
As Antara Dev Sen of the little magazine says, “It was the mid-1990s …we decided to opt out and start a publication which would talk at length about social concerns and cover the huge span of literature and culture across South Asia … We try to break the rules, challenge the stereotypes.” I think each of the other 12 would broadly agree with her, but add that there are at least three other attributes that all of us share: the willingness to take (publishing) risks; the desire to intervene actively in the intellectual, cultural and political business of making change; and a reckless disregard for security. As one of us quipped when asked: “What could be less viable than third world, publisher and woman? Being third world, publisher and feminist!”
What propelled all of us into leaving the secure and stable havens of the established publishing or advertising or journalism mainstream? Why forsake successful career advancement for the choppy seas of uncertainty? Why not stick with the tried and tested? As Bina Sarkar Ellias of Gallerie says, “There comes a punctuation in one’s life when you question how best to conduct the rest of your years. What might make a significant difference to your own life, and hopefully that of others?” Arpita Das of Yoda concurs: “We had this sense of not really doing what we wanted to do, not having the autonomy to do it. We were extremely aware that it was a big leap. But we really felt there was no choice.”
A kind of watershed, in other words, a certain dissatisfaction, dis-ease almost, with the status quo, and a strong desire to change it. The restless realisation that something was missing, that there were gaps to be filled and concerns that needed to be voiced, became a powerful impetus. It is arguable, for instance, whether any mainstream press would have published the first anthology of queer writing in India, Because I Have a Voice, a Yoda title that has become something of a counter-culture classic — like Stree/Samya’s Why I Am Not a Hindu (which Mandira Sen says is “like a manifesto for the underprivileged”) and Joothan; or Kali’s Staying Alive, Recasting Women and Borders and Boundaries; Tulika’s Essays in Indian History; Katha’s Prize Stories; Tara’s superbly illustrated and retold children’s stories; Tulika Publishers’ truly remarkable multilingual, intelligently conceived books for 6-10 year olds; and Karadi’s highly commendable picture books for the blind called Dreaming Fingers.
All this might seem commonplace now — a measure of the significant difference these ventures have made to Indian publishing and academia — but there was a time not so long ago when all the avenues these women publishers thought they must explore were considered dead-ends.
Breaking new ground
Women’s studies? Waste of time, not a discipline. Women’s writing — does it exist? Is there such a thing? Dalits? No market. Children’s books? High investment, low returns, can’t be prescribed. Politically committed social science texts? Dubious and dangerous — publishing is politically “neutral”. Sexuality? We’re a conservative society, no sex, please. Translations? You must be joking — too labour intensive, not worth the long gestations; besides, too many languages. Pamphlets and handbooks for activists? Who will distribute them — you’ll have to give them away. As for book reviewing periodicals — well, that’s quite simply a labour of love, and we all know how good women are at both unpaid labour and unrequited love.
Yet, subtract these women from the publishing landscape and you will be missing the enormous contribution they’ve made to the intellectual, social, cultural and political life of the country. The impact of women’s and Dalit studies in academia and in struggles for equality and emancipation is without question; as is the centrality of translations in connecting languages, literatures and regions within the country. Nowhere has this been demonstrated with greater clarity than in the nine-language simultaneous publishing for children that Tulika (Chennai) has being doing for over 10 years, and that Karadi does with its audio books, combining text with music, using celebrities like Nandita Das, Naseeruddin Shah and Usha Uthup to narrate the stories.
We used to be told — and still are — that translations are the work of Sahitya Akademis and the National Book Trust; that no private publisher could afford the slow returns and painstaking nurturing that translations entail, nor could they risk their bottom lines publishing for non-existent markets; that children’s books need to be subsidised in order to be affordable. And so it might have continued if this intrepid dozen hadn’t taken the bit between their teeth; for, the point is not that the mainstream couldn’t have done it, it’s that they didn’t. I don’t mean the occasional gesture of acknowledgement made by publishing a title or two, but the sustained and systematic development of a genre that makes for a change in perspective and creates an impact in the long term.
“We have to rewrite the history of our understanding,” says Katha’s Geeta Dharmarajan, “we are those small pebbles that create a ripple.” But it takes a long time for a ripple to make for a sea-change, and one feature of this kind of publishing is its slow, slow slog — which is one reason why it holds such limited attraction for the mainstream. Another may be the fact that the issues and areas we explore are (mistakenly) considered “marginal”. When Urvashi Butalia and I started Kali, for example, well-wishers in the trade sincerely asked us to reconsider focusing on “such a narrow area”. Meaning women. We said, “Half the world is not narrow!” But whether it’s regional literatures or women or Dalits or tribals or the underclass, the “experiences of the majority of our people are ignored by the mainstream,” says Radhika Menon of Tulika (Chennai), “so we create books that include them. This means that our primary market is the economically weaker sections.”
In many ways the choices and decisions made by these women-run Independents are financial no-nos because they are editorially, rather than marketing, driven. And, often, they are informed by a statedly secular and progressive perspective — either feminist or socialist or Marxist. Many obvious marketing and profit-making — even potentially best-selling — titles may be passed up if they fall short on any of these counts, for, as Indira Chandrasekhar of Tulika (Delhi) says, “I’m not in publishing just to run a business — it’s part of a larger political project. I’ve been surrounded by academics for the better part of my life, and I’m also committed to Left politics … it’s natural for me to bring the two together in my publishing.”
Individual effort
It’s worth pointing out that not one of the independent women’s presses is backed by family or corporate funds, and none of them has inherited a readymade business. In the 20-odd years that they’ve been around, they have not only managed to hold their own; through their publishing programmes they’ve opened up the space for innovation, insisted on debating and discussing settled truths and conventional wisdom, and been in the forefront of bringing the concerns of the periphery to the centre.
It’s true that India offers them a more hospitable environment in which to operate because we haven’t yet been taken over by conglomerates and multinationals — in that sense we still have a more democratic publishing space. Preserving and expanding this space is absolutely necessary for any kind of avant garde, experimental or against-the-grain publishing — and there’s little doubt that the women Independents have been doing just that for the last two decades or more.
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