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Wars of the words
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What were Delhi's best selling titles of 2006? ANJANA RAJAN finds out
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PHOTO: SANDEEP SAXENA
JUST TO READ A woman leafs through "Shantaram" in a Delhi bookstore
Ask around in Delhi's bookshops for the books that sold best this year, and the honours seem to be evenly divided between William Dalrymple's "The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857", Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss" and Gregory David Roberts' "Shantaram". The people in the business are never sure why some books do well and others don't. But word-of-mouth publicity certainly makes a book move off the shelves. Of course a big prize helps. But only if it goes to an Indian author.
Ask Anil Arora of The Bookworm in the heart of Connaught Place. When "The Inheritance of Loss" first came out, it was not selling well. Now, it is "doing brilliantly, courtesy the Booker Prize," he says. On the flip side, the Man Booker Prize is no guarantee of sales. It has in the past, gone to "people who never sold".
Return of the prize
The Booker `returned' to India in 2006, and Indians feel a certain proprietorship, notes Anuj Bahri of Bahrisons with a smile. "We look forward to it coming back. It's kind of like a personal possession." Bahri feels despite the fillip, Desai's book needs more time to pick up. It was certainly no help that in the first week after the declaration of the award, no copies were available.
"I don't know if the publisher (Penguin) was ready for it," he says, explaining that if a book is long-listed for the Booker, a publisher should normally have 5000 copies ready, and if short-listed, 10,000. "In November itself it should have done sales worth the whole print run," says Bahri.
The Nobel Prize for Literature is another story. Arora describes the usual winners as "minor Greek poets or political dissidents" whose work has largely not been translated into English. This time, it went to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, but despite extensive media coverage, sales of his books have been lukewarm in Delhi.
`Bestseller' is a misleading term in India, where print runs are small, point out booksellers. But beyond the hottest buys, Bahri assesses the year just ended as good for Indian writing. As a reader and as a bookseller, he has enjoyed the year. Crime fiction, which he loves, has produced some new titles. Besides Robin Cook who came out with a new one, he exults in seeing crime fiction selling "a lot". It's refreshing in his profession, where he is required to read a great deal and "would rather eat tandoori chicken at the end of the day"!
With his staff struggling to meet the demand, Bahri declares the book of the year to be "Shantaram," a novel about an escaped Australian convict who finds new meanings and new directions in the slums of Mumbai. Based on the intense experiences of the author Gregory David Roberts, "Shantaram" uses fiction to reveal the many facets of reality.
As does M.J. Akbar's "Blood Brothers", an autobiographical novel covering three generations of the author's family that sets in perspective a chunk of modern India's history. Yet it seems "Blood Brothers" has fallen in the chink between history and fiction. At Bahrisons, its estimated sales are 50 per cent of the figures notched up by Dalrymple's biography of Bahadur Shah Zafar.
Only the good ones
The Bookworm has sold at least 200 copies a month of Dalrymple, estimates Arora, who adds, "I really can't understand how and why it sold like that. There are so many biographies of Mughal emperors." It could be the hype of a foreign author living in India, he muses. But if word of mouth and the cocktail circuit boost topicality, he concedes a book will only last in the market if well written.
Jolly Sabharwal of Full Circle confirms the trend when she lists "The Inheritance of Loss", "The Last Mughal" and "Shantaram" in order of popularity. Speaking of history, "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford, says Arora, has been doing consistently well, as have Chetan Bhagat's books.
Non-fiction seems to be definitely popular. While Nitini Chatterjee of Oxford Bookstore places Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat" as the number one bestseller for his shop, it has been moving fast at The Bookworm too.
Another piece of research reaping rewards is "Made for Maharajas: A Design Diary of Princely India" by Amin Jaffer. Its price of Rs.4500 deters customers, say some booksellers, but Chatterjee says his crowd is on the lookout for exclusive stuff and undeterred by prices. That the coffee table tome is listed at number three among the 10 Best Asian Books of 2006 by Time magazine's Asia edition helps.
How was the year for books then? When Bahri says, "There have been some really good titles and some really stupid titles," it sounds like business as usual. Happy New Year!
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