The behemoth without Goliath

Speaking Volumes

"Whom does one write for?" his anonymous protagonist asks. "At least one of the answers will have to be ""'David Davidar'.... Because he gives me, and others like me, a valid reason. It gives us hope that someone will rescue our manuscripts, our thoughts put down and carefully typed on paper, from oblivion and eternity....

When he came into our lives about ten or eleven years ago (I can't remember exactly when), it was as if he wasn't quite real "" we might have dreamed him up. It was as if he'd come from nowhere.

But apparently he actually comes from the South; or at least he looks like a South Indian (I've seen him on television)." India Today was less subtle; in its list of India's fifty most powerful people, it dubbed Davidar, CEO of Penguin India, publishing's 'Don Corleone'.

Now the Don's headed to Penguin Canada, and even as parts of the publishing world exult that he's hammering at the glass ceiling that keeps Indians out of the global publishing scene, others wonder how his Cosa Nostra will fare.

As the papers reported last week, Penguin India will be headed by Thomas Abraham, a man with a serious reputation in marketing circles, and an equally interesting reputation as a serious reader outside them, but with none of the aura Davidar acquired over his 18-year involvement with Penguin.

Along with newly appointed executive editors Ravi Singh and Kartika Kartikeyan, the first task of the new triumvirate will be to reassure Penguin India's authors that there will still be Life After David.

This will not be easy, despite the fact that Penguin India runs like a gigantic, well-oiled if occasionally ponderous, often complacent machine these days. The competition for Penguin is not fierce "" very few publishing houses have been able to replicate its success or even come close to the sheer volume of books, good, bad and indifferent, it produces every year.

But HarperCollins has an ambitious manager in Ashok Chopra and a seasoned marketing man at the helm in Zamir Ansari (who was with Penguin himself for many years).

Rupa & Co is still among the most prolific and most canny publishing houses in the fray. Picador India, which had begun operations in India with much fanfare, appears to have lost steam, though it still has the likes of Raj Kamal Jha and Siddhartha Deb and added Allan Sealy to that list this year.

Neither HarperCollins India, Rupa nor Picador, however, have spent as much time and effort on building an editorial team as Penguin, and that could make a key difference.

Ravi Dayal commands respect, but once said wryly in an interview that (a) he never walked in Lodi Gardens any more, since it contained too many mobile "rejected manuscripts" and (b) that he seemed fated to discover authors that other imprints often poached once they'd hit a certain stage of success.

Sanjeev Saith at IndiaInk has built up a small but impressive list, but with just one or two titles a year, the imprint certainly cannot challenge Penguin in terms of volume.

Roli Books has recently added a string of respected editors, Ira Pande and Renuka Chatterjee among them, and appears to be doing far more than the coffee table books that the firm began with. Other notable firms "" OUP, Permanent Black, Kali for Women, Katha and the new Zubaan "" aren't really competing in the same territory as Penguin.

And that's the position: Penguin is a whale among, well, Plentimaw fish rather than minnows, and some of those Plentimaw fish are very seasoned indeed "" but there are no sharks around either to challenge the whale.

Even so, the sense in the industry is that Davidar's departure will test the structure he has put in place to the maximum. Some have even said with confidence that this will be the end of Penguin India "" not an opinion endorsed by Davidar.

Or by this columnist, partly because Penguin has a strong institutional structure, partly because Davidar has been gradually detaching himself from everyday operations for a while now, without the business of the house suffering, and partly on the cynical grounds that even if Penguin India totters and falls, it will take at least three years to implode.

But the real problem for the industry is not the question of whether Thomas Abraham can fill Davidar's oversized shoes; the problem is that in the 18 years that he's built up his reputation, no one else in publishing has been able to acquire a similar mantle. (It doesn't matter, frankly, whether you agree with his publishing policies or not).

Eighteen years ago, it wasn't like this. Back then, Davidar was the nowhere man, the guy who had nothing going for him except for the kind of chutzpah that allowed him to tell Shobha Dee that she was going to write a novel for Penguin India when she was still wondering who he was.

Seven years ago, Davidar wasn't living the Indian publisher's dream so much as the nightmare. The Nehru Place office where Penguin then had its quarters was an office of the ghetto variety.

Davidar had progressed from the days when he was the general dogsbody, head cook and chief bottlewasher in addition to being one of the founder editors, and Penguin India now boasted an office boy.

It also boasted a generator that belched black smoke at everyone during the frequent power cuts, a bathroom reserved apparently exclusively for the amatory activities of local pigeons, and a perpetual problem with the damp that forced editors to get on with their manuscripts before the things fragmented into mush.

The only thing that kept Penguin's staff going was the knowledge that the man who stared silently out of the window during those frequent power cuts, waiting patiently for the lights to come back on, had a vision that would not be denied.

As he leaves for Canada at the end of this year, to face the first real challenge of his career in the last five or six years, Davidar can exit with the knowledge that he has given Penguin India the two things it needed: that stubborn, implacable vision of a better future, and equally important, his absence so that they can learn to live outside his shadow. All they have to do is get on with the job.

nilroy@lycos.com