Rajpal and Sons is one of Delhi's best-known Hindi language publishers, its history inextricably linked with pre-independent India's most fierce debates. Rajpal, whose book publishing house was originally in Lahore, was best known for publishing The Wisdom of the Vedas.
In the early 1920s, he held firm in his defence of the publication of a pamphlet, Rangeela Rasool, shielding Pandit Chamupati, the then-anonymous author. Rangeela Rasool was considered virulently blasphemous to the Prophet by many Muslims. In 1929, after Rajpal had defended himself successfully in court, he was savagely stabbed and murdered in his shop by Ilm-ud-din; it was the third attack on his life.
In 1947, Rajpal & Sons shifted to Delhi in the wake of Partition; Rajpal Malhotra's oldest son, Viswanath, swiftly established the firm as one of the grand old publishing firms in the Kashmere Gate and Daryaganj area. From Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Kamleshwar and Dinkar to Hindi translations of professor Amartya Sen's work, it produced a steady stream of bestsellers. Third-generation publisher Meera Johri spoke to Business Standard about the state of Hindi-language bestsellers today.
Since the majority of sales in the book market are still unrecorded, Johri said, the definition of a bestseller varies from publisher to publisher. "Our definition of a bestseller in Hindi is a title that sells upwards of 5,000 copies within the first year, and then continues to be reprinted and sold consistently year after year." Aside from Bachchan's Madhushala, which has sold consistently for over 70 years, she also counts some steady sellers - Manas Ka Hans, Awara Masiha, Vayam Raksham, Ashad Ka Ek Din - that were published more than 40 years ago.
The classics do well, but the demand for translations of bestsellers by Indian authors writing in English, and of global bestsellers, is also rising. Alongside these, she mentioned a few emerging new Hindi writers whose works explore "urban, contemporary India", and a surge in demand for repackaged thrillers and crime fiction from the 1960s and 1970s, something of a golden age in Hindi pulp fiction. "It's a very large canvas," she said. "The old, the new and the repackaged old - all of them are vying for the readers' attention, and succeeding!"
80 years of Rupa & Co: Daudayal Mehra, the founder of the firm, was originally in the hosiery business. The story told in Calcutta, as it was called then, was that he was such a good salesman that the local representative for Collins' India was impressed with his persuasive skills. Asked if he might sell its dictionaries, Mehra discovered a liking for the products he was selling, and acquired a taste for books. Rupa & Co was a book distributor, its store in College Street very near Presidency College and numerous booksellers and close to India Coffee House, until the 1960s when it decided to become a book publisher. Its first bestseller was Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, which sold far better than the Bengali poetry that it also published.
Departures: P M Sukumar joined HarperCollins India as a CEO in 2005 - its bigger books for that year included Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled and Mishi Saran's Chasing The Monk's Shadow. His departure after ten years, to pursue his own interests, came as a surprise to many in the publishing house. In these ten years, Harper has prospered, publishing authors such as the Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga and Siddharth Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies).
The new CEO, Anant Padmanabhan (formerly senior vice president at Penguin Random House) will report to Charlie Redmayne, who heads HarperCollins UK. Redmayne, who took over from Victoria Barnsley in 2013, is a former Irish Guards lieutenant whose understanding of the technological challenges that face publishers in the digital age is stronger than that of most CEOs. He has just concluded tough negotiations with Amazon.com - "We face certain challenges from our friends in Seattle," he had said wryly at HarperCollins UK's annual party last month.
His plans for HarperCollins India will be watched with great interest in a year when English language trade publishing houses have seen immense churn. Former Penguin India publisher Chiki Sarkar, who quit Penguin Random House India in April, is expected to roll out a juggernaut of a new venture fairly soon.
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