Happy birthday, Penguin India

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Twenty years ago, when Penguin India opened its doors, most Indians associated their trademark orange penguin with Puffin's children's books or with the venerable Penguin Classics.

Over the course of the next two decades, Penguin would work hard to introduce the idea of "trade publishing" to a country used to either academic publishing or the bizarrely eclectic books from Russia brought in at the height of India's brief love affair with Russia. Trade books, usefully defined by the University of Chicago Press as books that the public reads "for pleasure and for information", thrived in Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the Hindi heartland, but there was no real "Indian" trade publisher before Penguin set up shop. At the time, as its commemorative Fiction Collection says, "its most valuable asset was a boardroom table made of teak, at which strategies were devised, contracts signed and commitments made".

The first books off the Penguin list in 1987 were a motley lot: P T Usha's Golden Girl, Pupul Jayakar's study of Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ranga Rao's Fowl Filcher, Shiv K Kumar's Nude Before God, Anees Jung's Unveiling India, Sunil Gangopadhyay's Arjun and Dom Moraes' Collected Poems.

They promised the eclecticism of the parent imprint. Allen Lane had launched Penguin's paperbacks with a similarly diverse selection of ten books in the summer of 1935: Andre Maurois' Ariel, Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Eric Linklater's Poet's Pub, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links, Compton Mackenzie's Carnival, Beverly Nichols' Twenty-five, Susan Ertz's Madame Claire, E H Young's William, Mary Webb's Gone to Earth.

Aside from the teak table, Penguin India's most significant assets lay in David Davidar and its quietly dedicated editorial team. David had, right from the start, a trade publisher's nose for what would sell and an ability to sniff out and commission books that the public didn't even know it wanted. The writer formerly known as Shobha De recounts the story behind her first pulp-fiction bestseller "" she wrote it chiefly because Davidar assumed confidently she would, and she didn't have the nerve to tell him she couldn't do it.

In the mid-1990s, I did a brief stint with Penguin. Their office today is comfortably stylish without being ostentatious: Ajit Ninan's caricatures of Penguin authors line the walls, there are gleaming conference rooms, boardrooms and reception rooms. All of these would have been considered unnecessary frills in the publishing houses of the 1990s.

At HarperCollins, the only concession to the editor's office was that her desk was located behind a Kashmiri wooden screen, allowing for at least purdah if no audible privacy. Other academic presses in Daryaganj seemed to believe that the prestige of their scholarly writers was in direct proportion to the filthiness of the stairs. At Penguin, the "new" computers were often rendered redundant by power cuts, the bathroom was infested with pigeons that flocked there in apparent solidarity with the firm's avian trademark, and some manuscripts had been there so long that they had become, too literally, part of the furniture.

But even in my very short time with Penguin, I understood why people stayed loyal to the publishing house "" because of the work. In the six months I was there, I saw novels by Kaveri Nambisan, Carl Muller, a study of the Naxalite movement, Abraham Eraly's History of the Mughals, and a very odd collection of poems that was submitted persistently to us under different titles, to be rejected each time with equal tenacity.

It's easy for those of us in publishing now to forget that Penguin India's Who's Who collection of authors was built only gradually. Vikram Seth came to Penguin as a young poet who'd written what seemed like a promising travelogue "" now he's one of their stellar authors. Vikram Chandra, Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Markandeya, R K Narayan, Manjula Padmanabhan, Khushwant Singh ... by the time David Davidar published his own novel, he was able to say that he had published almost all of India's leading authors in one way or another.

One of Penguin's stalwarts, Ravi Singh, cut his teeth as a junior editor with the company and now heads the editorial side of Penguin India. Another, V K Karthika, heads HarperCollins India, and Thomas Abraham, who ran Penguin India on the managerial side, now heads Hachette's entry into the country.

So many of us are now setting up publishing houses in a brash, exhilarating, competitive new India. The tables may be glass instead of teak, or may have been supplanted, as in my case, by a wide, battered walnut-wood desk on loan from a writer friend, but our journeys all began in that damp, noisy, paper-swamped office so many years ago.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

The author is chief editor, Westland and EastWest Books; the views expressed here are personal