Hardly any posthumous writing is published in India. Arghya Ganguly analyses why
Ever since English became a language of literary creation in India, Indian writers in English have always delivered a repartee with gusto to every question raised by the highbrow critics of the West. For being teased about possessing a derivative prose, the writers had infused colloquial vigour and chutnified English. They turned the so-called “marginalised literature” of Diaspora into award-winning efforts. And when the West gossiped about “a gap between language and expression”, they exploited the gap. But, in the light of the current boom in posthumous writing abroad, Indian publishers (and writers) appear incapable or even disinterested in giving a riposte.
American postmodernist David Foster Wallace’s pen did not rest even after he lost his lifelong struggle with depression in 2008. Within 30 months of his death, three works have already been published — the most recent being The Pale King — with at least four more, fiction and non-fiction, anticipated. Mark Twain, as promised, made a comeback recently, 100 years after his death, as have Vladimir Nabokov and Sweden’s Stieg Larsson, who “kicked the Hornet's nest” with two bestselling posthumous novels after a fatal heart attack in 2004. On the other hand, our writers seem to lead a dormant literary afterlife.
So why does India, with its vibrant history of literature, have a non-existent posthumous industry? Is it a mere coincidence that none of our English writers leave behind work stashed away in their bank vaults akin to Agatha Christie or leave a manuscript sitting “in a neat pile on his desk in the garage with his lamps on it, illuminating it” ensuring infinite jest for the ‘crazed’ Wallace aficionados? Or is it a conscious effort on the part of Indian publishers not to figuratively snatch an unpublished manuscript from the cold hands of a late author? If not now, will India ever have a posthumous industry?
“We can’t have a posthumous industry like the one operating in US or UK right now because one, while publishing abroad is huge, it is a cottage industry in India,” says Udayan Mitra publisher of Allen Lane Portfolio. “We have print runs of about 2,000 copies as compared to millions of print runs abroad. Two, in the West, they (readers, professors, scholars) hero-worship the authors and the industry is then built around that author. That's not the practice in India. Reading a book for Indians is like watching a movie. It’s meant to be seen and forgotten.”
Mitra points to the industry the West has built around Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Shelley etc. “Their birthplaces have become a place of pilgrimage where readers pay to enter. We are not so involved in such things. The number of people who read here is miniscule. Imagine we find Prem Chand’s unpublished work tomorrow. But so what? How many copies is it going to sell?”
Novelist Shashi Deshpande has been a witness to publisher’s indifference to posthumous works. She reckons there can be a market for a posthumous novel if the author has already a loyal following. And if the publisher takes the trouble to market it well. “In Indian writing in English, I don’t recall any book that has been published soon after an author’s death. One reason is that we still have too little of a literature to have different kinds of phenomenon in it. Two, publishers are not very adventurous here, even if authors leave behind an unpublished manuscript. The publishers would have to make full use of the author’s reputation, and have great faith in the author as well,” says Deshpande, indicating that Shama Futehally’s unfinished novel was published by Penguin after her death, but it made no noise about it. It went modestly into a collection of her stories.
“I myself have just translated a Marathi novel by Gauri Deshpande, (Deliverance) who died a few years ago. Both the publisher and I are aware that the book starts with a handicap, because, how do you project this novel? I wonder whether even Stieg Larsson would be a hit here,” says Deshpande.
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Another stalwart of Indian literature, poet Eunice Dsouza, has faced rejection when she tried to promote the publication of The Story of My Life (1911) by Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla. Jessawalla reminisces about “basking in the free air of enlightenment” while her balloon took off from Paris, in her picaresque memoir. “I had edited Women’s Voices: Selections from 19th and Early 20th Century Indian Writing in English (2004) which people have forgotten. I took an excerpt from The Story of My Life in my anthology of poems and I wanted to publish it in its entirety but the publishers weren’t interested,” says Dsouza.
Dsouza prescribes not competing and comparing ourselves with the West. Instead of trying to build a posthumous industry, she feels publishers should republish forgotten works by digging into the repository of talent from the past for old readers to rediscover, and for new Indian readers to be introduced to.
