Hindi novels turn a page after Booker fillip
NEW DELHI: It was 2 am on May 27 and Amod Maheshwari’s family was glued to YouTube watching the live telecast of the International Booker Prize award ceremony in London. The family erupted in celebration as Tomb of Sand, an English translation by Daisy Rockwell of Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, was announced the winner of the coveted prize.
Maheshwari, the CEO of the family owned Rajkamal Prakashan, a well-known Hindi publishing house, which had published Ret Samadhi in Hindi, in 2018, sent out a message to his printers to print 15,000 copies of the book by the next day.
“We had about 2,000 copies in stock that were all sold online before dawn. We anticipated that if the book won the Booker, there would a huge demand for it and we wanted to be ready, but as we realised the next day even 15,000 copies were not enough,” says Maheshwari.
Within five days of getting the award, Ret Samadhi, which had sold only 1,800 copies in over four years since its publication in 2018, sold over 35,000 copies—a record for a Hindi novel. It occupied the top position in the books category on Amazon India for several days, also a record.
“Never before has a Hindi book sold so many copies in such a short time. By now the book has sold over 47,000 copies. We hope to cross 100,000 over the next couple of months,” adds Maheshwari.
That target may not be unattainable, given the title has stayed on the list of the five bestselling books on Amazon India and continues to be a bestseller in most of Delhi’s top bookstores.
Making Hindi ‘cool’
Many believe that the book’s unprecedented success marks a new exciting chapter for the Hindi publishing industry and will provide further impetus to the sales and readership of the Hindi novels, which have seen a steady rise in the past few years, thanks to a combination of factors – new publishers, new young writers, high production quality and slick marketing and packaging -- that were considered hallmark of English publishers.
While Ret Samadhi is shattering sales records, in the past few years several other Hindi novels, though not all so literary, brought out by well-known Hindi publishers such as Vani, Rajkamal, and Hind Yugm have been continuously crossing 10, 000 sales mark within a year of their publication—quite a leap from a decade ago when a Hindi novel was considered a bestseller if it sold a thousand copies.
“Over the past few years, many of our novels have sold over 20,000 copies within months of publication. When we started our publishing firm in 2010, I struggled to sell 500 copies of any book,” says Shailesh Bharatwasi, who founded the Hind Yugm, a publishing company credited with discovering many writers in Hindi.