The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
‘We are not ashamed of doing anything, if it is correct’
Rupa Books chairman Rajen Mehra on his memoir, the challenges of being a publisher and how to make book fairs more inclusive
RUPA PUBLICATIONS chairman Rajen Mehra decided to pen the journey of his publishing company during a hospitalisation a few years ago— Never Out of Print (Rs 500). His granduncle Daudayal Mehra started the company in Calcutta back in 1936. Today, it’s one of the few independent English-language book publishers in India. We speak to Mehra on this journey of over eight decades. Excerpts:
Your non-fiction catalogue is much larger than fiction. Are you going to invest more in fiction?
In the 1980s, we published best-selling authors such as Sidney Sheldon, Agatha Christie and Alistair Mclean. Our sales were internationally talked about. Youngsters like Anurag Mathur, Ranjit Hoskote, Sudipto Sen, Salman Rushdie were coming up. We had distributed Midnight’s Children while availability and pricing were an issue. Fiction is very difficult, you have to get a plot, work it around. Everyday things are changing so rapidly.
How do you combat international publishers and their gradual consolidation? They dominate the market.
It’s a blessing in disguise. We were the first to import Penguin into the country and our relations with them were great from 1936 to 1992. But, suddenly, they decided to go away and we lost more than 50 per cent of our business. We decided to become more independent. You can’t build publishing in a day. Harpercollins joined us. When they left us in 2002, we were ready with half the list we wanted. By 2015, we became totally dependent on our own publishing.
Are modern-day publishing targets and quotas diluting editorial quality or the choice of books published?
You don’t get an author like Milan Kundera today. (Ideological) writing got over in the mid-1980s. In India it was after 1992’s liberalisation. If you don’t have an ideology, what do you do? What comes, you take it and forget about it. It’s like fast food. The quality obviously has to go down. Crime writers like Ken Follet, Robin Cook and Jeffrey Archer have a commitment to write one book a year or two. An ordinary book takes more than 10 years to complete. It is also affecting the film industry. People like fun and frolic, with sex and music and dance.
Rupa started with publishing in Bengali, but had to shut it down in the 1980s. The translated catalogue isn't huge. Do you want to go there?
I was very keen to get into Hindi publishing. I invested a lot of money in promoting that but somehow it didn’t click. Older publishers like Rajkamal Prakashan and Radhakrishna survived because they have been around a long time. Translations only work when the writing is good and long-lasting. It takes about two to three years to do it well. And writers like Mahasweta Devi, Ashapurna Devi, Sivasankari and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani are not easy to translate. At Aleph, we do lots of translations which are doing very well.
Does self-help, a major market for Rupa, get an unfair rap? Critics accuse it of passing unscientific advice for a small, privileged, urban, neurotypical audience.
When a manuscript comes to us, we can only suggest to an extent the audience it should have across A-tier, B-tier or C-tier cities. A-tier cities are where books sell most. If, say, public libraries are strong in Kanpur, then obviously literature will go towards that. It's like a river. It makes its own passage.
Book fairs are often criticised today for not being disruptive enough, for inviting many establishment figures. Has their role been reduced to commerce and not championing marginalised voices?
I had a fight once in Jaipur, over a 1,600page history book on Rajasthan, by an author from Jaipur. It took her 10 years to write it but there was no review. I was invited to speak and I spoke of how the book wasn’t talked about even in Jaipur. A huge gap is there. We should have more reading sessions. I remember actor Roshan Seth was one of the finest orators in Delhi. When there was a book launch, people would ask him to come and read it out.
D Mehra published couplets about Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri upon their deaths. Rupa has consistently published controversial political memoirs. Has the space to publish antiestablishment books shrunk in the past 10 years?
On the current dispensation, talking about Advani or Jaswant Singh or anybody, we are not ashamed of doing anything if it is correct. We are not pressured by everybody. I’m very firm on this. I’ve fought for Rushdie many times. You can ask Mark Tully, whose Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (1985) was detained . I was under pressure. We had to pay very heavy damages. We sorted it out and printed 30,000 copies and the book sold. The person who wanted to pressure us ran away because they were afraid that they’d be exposed... I haven’t come across anybody (opposing anti-establishment books). When we published R Venkataraman (on the former president), I said openly how the Congress party behaved. And journalist Karan Thapar picked it up.