Basically I undertook this task to address my own ignorance of many crucial matters. In 1936, the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal (the Forum for the Break-up of Caste) invited Ambedkar to deliver their presidential lecture, and on seeing a copy of his address, they disinvited him, for in this work he asked them to ‘apply the dynamite to the Vedas and the Shastras’. Now, what was Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal? Who founded it and when? Why did they branch out of the Arya Samaj? Whom did they invite before and after Ambedkar? What was the connection between Ambedkar’s famous 1935 announcement that he’d not die a Hindu and this invitation? Who was Sant Ram who stood up against the mostly upper caste Mandal members who opposed Ambedkar? Why did all this happen in Lahore? What happened to Sant Ram after the 1947 Partition? Each page of AoC threw up implicit and explicit questions—to which I attempted to provide answers through extensive notes.
Q:What was your reaction to critiques, after getting the introduction done by Booker prize-winning author and activist Arundhati Roy?
Anand: To come back to the critiques on Navayana’s edition of AoC—back then, it upset me hugely that those who attacked the book had not even laid their eyes or hands on it. It took me a while—and
some distance—to realize such a reading need not be of the book at all; it could be a reading of the entire act or gesture involved in the Navayana edition with Arundhati’s Introduction, the annotations, the endorsements, the magazine placements, etc., for this edition—a parade of entitlements at one level—was presented as an event, as a totality.They were reading and reacting to a situation that had imposed itself on the world; consequently, it was a reading of the world and not a reading of our reading of AoC. I was also initially disturbed because some of those attacking had been friends who knew of this project, friends who though sceptical of me, seemed to have guarded regard for the work Navayana did. Now they said, after Arundhati whom will Anand ask to introduce the next Ambedkar book? Sachin Tendulkar? Chetan Bhagat? I was shocked, but soon came to understand the resentment as being historical and not merely particular and personal.The time was ripe for such an attack, it appears. It’s also a question of purchase—attacking someone like Roy will get you eyeballs. Not, however, Sharmila Rege, not that a critique of such ‘lesser’ mortals is not valid.
Q: How are language and caste related in India, and what impact does it have on vernacular literature?
Anand: Language becomes another site of exercising power and maintaining hierarchy.Almost all languages in India carry the baggage of caste.We forget that the various ‘official’ languages—there are 22 listed in the official schedule of the Constitution—themselves are contested terrains.Take Telugu, for instance, the language I grew up with (though I am a native Tamil speaker).What’s called ‘literary’Telugu has been mostly a brahmanical variation spoken by less than 5 per cent of the coastal population of the state of Andhra Pradesh.And classical literature invariably deals with epics, gods and brahmanic religion. Prosody, meter, ‘suitable’ subject matter, etc. are all dictated by the elite few.
By default, the language spoken by ordinary people—the leatherworkers, weavers, masons, fisher folk, etc.—is rendered unsuited for literary production.Which is why when a Dalit woman like Gogu Shyamala wrote short stories in Telugu, her work did not find a publisher
in Telugu—because the Dalit Telugu she wrote in did not have an audience, and it was a region-specific, caste-specific ‘dialect’, it was argued! Her work was first published in English translation by Navayana in 2013.And such were the problems posed by her Telugu that nine translators were deployed to translate her eleven stories.
The same holds for Marathi or Hindi.This is why when Tukaram in the 17th century writes the way he does in Marathi—not shying from using words like fuck even when he is talking of his god Vithoba—it is a revolution. But those who sing, rather perform, his Abhangs—verses—on stage, avoid the Abhangs in which he swears.The same holds for Kabir, the 16th century weaver-poet of Benares.Again, these radical poets got assimilated or appropriated through sanitization and nationalization.This is the linguistic tradition from which Namdeo Dhasal (1949–2014), one of India’s finest poets and one of the founders of Dalit Panther (modeled on the American Black Panther), comes.
Whenever language becomes a site of power, you have to apply the dynamite of love to it and raze it down. Good poetry does that. Q: In your opinion, what is the future for publishers?
Anand: I feel it has good future as well. Do not forget that the guesstimate for per capita spending on books in India is an abysmal Rs 80 per person per year. Even if only 20 million of the 1.2 billion have the luxury of reading for pleasure in India, that’s a huge market.And they don’t seem to be reading as much as they ought to, notwithstanding the mind-numbing sales of authors like Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi.
Q:What are the challenges being faced today?
Anand: Money! And most small publishers would give you the same answer likely. I do not seem to have a good head for the business end of things. Bhimayana has been our only funded project, but otherwise it is quite hand-to-mouth. Navayana survives primarily on the generosity of friends, though since 2010, after Slavoj Zizek’s first annual Navayana lecture, our market presence matches the best.We do make sure all our titles are well reviewed. In terms of profits, I doubt if even the bigger
presses really make any profits with all the heavy overheads they have. The real profit-earners in Indian publishing are textbook publishers. Ratna Sagar’s turnover could well be more than HarperCollins or Penguin’s, but the overall visibility of a Ratna Sagar will be poor.
[Excerpts from an interview in Cordite Publishing Inc., Cordite Poetry Review 55.]
s . anand is Publisher at Navayana. He co-founded Navayana in 2003 along with Ravikumar, and in 2007 won the International Young Publisher of the Year award instituted by the British Council and London Book Fair. He has annotated Dr B.R.Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste and Riddles in Hinduism, and curated and co-authored Bhimayana, the graphic biography of
Ambedkar that has been translated into nine languages.
43 BrIngIng Books to Phones “readers have loved it; some genres are working better than others”
Chiki Sarkar
Juggernaut aims to create a world-class Indian publishing company that redefines reading and writing for the digital age.Their mobile app has created waves in the industry.
Q: Please tell us how an innovative publishing venture grew out of many years of working with a giant mainstream publisher. Chiki: Having worked with the country’s largest publisher, I became very aware of the problems facing the industry (low sales, fewer bookshops, etc.).At the same time I looked at the world of growing digital readers and the rise of Wattpad, China literature (valued today at US$1 billion).Alongside this, I just looked everywhere around me and saw people constantly on their phones. India is the world’s secondhighest user of smartphones.All these came together to make Juggernaut.
Q:What has been the experience so far: in terms of variety of books and formats, author base and reception among readers? Chiki: We have a wide range of formats and genres—so all the usual genres and then works of varying lengths from 5,000 to 100,000 words. Readers have loved it, of course some genres working better than others. Our free classics, non-fiction and erotica are the three big genres. But we are also finding growing readers for our writing platform where amateur writers upload their stories and we showcase them in the same way as our curated authors.
212 bringing books to phones Q: How does the economics work?
Chiki: It’s very simple…we charge per book.Authors are paid fees with bonus fees built-in when they have reached a certain level of downloads. We will be introducing a subscription service shortly.
Q:Tell us about the mobile short-format books. How many has Juggernaut done and how has that worked both from the authorship and readership viewpoint?
Chiki: We have about 3,000 own titles, which combines our own digital originals, out-of-copyright class
ics and writing platform.
We’ve broken our new writers like Mayur Didolkar who writes a lot for us and found new spaces for a writer like Andaleeb Wajid—both of whom are becoming very popular.We also have favourites among the erotica writers who write regularly for us.
Q:We notice that a lot of mainstream, even academic, authors have published with you; for example, the sociologist Nandini Sundar with the book on Bastar. How did that happen?
Chiki: We have a boutique list of books that we do in physical along with digital—that list will mostly have names of authors who are well known. Nandini Sundar on Bastar, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghose, Meena Kandasamy,William Dalrymple,Twinkle Khanna and Rujuta Diwekar are just some of these names.
Q:Who, if anyone, is the competition for Juggernaut? Chiki: We are at the intersection of a range of spaces—so traditional publishers, self-publishing platforms like Wattpad, and Amazon which sells e-books—all are our competitors.
Q: Do you know of other creative ventures in Indian publishing? Chiki: There are loads. In India, there are wonderful self-publishing platforms like Pratilipi; while Pratham seems to be doing fun stuff around the kids’ space.
chiki sarkar 213 Q:What is your forward plan?
Chiki:We will build more on Hindi. Eventually, we will give Hindi a different home page, introducing subscriptions, enabling the writing feature within the app (currently you can upload only on desktop). Besides, we also plan to go international.
chiki sarkar is Publisher and Co-Founder of Juggernaut Books. She started her career in publishing with Bloomsbury Publishing in London, and after seven years moved to Delhi and joined Random House in 2006. In 2011 she took over at Penguin Books India, and following the merger of Penguin Books and Random House in 2013 she was made the India head of the new company. She set up her own publication house,
Juggernaut, thereafter.
44 OFFERING CHAPTER-LEVEL CONTENT “many people don’t have time to read a full book” Rohit Kumar
Q: From mainstream publishing to your own venture Chapter Apps, what prompted you to go in for it?
Rohit: We all have multiple books on our bookshelves...most of the time we never read the entire book ever; we read in parts.Whatever information we want, we quickly find it on the internet, rather than referring to a print book.All that now is happening on the phone.That was the fundamental I had in my mind four years ago. It took me one year to plan and leave my job and start Chapter Apps.
Q:What was the idea behind Chapter Apps? What is the USP? Rohit: The idea behind Chapter Apps is fundamentally that people don’t have time to read a full book, especially for professional studies. So, whether it is ongoing learning, lifelong learning, corporate learning—people like to read in chunks.They would like to buy chapters, rather than the whole book.And we thought that most of the consumption of the content would happen primarily on the mobile.That was the fundamental idea behind the venture. I started it three years ago and got the investments for the same.
Our USP is that we have more users on the mobile than our competition…so we understand how to make things work better on mobile, better than the others.We understand how to give people a proper integrated solution, which includes content at users’ experience, because we built the product.We integrated the company in Silicon Valley; we have actually built it through a product software company—so we are able to take on more clients live in a matter of hours. It’s a robust system and we have several thousand users a month now from different companies using
it, and every company is growing in its usage dramatically.
rohit kumar 215 Q:What about the content?
Rohit: We are very selective with content. For the insurance sector, we are developing content and taking it to multiple organizations, customizing it to their requirements. So we offer both content and technology.When the platform is established in more places, then it becomes easier to sell more content.We believe that the first problem to solve is the technology adoption, content adoption follows.
Q: How has the journey so far been?
Rohit: It’s been a very fulfilling and fun-filled one, because what I love is discovering how people will actually use it...and that process of discovery is actually most fascinating, because as you start understanding what they like and don’t like...then you make that change.You start connecting with people and when more people start doing it, that’s when you get the real satisfaction.That’s part of starting your own venture, you can experiment in so many different ways. Intellectually, it is very fulfilling as well.
Originally, when I started, I thought I would publish content on my platform and it would be content from multiple authors. It would have to be new content, as for the mobile format, content needs to be small. When we started taking the content to the masses on mobile, it was still early days.We got feedback from people saying that they require content which their company/ professor is using or approves.That led to a very interesting journey, faced by the choice of whether we should focus on content adoption or technology adoption and what we realized was that content adoption is a longer sales cycle as people took time to decide whether they wanted our content or not, but for technology adoption there was greater willingness, especially in the corporate market.Two years ago, we started with corporate pilots. It took us one year to build the product and take it forward...and then we did the first few pilots and 1.5 years ago, we got our first long-term contract with an insurance company. Since then, there is no looking back.We have more than 20 corporate clients now and the list is growing. Our biggest concentration is on financial services as of now.
216 offering chapter-level content Q:What about competition?
Rohit:The competition has started increasing rapidly, because mobile as a mechanism is starting to take off; there are a lot more companies coming into mobile apps. Most of our competition is coming from very different spheres—trading companies, HR consulting companies, LMS companies. But, the actual requirement is to have a fully-integrated platform, with a complete solution. Content—upload or edit—that would be the real challenge. Eventually the best platform with the easiest usability will win.
Q:What is the forward plan? How do you foresee the future market? Rohit:The future is very clear: there will be more usage on the mobile and the demand is exploding now.Two years ago, people would say that it is an interesting concept but were not sure who would pay for the data; now people know mobile is cost-effective.And every user has a mobile, but every user does not have a laptop.There is going to be a shift in terms of how to make content more engaging, how to engage more users, and how to reach out to them in small interventions, every day and every week. I think in the future, there would be chatbots—that would happen in the next two years or even earlier.
The future of the publishing industry is digital and to have a platform like this. Now the question is if all the publishers put their content on our platform...then we will actually see a huge amount of success coming. If every company builds its own app, that may not work. If a mobile platform for textbooks existed where content from all publishers is there—that is where I believe the future is and that is going to happen.
rohit kumar is Managing Partner of Guiding Star Digital Publishers LLP and its subsidiary Chapter Apps Inc, where he is building and leveraging mobile technology platforms to improve productivity for professionals and students. Prior to starting his entrepreneurial ventures, Rohit was Managing Director, South Asia, Health Science Division, Reed Elsevier India. He was President of the Association of Publishers in India during 2013-15, and Co-Chair of the FICCI Publishing Committee during
2013-16.
45 IllustrateD Books In the DIgItal age “Is augmented reality the future?” Bipin Shah
The emergence of augmented reality in illustrated-book publishing may offer a ray of hope to keep readers falling off the curve by offering them print books and digital components rolled into one. But are we ready to forego the touch and feel of a book—the smell of a fr
esh book, feeling the textured paper and seeing the vast expanse of an image, which is almost like a sensual experience that could never be replicated digitally?
Q: How has illustrated-book publishing evolved over the years? Bipin: The classic model for illustrated-book publishing was established by Paul Hamlyn, followed by many others, which saw high overall pre-press and print costs for illustrated titles offset by large print runs, traditionally including one or more co-editions with foreign-language publishers.This was several decades ago and the torch has been carried forward by the likes of Thames & Hudson, Harry Abrams, Prestel Publishing, and exceptionally talented teams at Phaidon and Taschen. Today, most—but certainly not all—illustrated publishing has modest print runs, produced mainly—but not exclusively—in the Far East, as printing costs are lower than in India. Museum publishing growth has slowed down considerably in the last several years, yet they continue to publish some of the best art books.
Q:What have been the challenges in this segment?
Bipin: Publishers of illustrated books have been put in a state of high alert for several years.The first shock I got was about six years back
when I was waiting for a meeting at the booth of an American art book publisher at Frankfurt Book Fair.The display did not reflect what I had become familiar with over the years.The number of art books on display had declined by half, replaced with popular picture books and illustrated trade books. On another occasion, I was sitting with an editor of a highly respected art book publisher discussing co-edition options for a forthcoming book. He liked the idea very much but wanted the manuscript to be reduced from 48,000 words down to 25,000 words!
Over recent years, print runs have been falling in line with reduced demand from retailers, and disappearing bookstores.Although colour digital printing has become a mature technology, it is still expensive compared to traditional offset printing.
Shelf space for illustrated books has been reducing year after year. What I saw on a recent visit to the showroom of one of the largest distributors of illustrated books in India, revealed the current state of the illustrated-books market in India.As recently as five years ago, there were three large tables piled with new and recent titles.This has now fallen to just 25 per cent of that volume.
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