Killing Bangla Publishing

SINCE THE TIME it used to be held in the stretch of land outside the Victoria Memorial, I have been a frequent, though not regular, visitor to the Book Fair or Boi Mela as it is called in Bangla, in Kolkata. This year, I once again dutifully kept aside a Saturday afternoon to travel to the sprawling Fair held over a generous stretch of Salt Lake.

The Fair has appealed to me— someone who tries to keep up with all the new titles in English— for two reasons. First, it allowed me an opportunity to browse through the offerings of smaller publishers who offered interesting titles (and reprints) but lacked the means (or the drive) to publicise them. Over the years, I have picked up many interesting books that have subsequently become quite rare. Secondly, the Fair has always provided me a wonderful opportunity to get an overview of what has been published lately in Bangla. Last year, there were publishers from Bangladesh who had books on subjects I was deeply interested in—although they transacted in cash only, a serious limitation that acted as a brake on my purchases. This year, the Dhaka lot were predictably absent, and I had to channel my visits to the smaller publishers of Kolkata. The crowds trying to enter the stalls of the big publishing houses of Kolkata— like the firm that has done well hawking the intriguing volumes of what passes off as Mamata Banerjee’s poetry—were far too forbidding.

In any case, and quite predictably, I ended up generously overshooting my budget and returned with more

books than a single person could carry.

I hunted, located and purchased a very

quirky book on German porcelain figures on Hindu themes that were produced for the Indian market during the high noon of Empire. In the process, I also ended up ordering a voluminous book on the oleographs that were in circulation in the first two decades of the previous century. I know in my mind that this limited-edition book will be a collector’s item in the coming years.

Finally, and quite fortuitously, I chanced upon two volumes of the collected writings in Bangla of Atulya Ghosh, the legendary politician of West Bengal whose organisational acumen kept Congress in business from Independence to 1967. The cheroot-smoking patriarch in dark glasses with a passion for crime fiction retired from politics after Indira Gandhi worsted the Syndicate and spent the remainder of his life writing and running a children’s home on the outskirts of Calcutta. There are umpteen books either on or written by the Left stalwarts of Bengal—in fact, the Fair has a discernible Left flavour to it—but the anti-communist tradition that defined the politics of the state in the glorious years of Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy has often been conveniently forgotten. If BJP comes to power in West Bengal, I hope it enlarges its local intellectual reach by absorbing aspects of the old Bengal Congress tradition.

Before I get derailed by political history, I must mention my conversation with a young Bengali lady who was now managing a mid-sized publishing house that had been started by her grandfather some five decades ago. She narrated some of the challenges that publishers of Bangla books face. The books have a potentially large readership, but the margins are woefully meagre since the market is terribly price-sensitive. This naturally means that the royalties paid to authors are either non-existent or pitiful.

What compounds the problem for Bangla publishing is the gradual disappearance of bookshops, particularly in the districts. The lady had very harsh words to say about the so-called Boi Para around Kolkata’s College Street that once had the reputation of being a bibliophile’s paradise. Today that reputation would be undeserving since most of the pavement shops where you could once pick up rare titles (and even first editions) now sell guidebooks by professor so-and-so that help students negotiate examinations. The subtext of her disdain for today’s College Street was that these people had a stranglehold over the market and were, in fact, killing Bangla publishing.

In normal circumstances, I am not an advocate of the state getting into the business of running businesses. However, I think there is a case for a future government (which, quite naturally, I hope will be a BJP government) running bookshops in the district capitals on the lines of the wonderful Biswa Bangla outlets. And, finally, public libraries should be encouraged to buy titles other than the poetry of the talented chief minister.