Alumnus Update: Abhijit Gupta
Abhijit Gupta is a 1993 scholar who pursued a PhD in English Literature at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He is professor of English at Jadavpur University, and director, Jadavpur University Press. His latest book The Spread of Print in Colonial India: Into the Hinterland came out in 2021 from Cambridge University Press.
In this week's blogpost he serves us a gentle reminder of the important role publishing houses play in the weaving together the fabric of literary scholarship.
It’s been nearly thirty years since I appeared for the Inlaks scholarships interviews in New Delhi, in the early and late winter of 1992. At that time, I was working in a newspaper and had become deeply interested in what went on behind the scenes in a newspaper office. In the world of both the newspaper and the printed book, what the reader sees and handles is the finished product. But there is this whole ecology of invisible labour which makes the book or the newspaper possible—the work of the printer, binder, illustrator, copy-editor, the publisher and so on.
In course of my final interview, I said that I was interested not so much in the finished literary product as the process behind it, and therefore I wanted to do a PhD in the broad field of publishing studies. And if possible, I would like to start a publishing house once I returned to India. Unfortunately, I was able to keep only one half of my promise in the short run. I did do research on the world of late nineteenth century Victorian publishing, but it would be nearly another two decades before the promise of the publishing house was belatedly realised, and Jadavpur University Press came into being.
In the world of Indian academia, the university press is an anomaly. In the West, any self-respecting university has a publishing house attached to it. This did not happen in post-Independence India. Before 1947, Calcutta University had a flourishing publishing programme, while Visva-Bharati, the ‘world university’ set up by Rabindranath Tagore, become a trend-setter in Bengali publishing. But the spread of universities across the country post-1947 did not lead to a proportional rise in academic publishing. The task of nation-building and creating responsible citizens for the new republic became the preoccupations of the Indian academy. Thus teaching, and not publishing, became the chief focus of college and university teachers. In such a scenario, only those with a burning desire to say something would publish in books and journals, often at financial cost to themselves. It was only in the late Nineties that the University Grants Commission of India began to encourage academic publishing by setting aside funds for publishing in its ‘Special Assistance Programme’ for departments, but the rules for availing such funds remain so Byzantine that they are often disincentives to publishing.
It was under these circumstances where the university where I teach, Jadavpur Univeristy in Calcutta, set up a publishing house in 2012. At a time when the conventional publishing was facing unprecedented challenges from digital modes of publication and retail, it might have seemed foolhardy to venture into old-school academic publishing. But ten years on, the experiment seems to have worked. The press has published at a steady average of seven-eight titles every year but this year alone, it is scheduled to publish over thirty.
What kinds of books does JUP publish? From the beginning—more by accident than design—the press has published translations. This is not surprising, given that the press had access to the wider academic community of the university, and there was easily available expertise in a wide range of non-Indian languages. We began with an Italian-Bengali series, with the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli translated from the Italian into Bengali. Few years down the line, the remarkable Alpana Ghosh—who learnt Italian solely to be able to translate Dante—approached the press with her translation of the entire Divina Commedia. Here was a septuagenarian homemaker with no connection with academia who had nevertheless devoted her entire life to translating perhaps the greatest single work of western literature.
Then there was Abhijit Mukherjee, electrical engineer by day and Japanese language instructor after hours who brought to us Bengali translations of Haruki Murakami’s Japanese short stories and novels. Acquiring the translation rights of Murakami’s works was quite an education for us, as we learnt how to negotiate copyright with publishers and their agents. This gave us the confidence to be more ambitious and we acquired the Bengali translation rights of a wide range of authors across the globe, such as the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz (Poland), legendary science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula le Guin (USA), the extraordinary Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, arguably the greatest science fiction writer of the last century Stanislaw Lem (Poland), another Nobel laureate who turned down the prize Jean-Paul Sartre (France) and so on. But perhaps our greatest coup was the rights to a Japanese-language biography by Takeshi Nakazima of Rashbehari Basu, an Indian freedom-fighter who ended his life in Japan. The Bengali translation by Kazuhiro Watanabe had been offered to a number of Bengali publishers in Calcutta but none of them was able to close the deal. However, the Development Editor of JUP, Devalina Mookherjee, visited Tokyo and was able to secure the rights to the book in one afternoon, after successively meeting the publisher and their agents. The title has become one of JUP’s best sellers, and recently won the top prize in the Publishing Next Industry Awards in the Indian language books category.
But publishing books alone is not enough, one also has to find ways to reach them to readers. Here, a small publishing firm such as JUP is at a disadvantage, since it does not have access to the distributing and sales channels which larger, more corporate publishing houses, have at their command. One has to figure out how to advertise and sell both through brick-and-mortar and online outlets, attend book fairs, and find ways to ship overseas. In the past few months, we have been finally able to make our books available in bookstores all over the country, in places such as Goa, Mumbai, Varanasi, Gangtok, and Delhi. Talking to booksellers and store owners have made us more conscious of the fragile ecosystem of conventional sales and distribution, under threat more than ever from online giants. If good publishing is to survive in India, then readers must continue to support and nurture the local bookstore.
Images courtesy Abhijit Gupta
