A Shelf-full of Books

[The following piece appeared, with some edits and a title change, in DNA on the 21st of March]

A few days after my first translation, The 65 Lakh Heist, by Surender Mohan Pathak, was released, I walked into a large chain bookstore to see if it was stocked there. I found it in the “Indian Fiction” bookshelf. Its two closest neighbours were an anthology of Love stories edited by Ruskin Bond, and the newest book by Salman Rushdie.

I’ve been browsing through bookstores all my life, but it wasn’t until then that it struck me just how unfair the categorization was for all of the books displayed in the Indian Fiction category. The Ruskin Bond book should have been under Romance, or maybe under Anthologies. Rushdie’s book should have been Literary Fiction. Many of the other books felt wrong, too – Tagore’s and Premchand’s translations should have been under Classics. There should’ve been some sort of category created for Indian campus-lit and chick-lit by now, but those books sit next to historical thrillers and post-modern fiction in the same Indian Fiction bookshelf.

The reader will, no doubt, point out that the volume of Indian books in all these genres is so low, that the books would be lost if mixed in with the other – non-Indian – books. And starting from that point, the reader – and several writers and reporters – have come to the conclusion that Indian writing is very limited and that readers here read much less than their counterparts in other countries. Although this makes for great copy, it’s far from the truth.

Let’s go back to that book I talked about in the beginning – The 65 Lakh Heist, by Surender Mohan Pathak. Mr. Pathak writes crime thrillers in Hindi, and has so far written 270 of them, selling over 25 million copies of his books. The 65 Lakh Heist alone has sold over 3 lakh copies in Hindi. Hindi Pocket Books, as they are called, are a huge industry – but no less than Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, or Bengali popular fiction. This is hardly surprising. The number of people speaking these languages in India is more than those for whom English is a first language. And this industry publishes books in all genres – romance, action, thrillers, noir, social dramas, literary and historical fiction. And if you look at Indian publishing as a whole, instead of just the English segment, it’s thriving and can give English-language publishing in, say, the US, a run for its money.

But if this industry is so large, why are the books in the Indian languages not stocked in the “prestigious” chain bookstores in India? In Bangalore, chain stores have an emaciated-looking Kannada shelf which features Kannada translations of “Chicken Soup for the Soul”; in Pune, there’s a Marathi shelf which contains (you guessed it) Marathi translations of “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and “The Alchemist”. The Hindi shelf, if present, has the same content. Why do the stores boast variety in the English section but turn the Indian language shelves into pale echoes of the English shelf?

I spoke to Krishnakumar R., of Odyssey, about why there weren't more regional language books in Odyssey stores, and he listed three reasons. "The publication schedules of regional publishers are not well planned and have less volume than the English publishers. Second, the distributors of these books don't do a good job of pushing these books to our stores, so we don't get the books reliably. And thirdly, economics is a factor too - our profit margin on regional language books is definitely less than the English books."

All of which are potential discouraging factors, true. But then these stores already deal with a wide variety of products: music, movies, weekly magazines, stuffed toys, show pieces, and so on. Many of these will have the same problems that Mr. Krishnakumar listed. Most tellingly, though, he states, “And we also need to stock those products that cater to our target class of people.”
Perhaps that’s the crux of the issue – the perception that popular fiction in regional languages is a different class of people from those that read English. The feeling is that there are different stores for those books anyway, and the people who come here prefer only the English books.

The movie shelves of these same stores prove them wrong. In the past few years, the size of the Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, and whatnot shelves has grown dramatically – everything other than Hindi and English used to be on one shelf, and now they occupy a fourth of the movies section. And there’s always a crowd sorting through them. Everything that could be said about regional language books could be said about the movies, too. Yet, the stores cater – profitably – to every type of Indian movie watcher. If they actually stocked a representative collection of popular fiction in Indian languages, the stores would similarly attract the general Indian reader, instead of focusing on the niche.

We the English readers, though, us fans of Chetan Bhagat and Dan Brown, would find ourselves in trouble if this happens - we wouldn’t know what to buy. Not because we’re ashamed to, but because we simply don’t know which books are good, and which are tripe. We know when the newest John Grisham is coming out, but we don’t even know which writers are good in Hindi. How is it that we, readers of this paper, never hear of the new releases in Hindi/Marathi/Tamil ? Why are there no best seller lists or reviews we can refer to?

Well, yes, the Hindi/Marathi/Tamil newspapers do talk of these books, and they do have a good circulation. So it could be argued that English newspapers don’t “need” to cover them. But the reason to cover regional literature is the same reason that Bollywood and other Indian cinema is covered in the English media – it is interesting to a large part of the population, it is a large industry that involves thousands of people and large amounts of money, and it is as much a part of the popular culture as movies are. It’s strange that cinema is covered and fiction isn’t.

We might be in this situation because we’ve imported the whole business of English books – writing, buying, marketing, even the genre names on the bookshelves, from the Western books ecosystem. This includes the reviewing and the top ten lists and the contacts with the press – everything that constitutes the hype that sells the books. Publishers in other languages are still waking up to the fact that the English publishing industry is dominating the literary supplements with its flashy covers and advertisements. Writers in other languages are much more grounded – they aren’t turned into celebrities the way English writers are, and they have traditionally depended on word of mouth for their publicity.

Some Indian language book publishers are now learning from their multinational counterparts – they have websites, push for reviews, and even make extracts of new releases available for new readers. A couple of English newspapers now carry columns by writers in other languages. The translation market is booming – until now, it was lop sided, with books from all over available in other Indian languages, but next to nothing available from Indian languages in English. This has changed over the past couple of years, with more and more interesting titles coming out, and more publishers jumping into the fray. Almost every genre of books is now getting translated, raising interest in the originals in their respective languages.

Maybe in a few years, we’ll be as informed about the latest releases in Kannada or Hindi or Marathi as the English ones. And we can go to the chain book stores, and buy our own writers from the genre shelf that they belong to – not the ‘Indian Fiction’ bookshelf.


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What to start reading
If you’re interested in reading some popular fiction from around India, but aren’t familiar with the languages required, here’s a list of new and interesting translations into English.

1. The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction: This was probably the book that started the current wave of interest in popular fiction. Excellently produced, smoothly translated, this book is a must-have.
2. Chandrakanta, by Devkinandan Khatri: The original isn't contemporary, in fact, it's nearly a century old now. But a recent translation, by Puffin books, was quite well done, and probably is one of the few of Indian fantasy so far.
3. The Adventures of Amir Hamza, and Tilism-e-Hoshruba: These are very interesting popular epics, in Urdu and Persian, which have been embellished through the centuries by storytellers. Excellent translations by Musharraf Ali Farooqui came out last year, which revealed these stories for the first time to English readers.
4. The Feast, and other visions of malevolence: This is an interesting graphic novel adaption of weird tales("goodh katha") by the renowned Marathi writer, Ratnakar Matkari. It is scheduled to be released this year, and it will be the first translation of this genre into English.
5. House of Fear, by Ibn-e-Safi: Random House recently released this translation of the cult Urdu pulp writer Ibn-e-Safi, detective stories. There is another anthology of his work, Doctor Dread, coming out soon from Blaft publications.
6. Faster Fene: B.R. Bhagwat created this young lad who gets embroiled in adventures and mysteries with alarming frequency. He's been a favourite of Marathi readers for decades now. Some of his stories have been translated into English, too, but are available only in stores in Mumbai/Pune.
7. Byomkesh Bakshi: Made famous by the TV serial starring Rajit Kapoor, Bengali readers have long been fans of this detective. Sreejata Guha has recently been translating them into English to bring the stories to a wider audience.
8. The 65 Lakh Heist, and Daylight Robbery, by Surender Mohan Pathak. Blaft published these translations of the bestselling Hindi crime writer. These are books starring his popular anti-hero, Vimal, who is reluctantly conscripted into criminal capers.

Press Coverage part 3, and some random thoughts

As you'd expect from a nerd like me, I've been googling for "65 lakh heist" three times a day for the past month. Which has shown me a few interesting things. First, that the number of results changes every hour or so. Doesn't necessarily go up, though. There seem to be websites that just aggregate all possible search terms and populate junk pages with them, and Google finds them a couple of times and then somehow removes them from search results. So you see 712 results now, and 715 results in an hour, and back to 690 the next morning. Fortunately, Google removes most of these dummy results so you don't have to wade through them.

The same sort of situation happens for book sales in the real world. My info on whether the book is doing well comes from Blaft, who get it from their distributors, who get it from... dunno, bookshops and regional offices and whatnot. So I still don't know whether or not the book's doing well enough. Oh well. At least all the reviews so far have been positive.

Speaking of which:

Chandrahas Choudhary wrote a glowing review of the book for Mint, and also posted it on his blog, The Middle Stage. The same post also became the first syndicated column of his that featured on Ultrabrown. Going by Google results, this dude is (justly) awesomely popular - more than half of the genuine results of my daily search are folks who list him on their blogroll, and so have a link to his review on one side of their blog.

Ullah Faiz, over at the UTVi site, writes a post in which he reviews both Daniyal Mueenuddin and 65 Lakh Heist. Good to hear 65 Lakh Heist get mentioned in the same breath as the newest literary sensation :).

The Global Post is an American agency that runs a website featuring articles by independent reporters. Several of these articles get syndicated by mainstream media. Mark Scheffler posts a video interview and short article on Global Post featuring Pathak ji reading from the book, and also comparing his writing to toothbrushes and pizzas (?).

The Global Post article makes its way to the blog of The Complete Review, a world literature site.

Besides all these, Blaft takes an interview of Surender Mohan Pathak himself, recording a long video, and turning it into a proper interview on YouTube. Watch this one!

Sridhar Raghavan, yes, *the* Sridhar Raghavan, mentions The 65 Lakh Heist as his most recently read book in an interview with Tehelka magazine. Hope he passes it on to Anurag Kashyap too...

There's one more interesting development. Deccan Herald asked me to write something about pulp fiction last week, which got published in their Sunday edition. Will post the text of that article in a separate post.

Now if only I could figure out how the book itself is doing!

Invitation to a Reading

Here's where I'll be this Friday:

From 65lh

If you'd like to come, let me know. It should be interesting!

The 65 Lakh Heist: Press Coverage, Part 2

A few more newspapers/mags have mentioned The 65 Lakh Heist over the past month. Here's a summary.

First, a couple of online-only links: BusinessWorld has a nice long review of the book on their web site. The reason they gave for not printing it in the mag itself is that we sent the book to them too late (?).

My friend George Thomas has talked about the book on his blog, here. Thanks, dude!

On to print mentions: Indian Express and Screen both carried the same story about Blaft, with some mentions of the book. The Screen story is here.

Timeout, all three Indian editions of it, carry a review of the book in their 3rd April edition. Here's the link to the Bangalore site.

For some reason, The Hindu's Trivandrum edition features the book in it's weekly reading list in its 12th March edition. Waiting for the remaining editions of the paper to pick it up.

Finally, one offline-only mention: Time Asia, THE Time Asia, has mentioned The 65 Lakh Heist as one of '5 Picks of the Week' in it's March 23 edition. Other picks are a Wong-Kar Wai movie and Eminem's newest album. Interesting company! :)

The 65 Lakh Heist: Press Coverage

I woke up yesterday, the 1st of March, at 7 AM, and bounded to the front door to check out the newspaper. Rifled through it, didn't find what I was looking for. Tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't. Decided to check my mail.
There it was - a mail from a friend with links. The articles had been published in the Indian Express (which doesn't get to Bangalore), and the Delhi edition of Times of India (and not any other edition). So, one way or another, no one in Bangalore knew of any of this. Oh well.

But the Indian Express had a nice huge article, in all its editions. The link I got: http://epaper.indianexpress.com/IE/IEH/2009/03/01/index.shtml . Scroll down about halfway through the right-hand list of pages, click on the page labelled "The Word". There you go. And in case you want to read the actual text: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pulping-hot/428885/0 .

The Delhi ToI had a smaller article, more focused on Pathak himself, and on the experience of reading Hindi pulp. The epaper version is at http://epaper.timesofindia.com . Select the date as March 01, and go to page 10. The article is on the lower right side. If you just want the text : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-4206344,prtpage-1.cms .

Stay tuned for more self-congratulatory lists of links :).

At Kala Ghoda

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is, I'm told, a great place to hang out, see stuff and meet people. As a direct consequence of The Sixty-five Lakh Heist, and the discussions around it, I've been invited to participate in a panel discussion there. Yes, me, of all people. There are some very interesting folks on the panel, and Jerry Pinto is moderating.

One thing that should interest folks is that we'll be playing a short set of excerpts from an interview with Surender Mohan Pathak during this panel. There'll also be some talk about pulp covers in Hindi, Tamil and others.

In short, if you're in Mumbai on the 9th Feb, make sure you make it to the David Sassoon Library, by 8:30 PM. Would be nice to have someone in the audience who knows me, too ;).

Though it's not final and requires a bit of touch up, here's the cover page of the most important book of the year (as far as I'm concerned, anyway):



Painsath Lakh ki Dakaiti was a landmark in Hindi pulp fiction, when it first appeared several decades ago. It's been reprinted 15 times by 7 different publishers, and has sold more than 3 Lakh copies. It kickstarted a new genre in Hindi pulp thrillers - a hero who is a wanted felon, who's broken out of jail and continues to commit crimes.

And the cover above is of the translated English version, published by Blaft, coming out by the end of Feb.

Okay, so why is this the most important book of the year for me?

Forunately for me, the folks at Tehelka magazine have published the answer on their site, saving me the trouble. See for yourself.

So now I'm famous, apparently :)

Have you heard of Surender Mohan Pathak? Perhaps you've seen his name at Railway Station book stalls, the way I've been seeing since childhood. But here are ten things I hadn't known about him until a few months ago.

1. He writes about 4 novels a year. For each of these, he gets about 4 lakh rupees for the initial print run.

2. He's been writing since 1959. His first story, 57 Saal Purana Aadmi (The 57-year-old man), was published then. And his first novel, Operation Budapest, was published in 1969.

3. So far he's written 268 novels. The last was a murder mystery named Jaal, starring his popular press reporter character, Sunil Chakraborti. The book had the current economic downturn as a backdrop element.

4. The average print run of the first editions of his books is one lakh. That is, one lakh copies of each of his books are printed on first release.

5. Though Pathak had written about 50 books before he hit big time, his first claim to fame were translated versions of James Hadley Chase novels. Pathak's writing style - crisp, detail-oriented, and fast-paced - suited these books so well that other publishers began marketing their own versions of Chase in Hindi with his name on the cover as translator. Pathak took about 3 or 4 days to do each book during his free time in his office at a Telephone company.

6. Along with translating the Chase books, Pathak also translated Ian Fleming's James Bond books. Having done that, he wrote his own series of James Bond novels!

7. His 'Vimal' series of books, beginning in the 70s, was the first in Hindi pulp to feature a Sikh hero. The success of this series prompted many imitations, none of which did as well. Many fans consider this series, which has 38 books so far, as his best so far.

8. Pathak was the inventor of the word 'Company', as used to describe an underworld organization, in his Vimal series of books. So, the 'D Company' owes it's name to him.

9. Looking for a closure to the Vimal series, Pathak at one point killed off his wife to trigger a final confrontation. The public outcry at this was so huge that Pathak was forced to resurrect her. The method he used to do so was suggested by a fan in an impassioned letter to him - a double role. :)

10. Hindi pulp books get published on cheapo, thick, newsprint paper. Considering Pathak's popularity, his publisher, in 2008, decided to print his works on good quality white paper, with a higher price for the book. Popular opinion in the publishing industry was against this move since the market is deemed to be very price sensitive. However, Pathak's first book on white paper, Midnight Club , sold as well as if not better than the older versions. The plan now is to reprint the best of his work on white paper as collector's editions.

11. Yes, a bonus fact : In 2006, a young man named Sandeep Bhatnagar pretended to be a human bomb in order to loot a branch of UTI Bank. He was caught, and confessed that he'd picked up the plan from Zameer ka Qaidi, a book by Surender Mohan Pathak. "He probably hadn't read the whole book," Pathak told us(*) later, "Or he'd have known that the guy trying it gets caught in the book too."

(*) Who's us? Wait for the next post!

[Part 1 of the Whole Story of how I came to doing this.

A few months back, I wrote this post on my blog, describing a book I picked up on impulse and loved. Towards the end, I wondered why no one tried a similar project for Hindi pulp. The question was prompted by a rather selfish motive - I'd seen these pulp books since childhood, and even read one or two by Colonel Ranjit - but had never had the courage to jump in. My reading speed in Hindi, anyway, was much less than English, and my vocabulary wasn't that great. It would nice to have someone find out about the Hindi pulps, especially the ones that had attracted my attention from the beginning - the detective novels and the horror and fantasy books, choose the best of the lot and translate them for me to read.

Rakesh Khanna of Blaft responded to my post almost immediately (see the comments on that old post). Was I interested in taking up such a translation project?

I was really taken aback. But thinking over it, it seemed like a god sent opportunity. I'd done some translation from Hindi to English for movie subtitles before, and had even helped my mother with Gujarati to Hindi translations. If interest in the books counted as a criterion, I was definitely the best guy for the job. I said yes.

The first chance I got, I went down to the Bangalore Railway station, and the bus stand next to it, to try and find some Hindi pulp to look over. Would you believe there's not a single shop in all of Bangalore that sells the stuff? It's either Kannada or English. Not enough readers to justify selling Hindi, apparently, though there are a couple of shops that sell serious Hindi literature.
I called up my relatives in Pune, Mumbai, Indore, Delhi to see if they could look up and send me some books. At the same time, I made another discovery - Surender Mohan Pathak has a fan club on Orkut! I joined the club and asked folks about which of his books were good and so on.

By then, I'd gotten a few books from folks in better-placed cities - one each of Surender Mohan Pathak, Ved Prakash Sharma, and Raj Bharati. Reading them through convinced me that Surender Mohan Pathak was the best of the three for a translation project. I also managed to get 'best-of' book lists from the Orkut group, from which I selected one good candidate to start with.

This was 'Painsath Lakh ki Dakaiti'.

Deciding that this would make a good translation was one thing. Actually figuring out what to do next, and how to start, was another thing entirely. How do I know whether I can do this? How do publishing rights for translations work? Would Pathak be interested in letting me do this? How do I get to him?

[The saga continues... wait for the next part, to be posted whenever my boss isn't around the office :) ]