Hindi Writer’s Cul-de-sac

BOOKS never sell. They are sold," says Shyam Sunder, a senior manager at a Delhi-based Hindi publishing house, Prabhat Prakashan. Publishers of quality Hindi literature have had the truth of this maxim rubbed in their noses with unfailing monotony for the past few decades. And the writers see the evidence in the slim accumulation of zeroes in their biannual royalty cheques. And these are not first-time writers alone, but prolific and well-reputed authors too.

Says litterateur Nirmal Verma, 66, who has 20 books in print: "It’s very difficult to make a living as a fiction writer unless you are employed somewhere else." While this may make for a traditional writer’s dilemma, it becomes a sad indicator if the writer in question—and Verma is a classic example—receives a paltry annual royalty of just Rs 30,000 from all his books.

For some it’s even worse. Take, for instance, Naresh Mehta, 75, winner of the Jnanpith award in 1993. Based in Indore, Mehta has written over 45 books, nine of them novels, but his annual cumulative take is just Rs 15,000. Says Mehta: "It’s difficult for the likes of us to make a living just from our writing unless we live very frugally." Or if your intentions are different. Says writer Manu Bhandari, author of the bestseller Maha Bhoj: "I write just for reactions and rewards. Not money. It’s sad to see a young generation in the Hindi belt which doesn’t read Hindi."

That, in fact, is part of the problem. Complains Mrinal Pandey, executive editor of Dainik Hindustan and daughter of the famous Hindi writer Shivani: "My mother lived only on her writing and she lived like a nun. Things have got worse since then. The middle class made their children English users. One by one the major Hindi magazines closed down." The major disadvantage of this is that the writers no longer have quality platforms to exhibit their talent.

While rising paper costs have increased book prices all around, the assertion of the Hindi publishers is that the spiralling costs have affected them more because of the fringe economic status of Hindi readers. Says Sunder: "Earlier, first editions used to have a minimum print run of 2,200 copies. Now they don’t exceed 1,100 and sometimes it’s just 500."

 But what’s really eating the system from within is the dependence of the publishers on bulk purchases by libraries and other state and central purchase schemes, especially by institutes like the Raja Rammohun Roy Literary Foundation (see box), rather than relying on over-the-counter sales. The result: widespread distortions in the decision process that goes into selecting books. Says Sunder: "If the sales of a particular book notch up Rs 1 lakh, you can safely assume that Rs 99,000 have been through bulk sales. The main reason is that over the years readers have disappointed us, so we had to depend on libraries. Because of our small print runs, our prices become prohibitive for the ordinary Hindi reader." Making matters worse are instances of some appraisal committees charging a security deposit of Rs 1,000 per book that the publisher submits for scrutiny. Money which is often not returned for years on end.

 And if small print runs aren’t bad enough, the number of quality bookshops willing to give space to Hindi titles is ever decreasing. Says Ashok Maheshwari, manager at Rajkamal Prakashan, one of the bigger Hindi publishing houses with a sales turnover nearing Rs 80 lakh: "The bookshop owners have a mental block about keeping Hindi books. It’s the same mindset that prevents ordinary Hindi-speaking people from displaying Hindi titles in book racks at home." The editor of the Hindi literary monthly Hans, Rajinder Yadav, goes so far as to say that there aren’t even 25 good outlets in India where Hindi publishers can send books. Says he: "If there were 500 such outlets with each purchasing, say, five copies of a new title, things would improve."

In fact, many Hindi authors as well as publishers cite the example of the Kerala Sahitya Pravartaka Sangam (KSPS) which was founded in the ’50s and produced almost a book a day in Malayalam. Helping popularise Malayalam literature in a big way, the KSPS gave a royalty of 30 per cent to its authors. Says K. Satchidananda, poet and editor at the Sahitya Akademi: "The Sangam published many of the Malayalam classics, encyclopaedias and folk legends and efforts are on to revamp it once again by selling the Sangam’s real estate to raise money."

Raising money for running costs is, in fact, one of the principal headaches for the publishers. All of them hit a virtual blank wall when they approach commercial banks. Says author Arun Prakash: "While RBI guidelines were issued to commercial banks to give loans to publishers, they added a rider to it. The publisher had to be a textbook publisher too. It’s high time the government at least declared publishing a cottage industry."

Strangely, the evidently larger Hindi market potential hasn’t been tapped yet for a variety of reasons and sometimes its size alone works against it. Says Verma: "Hindi is read in a sprawling region. It’s not like Bengali, confined to a culturally homogeneous region.

A Bengali engineer would like to keep books of Tagore and Sharad babu. The cultural elite is shallower in the North. Our literature teachers in the North hardly awaken love for the language."

Lucknow-based Srilal Shukla, author of the bestseller Raag Darbari, is critical of the leadership. Says he: "You can’t discuss the crisis of Hindi literature with the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Deve Gowda and Taslimuddin. Besides, books for us in the North are not that essential cultural events as they are in Bengal and Kerala." Shu-kla also feels that the lower middle class in the Hindi belt cannot afford to write fiction. "For my book Pahla Padav I had planned to spend some time with construction labourers in the Chhattisgarh region. But raising the money was beyond me. I couldn’t go and spend some time there in the style of Gunter Grass in Calcutta."

While Shukla nets about Rs 50,000 a year in royalties, he feels he missed out on his writing economically by not being prolific, which he feels is the only way to survive in India.

But nearly all Hindi writers point to the growth of English as the main obstacle. Says Mehta: "Even though Hindi has a loose status as national language, I feel it would have helped us much more had there been a clearcut geographical and cultural demarcation of the language."

Another drawback that regional publishers face is the high cost of stall space at events like the World Book Fair in Delhi. Says Krishna Gupta of Pravin Prakashan: "The non-English press should get a discount of 50 per cent. A stall space of just 150 sq ft costs around Rs 12,000. We hardly sell books worth that much. Sometimes we participate just to make our presence felt."

Curiously, Hindi publishers have better things to say for the Patna Book fair which is organised every December. For some reason, book sales are higher in Bihar than in other Hindi-speaking states. Explains Verma: "The reason for Bihar being more alive as far as literature goes is the political awakening in the state. Literature and political awakening go together."

And maybe there’s a connection between the poor showing of Hindi literature with the kind of respect its authors get. Says Mehta: "The respect that a Bengali, Malayali or Maharashtrian author gets, no Hindi writer gets." Malayalam writer O.V. Vijayan claims that in Kerala writers enjoy more popularity than politicians. "Also, writers are enjoyed and admired by the common man. I have experienced this many times in my visits to Kerala," adds Mehta.

But N.S. Madhavan, joint secretary in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry and a well-known Malayalam short story writer, points to another factor: "Malayalam literature is more vibrant because the state enjoys 100 per cent literacy. Every village boasts of at least one library. The children are influenced by world literature that’s been translated into Malayalam and is available in libraries. This does not happen in any state except Kerala." But that’s not to say that no Hindi genre is doing well. There’s Narendra Kohli, whose mythology-based novels have been a roaring success and have allowed the writer to stop teaching and concentrate on writing fulltime. Says he: "If some current Hindi writers take pride in the fact that they don’t sell much, it’s their problem." While Shukla calls Kohli’s success a result of "writing about the obvious", others bracket him with pulp fiction. Rebuts Kohli: "No pulp fiction writer has 25 people doing PhDs on him. Tulsidas was also at one point of time called a pulp fiction writer."

Kohli, at the moment, receives an annual royalty upwards of Rs 2.5 lakh and takes pride in the fact that his book sales have been over the counter and cannot be attributed to "bulk sales".

But even though the print run of editions is going down day by day, the number of titles publishers come out with remains high. Publishers with annual sales of Rs 80 lakh-plus—and there are about eight of them—come out with an average of 125 new titles every year, out of which a minimum of 30 per cent is fiction. In fact, Verma notes that it is much easier for Hindi writers to get published: "Mediocrity flourishes to a great extent."

Corroborates Ramesh Grover, partner in the Allahabad-based publishing firm, Lok Bharti: "These days quality creative writing is a little on the ebb. We personally don’t like to compromise our reputation by publishing new authors unless the quality is clear-cut." Lok Bharti has published four Jnanpith award winners—Mahadevi Verma, Dinkar, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Naresh Mehta. In the end, it is perhaps the optimism of 66-year-old Grover that provides a silver lining to the clouds: "It is right that we have hit a low lately but I am not pessimistic about it. I think the readers are there, it’s just that we are not being able to reach them yet."