The arrival of Aptos and the fuss about fonts

Microsoft’s Aptos has stirred debates about font preferences. Why does the look of lettering matter so much?

An earlier version of Aptos, designed by Steve Matteson, called Bierstadt. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The poem was ready to be sent, but when writer and poet Priyanka Sacheti looked at the submission guidelines of the literary journal, she realised she had one last alteration to make: the font had to be changed from her usual Times New Roman to Arial. 

“It was difficult to put a finger on why, but the poems sat differently on the page in Arial than in Times New Roman,” she recalls of the incident from a few weeks ago. 

Sacheti’s feelings resemble what many users of Microsoft Office Suite experienced recently. On Reddit, X and Instagram, users began saying they felt unsettled while using Word, Excel or Outlook email; that their work looked and felt different. When they realised this was due to Aptos, MS Office’s new default font, the rollout of which started earlier this year, many passionately objected to or advocated for Calibri’s typographic successor. 

In her book Why Fonts Matter, UK-based typographer Sarah Hyndman suggests that experiences in the physical world can influence how we interpret a font. “Type can be seen as mirroring the emotions we display...through our facial expressions and gestures,” she writes. Hydman goes on to say that typography reflects how handwriting can show our mood: “When writing quickly, your mood is italicised and when angry it becomes bold and deliberate.” 

For those who still write extensively by hand, transitioning from page to screen becomes easier with fonts that look like their own handwriting. 

K.C. Janardhan, calligraphist and founder of Bengaluru-based J’s La Quill, a museum of handwriting and lettering, says that he only uses ITC Galliard Italic while typing “because it’s close to the way I write”. On his website, he uses Optima for the comfort of clarity that it offers others.

This is the same reasoning that software developers and companies follow when planning default fonts for applications that are used by a diverse, global audience.

THE DUTY OF A DEFAULT 

“A default font must be clean, legible and neutral, devoid of a strong character...,” says Satya Rajpurohit, co-founder of the Indian Type Foundry, which has designed Indian and Latin fonts for Apple, Google and Amazon. 

The visual elements of the alphabet’s design, “can significantly impact our interaction with text”, adds Rajpurohit, also the founder of Fontstore, a subscription font service for designers. These elements not only influence readability but also perception of the tone of the content.

Steve Matteson, the American typographer who designed Aptos, says something similar in an email interview with Lounge: “A default font should not impact the tone of what the writer is going to communicate because it can’t predict the writer’s intent.… It simply needs to show the writer the words in a clear and neutral tone and not hinder their writing process.”

Calibri dethroned Times New Roman around the time that Apple launched its first iPhone. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Matteson adds that Times New Roman, which served as the default font on Microsoft apps from 1992, exhibited an “institutional formality”, while Calibri, which was adopted in 2007, has an “overt friendliness” about it—both of these could “skew the visual meaning before the message was even read”, he says. 

To him, “Aptos is an attempt to temper that effect and draw the reader in to read first without any presupposed sense of the message”.

The other challenge that a default font has to rise up to, is the task of supporting “all kinds of documents—from essays to technical documents, from business letters to invoices and newsletters,” says Rathna Ramanathan, a children’s book author and graphic designer who researches intercultural communication design and typography. 

“Given how global the use of MS Office is, the default font needs to cater to different kinds of users with different technical fluencies,” she notes. For her, the perfect default font is “functional, not fussy, and easy to use”.

A font also needs to adapt well to the technology that displays it. So far, decisions concerning a font change on the MS Office Suite have coincided with milestones in technological advancement. Calibri dethroned Times New Roman around the time that Apple launched its first iPhone, which was an industry disruptor. Now, more than 15 years later, the demand is for a font that holds its own on UltraHD and 4K screens. Microsoft specifically mentions as much in a post on Medium that announced the roll-out of Aptos. 

“We very rarely print documents anymore—we are instead viewing them on our phones, tablets or on our computers,” notes Ramanathan. To her, Aptos “is born for reading on a screen”. 

Personal Preferences

When dealing with chunks of text on a daily basis, however, typographic preferences go beyond defaults.

“Obsessed with fonts”, India-born, US-based writer Nishanth Injam, writes with a different font each time he starts a new story. “At least for the first draft, as I fine-tune the voice, I run through different fonts, matchmaking till I find something that clicks,” he says. The idea is that with every new font, he can make a “clean break” from work he’s done before, to make way for “something new to emerge”. 

For some others, changing a font—even midway through a draft —is an instinctive act as they work through mental blocks. Editor Gayatri Goswami reformats files to Times New Roman before she works on them. “When dealing with so much text on a daily basis, tidy fonts that ensure an ease of reading are critical,” she says. 

This leads back to Rajpurohit’s observation on the design of each alphabet of a font. He explains that factors like the width of letters, the height of the lowercase letters compared to capital letters and the spacing between each letter can lead to users nurturing specific, personal font preferences. 

Even a change from a serif font to a sans serif font makes for a huge shift in mindset. He lays out the difference: “Serif fonts are the ones with little feet or lines attached to the ends of their letters (like Times New Roman). They often give off a classic, formal feeling, like what you’d see in a book or newspaper. Sans serif fonts (like Arial, Calibri and Aptos) don’t have those extra bits; their letters are plain and simple. They feel more modern and straightforward, kind of like the text you’d see on websites or signs.”

While writer Daribha Lyndem describes her preferred fonts EB Garamond or Palatino—both serif types—as “fonts that look like something I would find in a novel”, translator Arunava Sinha finds that he prefers a sans-serif type, Gill Sans MT. He explains that “flaws in my text jump out at me when I read in Gill Sans MT. The problem with (a serif font) is that things seem to flow into each other so beautifully, I gloss over any errors,” he says. 

That fonts are essentially designed to support creation and consumption of content without drawing much attention to themselves, marks the act of designing them with a certain altruism. “Fonts are akin to air; vital yet often unnoticed,” says Rajpurohit. “The best font is one you have read without even realising it was there.”

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 5 April 2024

Pankaj Garg: Objectifying everyday

Pankaj Garg, founder and CEO of the design-led lifestyle and tech accessory brand DailyObjects, on learning through the dotcom, e-commerce booms, and the future-proof beauty of their name

Pankaj Garg, founder and CEO, DailyObjects. (Illustration by Priya Kuriyan for Mint Lounge.)

A nondescript building in the Information Technology Park in Gurugram, Haryana, is home to one of India’s most popular design and accessory startups. Only an immensely missable, standard nameplate-sized black-on-white “DailyObjects” sign on the building wall confirms this. Similarly minimalistic and utilitarian, the ground floor of this four-floor 50,000 sq. ft space is a large open office with a line of long wooden tables with chairs, a few big-windowed glass cabins along its sides, and a corner with a coffee machine and snacks.

This seems unexpected for a design startup catering to an urban clientele looking for sleek, yet imaginatively crafted personal accessories for functional, everyday needs: laptop sleeves and phone covers, and, lately, in keeping with the times, cable managers as well as wireless chargers for multiple gadgets, smartwatch straps and desk-mats that can accommodate gadgets with personal stationery in compact and cool ways.

The company says it has not only remained profitable but has doubled in scale and revenue to ₹85 crore from FY22 to FY23. In the months since, it says it is set to cross ₹130 crore gross for FY24.

“Yeah, I don’t like filling the walls with cheerful or motivational clutter,” says Pankaj Garg, the founder and CEO. His cabin, too, is consistent with the minimalism—there’s only a skinny whiteboard near the window, a Macbook on a desk-mat on the table. I am intrigued by the only apparent clutter: white, moulded and 3D printed mock-ups of work-in-progress products lining the windowsill. Garg, 42, dressed in a dark blue, linen mandarin-collar shirt and boxy dark blue denims cuffed at the ankle, catches me eyeing them and jumps to his feet: “Come, let me show you around,” he says. “They must also be printing phone covers now.”

The tour takes about 25 minutes: There are karigars (craftsmen) who stitch and stamp, teams for quality control, and spaces for packing orders, display experiments, photo shoots and phone case printers. Garg tells me they can print 2,000 cases every day (about 60,000 every month), and as we walk by rooms with stocks stacked to the brim, he adds they have gone up from having just 15-20 karigars in 2020 to 400 in-house and over 1,000 more on project-basis now. Other than this, DailyObjects employs 160 staffers and has 400 others on contract.

This space is a big step up from the 6,000 sq. ft facility in Sultanpur, Delhi, from where DailyObjects worked three years ago. Quick thinking during a dip in real estate prices during covid-19 made this possible: “All businesses were cost-cutting then...we were so confident that we decided to move without any capital,” Garg says, adding that DailyObjects never fired any employees then.

Back in his cabin, Garg recalls his upbringing in Mubarikpur, in Rajasthan’s Alwar district. He talks about how he and his siblings, Sanjay Garg of the label Raw Mango, and Prerna Garg, a social entrepreneur, were given free rein by their parents, who ran a “khaad beej ki dukaan(fertiliser, seed shop)”, to follow their purpose and passions. The siblings attended the government school there, and “we were very ambitious right from our childhood”, he says. The trio always loved wearing good clothes and have had an eye for design and colour, he recalls. Sanjay, for instance, went on to establish a luxury handloom brand; Garg too has also always loved to shop for good things—incidentally, this is how his foray into entrepreneurship started.

But not before a bachelor’s degree in commerce from a Hindi-medium college in Alwar, a move to Delhi during the dotcom boom of the early 2000s to study at a computer coaching institute, teaching himself better English to keep up with continuing higher education in the language and completing his master’s in computer applications at Kurukshetra University. The moment of change came when he started working in software in Mumbai and later, Pune, even getting an H-1 visa to move to the US. “It was just not for me,” he recalls. He quit the job.

In 2009, visiting a friend working at the CIIE.CO, a startup incubator at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, he was inspired to ask: What if they started an aggregator for sales and discounts? “There was a clear gap there,” he recalls about starting SaleDekho.com. A little before launch in August that year, however, his co-founder decided to quit. Garg quickly took stock and moved from Maharashtra to the National Capital Region (NCR), mobilising a team of four-five to work on the site full time.

The same year, looking for a co-founder with zeal rather than a fancy degree, Garg met Saurav Adlakha, now the co-founder of DailyObjects. He recalls Adlakha, then just out of the Indus World School of Business in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, as being “a fresh graduate with burning passion”.

The duo worked through a timely transition from discount aggregating to identifying and hopping on to the e-commerce boom—for six months, they procured gadgets like smartphones and cameras from wholesalers and sold them on platforms like Mydala and Snapdeal. They “made some money” but, more importantly, learnt what they should not be selling. “These were easily available, high capital, high competition, but low margin, and if damaged, paisa bhi chala gaya (you also lose money),” Garg says. “Not the right category.”

It was at this point that an early version of DailyObjects came to be—and it is yet another example of Garg’s knack for sniffing out market gaps when out shopping. In 2012, despite living in a busy south Delhi residential area, he noticed that while neighbourhood markets would sell consumer durables like fridges, TVs or smartphones, many didn’t have accessories like cases and mouse-pads. Studying an Apple reseller’s store in Delhi’s Saket, Garg noted that while most of the revenue was coming from Apple’s star products, “they were surviving on accessories”. This was perfect. “There is no breakage problem, and accessories are directly related to growth of the main products,” Garg notes, recalling the aha moment that led to the launch of DailyObjects in June 2012.

The company we know today, though, only came to be in 2015, when Amazon and Flipkart became big players in e-commerce, forcing Garg and Adlakha to remodel DailyObjects from a mere online marketplace into an independent D2C (direct to consumer) brand that designed and manufactured accessories in-house.

In 2016, DailyObjects raised funding from the likes of Lenskart’s Peyush Bansal, Unilazer Ventures and Phanindra Sama of redBus. Still, it was a struggle, and the company came close to shutting down within two years of revamp. “We ran out of money, had a lot of liabilities, no profits, only ₹50 lakh in monthly sales,” Garg recalls. “Then we figured, let’s get back to the basics of the business.”

When I ask him what this meant, Garg pauses, picks up a pen and paper and starts doodling his explanation: “A focus on survival and unit economics, and a focus on building a brand.” A flow chart emerges as he speaks: First, they laid out clear expense targets; next, they stopped taking cash-on-delivery (CoD) orders and selling on other marketplaces.

“We corrected for a longer-term plan,” he says. If they wanted their own brand, they had to focus on building identity. From 2017-20, without raking in any capital, he claims sales went up from ₹50 lakh to ₹2 crore monthly, and the EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) from -50% to 8%. It was only after this, in late 2021, that they resumed selling on other e-commerce platforms and taking CoD orders. In 2022, the company raised $2 million (around ₹16.6 crore) from the venture capital firm Roots Ventures.

Today, Garg believes they have no competitor in the space of lifestyle and tech accessories. He says making in India is important to him because “building process and capability opens up a huge opportunity for the future”. While DailyObjects does not indulge in block prints or ikattrimmings to prove Indianness, they do a few collections with independent artists drawing on desi kitsch and liberally using desi nostalgia in ad campaigns for their more minimal, global designs—the recent Postcard phone cover collection’s video, for example, has a postman in khaki bringing mail on a bicycle.

They have to get this right, especially because their target group (TG) is young, aspirational, and does not lack exposure. “This is the mass premium category, 22- to 35-year-olds with phones costing more than ₹20,000,” Garg says. The $16.6 billion mass premium market is estimated to grow by 7% by FY 2028 to $24 billion, he adds, showing a report in the Economic Times which notes that among other consumer durables, sales of laptops costing over ₹50,000 increased from 47% in 2019 to 69%, and sales of smartphones over ₹15,000, from 25% in 2019 to 48% now.

“When (they have quality) options, they are ready to spend…so they are a perfect TG for us and our products are perfect for them,” he says. Their basket size, or products sold per order, has grown from 1.2 three years ago to 2.5 now, translating to an increase in order value, from ₹1,000 to ₹2,400. Bags, a category DailyObjects added only in 2020, already contribute to over 50% of daily sales, even as they ship more than 100,000 products every month, he adds. Though over 65% of these sales come from their own website and their app, which has more than two million downloads, DailyObjects is now also beginning to see new opportunities offline: They want to be in “100 Apple resellers across the country by the next year”.

Their run post-pandemic has Garg confident of an ARR (annualised revenue run-rate) of ₹500 crore by 2025. He also wants to capitalise on the “low-hanging opportunities” of brand partnerships, like the one with Smartsters, a children’s furniture brand, earlier this year. “We are still evolving,” he smiles. “Also, we have a beautiful name...anything can become a daily object. Our story is just starting.”

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 17 November, 2023

The case for a queer history month

Given the nature of the Supreme Court’s verdict against same-sex marriages in India, could an LGBTQ+ History Month help?

Pride parade Kolkata 2018. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In a conversation with Lounge just days before the Supreme Court decided it could not legalise gay marriages, Kannada writer Vasudhendra, 54, who has been open about his homosexuality over the last decade especially, recalled that growing up he did not even know the word “gay”.

“A village-born boy” who was “only taught Kannada properly”, he says that even as recently as 30 years ago, there was an alarming lack of resources for, or representation of, queer people in contemporary literature and culture. “It was only in college (in the late 1980s) that I came across a vulgar and insensitive joke about homosexual behaviour in an adult magazine in Kannada—and felt thrilled,” Vasudhendra recalls. “Thrilled because I thought Finally! Finally, someone has finally spoken about me.”

It has taken decades of sociocultural interventions in art, literature and cinema to build awareness on queerness; in parallel, legal appeals to decriminalise homosexual relationships, by individual petitioners as well as the likes of the Naz Foundation, an NGO, brought the conversation in India to the point it reached last week—on the cusp of marriage equality for people of all genders and sexualities. The country’s highest court of appeal had begun hearing petitions that sought legal recognition of same-sex marriage in April-May.

While the court stated that it would be beyond the scope of legal interpretation to go through with the verdict, passing the matter to the executive, Aishwarya Ayushmaan, a Delhi-based human rights lawyer who moonlights as the drag queen Lush Monsoon, says that if there was a stronger understanding of queer history within, and of, the subcontinent, the court might not have been hesitant.

“According to how I read law, if the courts want to do something, they will do it…. There could have been a way, even while respecting the separation of powers,” she says. “The hesitance comes from the fact that while the judges are aware of LGBTQ+ history to a certain extent, the public isn’t. When a majority of people aren’t aware of Indian LGBTQ+ history, they can’t partake in a judgement like this. Therefore, the judges will feel less confident in saying so strongly…something which is against popular morality,” she adds.

The sense is that apart from the huge legal victory in 2018 to strike down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (which could have sent a gay person to jail for up to 10 years), and a few conversations in metro-city salons, panels, and the celebratory photo-ops that Pride parades across the country lend themselves to, not much has changed in terms of the citizenry’s general understanding of love, desire and relationships outside the assumed norms of heterosexuality.

Just as with Vasudhendra, Ayushmaan, now 31, too had no way or context by which to live authentically or express her inherent femininity when she was growing up. This was in Ranchi, “a small town” where many people would, and continue to, dismiss the idea of queerness as a trend or fad. “Therefore, stringing together the terms ‘LGBTQ+’ and ‘history’ itself is a very, very important thing to do…it gives much needed background and context to something that is actually so deeply rooted in our history,” she says.

The late translator, gay rights activist and historian Saleem Kidwai had once said that “(f)or a long time, the history of us queer people has been erased from records and thus from our collective memory, a crucial act for the queer phobia project. Without a history and therefore without a memory, we as a community are rootless, alienated and disempowered.”

Recalling this, Sharif D. Rangnekar, author of Queersapien (2022) and Straight To Normal: My Life As A Gay Man (2019), says that to reclaim this space, the idea of a concerted effort at a History Month will help “create more platforms where these lives can be shared”. Rangnekar is also the director of the four-year-old Rainbow Literature Festival, held annually in December with the aim of spotlighting queer stories and authors.

“Even if the verdict was in our favour, a celebration of Indian queer history is something we should be looking into,” says Sakshi Juneja, founder of Gaysi Family, a media platform for desi queer folks. “It’s always good to remind ourselves where we come from, of both the hindrances and joys of the past. This is even more relevant now: It not only shows the resilience and strength of community, it also aligns older queer people with younger ones,” she adds.

Many countries mark an LGBTQ+ History Month, separate from a Pride Month, to commemorate queer icons, provide a sense of confidence and belonging to the community, and build awareness. History Month is currently on in countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, Romania, Armenia, Australia and Uganda. England marks it in February, Hungary and the Netherlands in March, Italy in April, Cuba and Germany in May, France in June and Finland in November.

Juneja says that while there need not be a hard-and-fast rule for India, perhaps a dedicated month for online campaigns, with offline engagements folded into Pride celebrations across cities at different times of the year, may be a good way to go. “It’s good to have continuous reminders,” she notes.

Similarly, Vasudhendra notes that any occasion to discuss queer lives and rights is a good excuse, whether the month or date was originally regarded more as an “American or Chinese” one. For Rangnekar, regardless of the choice of month or its original context, “if we can leverage (a History Month) for the (Indian queer) community, for them to know their history and for others also to know the history of queerness that the subcontinent has had, it will be extremely significant”.

In India, Pride marches—they started with the Friendship Walk in Kolkata in 1999—have established their significance in visibilising queer folks. Similar to the American Pride that was rooted in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, Pride marches here also became a display of self-acceptance in the face of systemic oppression, gay- and trans-phobia. Now, a History Month can perhaps serve another important, even if less attractive end at the present moment of disappointment: of unearthing and establishing the past, to pave the way for a stronger future. “It’s now more important to re-establish what LGBTQ+ people have endured through history, and the fact that they have actually even existed in the first place,” says Ayushmaan.

Rangnekar adds that while History Month is as much part of human rights expression as Pride Month, and that you cannot remove one from the other, “a History Month gives more strength to Pride. It gives us a reference, a past. It validates you in a way and it can become part of an argument to further strengthen your case for dignity and self-actualisation.” This seems to be the need of the hour. 

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 27 October 2023

Westland's Gautam Padmanabhan: The comeback man

Over a year after the Amazon setback, Westland Books' Gautam Padmanabhan on his venture’s various avatars, and why working in Pratilipi is exciting

Gautam Padmanabhan, currently, business head of Westland Books at Pratilipi. (Illustration by Priya Kuriyan for Mint Lounge)

On his Instagram bio, Gautam Padmanabhan calls himself a “publishing dinosaur”. About a year and a half ago, this would not have sounded cute. He may be sportingly alluding to having spent over three decades in the books business but in February last year, when Westland Publications Pvt. Ltd was suddenly dumped by its parent company, the India arm of the global retailer Amazon, his future in the trade was far from certain.

“Yeah, well…,” says the soft-spoken Padmanabhan, 57, haltingly. A wistful chuckle later: “As the CEO of Westland, I was aware of what was going to happen reasonably close to the date…but honestly, I did not expect the response we were going to get,” he says, referring to the shock and sympathy triggered by the news of shutdown.

It is thanks to one such response, from Bengaluru-based digital storytelling platform Pratilipi, valued currently at $265 million (around Rs. 2,173 crore), that he is able to have a conversation contrasting his 17 years as the CEO of a traditional publishing house with his now close to 17 months as the business head of the book publishing division of a digital storytelling platform. While more than happy to be back publishing books, Padmanabhan and his team at Westland Books have also been experimenting with other verticals within Pratilipi for multimedia storytelling.

The optimism is palpable as we speak at length on a muggy monsoon day in Delhi. Padmanabhan, visiting from Chennai, is dressed appropriately in a cool bush-shirt and office pants. In the conference room of their relatively new office space at the East of Kailash community centre in Delhi, he tells me about how working closely with Pratilipi’s in-house teams means they can more realistically reach the vast, untapped “market for...stories” and “explore non-traditional channels” to distribute them.

In close to two decades with Padmanabhan as CEO, and about half a decade with well-respected editors like Karthika V.K. and Ajitha G.S., Westland had become one of the biggest homegrown trade publishers—the name would be listed in the same breath as the India concerns of some of the biggest international publishers like Penguin Random House or HarperCollins. When the news broke, some quarters even saw Westland’s closing as a comment on the future of Indian publishing.

All the noise, even if well-intentioned, could not have helped Padmanabhan when he was cornered into chalking out a future for his strong, tight-knit team and a family legacy he had nurtured through various big business changes.

*****

Padmanabhan’s first job, in 1987, was as a sales manager at East West Books, a book distributorship his father had started in 1962. “Since I was interested in the business of books from childhood, I was ready to join as soon as I finished school, but, on my dad’s urging, I completed my BCom from Madras University,” recalls Padmanabhan, who has now lived for close to five decades in Chennai. In the early 1990s, this company merged into Westland, which he started in collaboration with the Landmark book-store chain. In the late 2000s, Westland was part of the Tata group’s acquisition of Landmark.

This was a turning point—it was on the advice of this new parent company that Westland turned its focus from third-party distributorship to publishing. Then, in February 2016, to test interest in India’s books market, Amazon first acquired a 26% stake in Westland. Later that year, it acquired the remaining 74 %.

Just about five years later, though, it pulled the plug. “I guess it was a straightforward thing that as a business they perhaps didn’t see much future in it—not in terms of Westland but in terms of growth in trade publishing itself in India,” says Padmanabhan. For context, the data and analytics firm Nielsen estimates trade publishing accounts for only 4-5% of the entire book market in India. “They therefore decided to move on and focus on other priorities,” he adds.

Through all these changes, Padmanabhan says their tendency towards “experimentation, following certain principles of business, and being open to new trends” helped. This is also why they seem to have been open to an offer from Ranjeet Pratap Singh, co-founder and CEO of Pratilipi, a non-traditional, online story publishing and reading platform that is both language- and format-agnostic.

Singh had reached out to Karthika and Padmanabhan just a day after the Amazon news broke. Time, though, was too tight for him to buy Westland from Amazon, so, a few weeks later, he asked if the team would join his firm. By this time, Padmanabhan and his team had managed to get the names of their properties (Westland and its imprints like Context, Eka, Red Panda) transferred from Amazon. They transferred these to Pratilipi when they joined.

Openness to new ideas aside, there also seems to be one old thread they have held on to through the monumental changes: Westland has stayed close to its roots in the sense that every company it worked with has been a solid distribution channel in its time. If Landmark was a leader in book retail through the 1990s and early 2000s, and Amazon continues to hold strong as a global e-marketplace, the Pratilipi model is a unique marketplace where readers can subscribe directly to writers who self-publish and/or serialise their stories. Westland has also restarted the third-party distributorship business, working with publishers such as Parragon and Simon & Schuster.

*****

Padmanabhan doesn’t give too many interviews. In one of the few he did agree to, close to eight years ago, he was clear about the fact that English language publishers with a national presence ought to explore the untapped Indian languages market. Sure enough, in the years leading up to and since 2022, when a Hindi book’s translation into English won the International Booker Prize, this became an interest area for big trade publishers.

Today, even as Westland continues to publish Ashwin Sanghi’s 13 Steps (2014) series of books in English (his novels are with HarperCollins India), they have the rights for it in all Indian languages; translations in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali have been published. Similarly, though Amish isn’t a Westland author any more (now with HarperCollins India), Westland has acquired Indian language rights (except Hindi) for all his titles. “We are releasing the Shiva Trilogy and theRam Chandra series in Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Bengali first, followed by editions in other languages,” Padmanabhan notes.

Currently, Indian language publishing accounts for 15% of Westland’s revenue, and Padmanabhan hopes to double this in the next few years. Given that Pratilipi houses stories in over 12 languages and has over 25 million readers, the goal now seems more achievable. Earlier, with the distribution channels available for physical books in Indian languages, coupled with the high costs of translation, this would have been hard to justify financially. With the Pratilipi model, “where a story can take off first through, say, e-reading, that helps us amortise the cost and make it more profitable”, he says.

This isn’t about just being an English language publisher also doing Indian language books—Westland’s dream is to be a “truly pan-Indian publisher.”

In line with this, and to expose the physical books market to new writers and genres, Padmanabhan wants to bring a few of Pratilipi’s big e-authors to the offline world. “This is the thinking behind Pratilipi Paperbacks,” he says. I point out that in a world where print suffers at the hands of digital, the viability of this may be in doubt. But Padmanabhan thinks it’s worth a try. The team has already identified two titles in Hindi, one in Bengali and two in Tamil to bring to print; they will next be looking at mining Marathi and Malayalam stories from the app.

“Also, scale need not necessarily come from just growing the market for the physical book, it can come from actually being able to adapt that content to other formats...,” he says, excited about the new avenues they have been exploring. With Pratilipi Comics, for instance, Westland is already working on bringing some classics into a series of comics. This includes stories by Saadat Hasan Manto, Rabindranath Tagore, Jim Corbett and Premchand. Some of these, to be published later this year, could work well both in print and online, he says.

Meanwhile, Westland is working with Pratilipi’s audio teams (FM, IVM Podcasts) to convert a few podcasts into books. Ashdin Doctor’s podcast, The Habit Coach, is one of the first that will make it. In turn, the audio teams, too, are considering books to take to audio. “The dream, though, is that even at the time of acquisition, we can...have the podcast team buy in,” says Padmanabhan.

*****

Rapid fire with Gautam Padmanabhan.

In the living-room-like working area, framed covers of some of Westland’s bigger books are being hung, little towers of books stick up from desks laid out next to each other, and colourful sofa fabric gives a cosy feel. Through all its avatars, Westland has tried to maintain a homey office because “large corporate offices, where there is a lot of security and entry is a problem, are not inviting spaces for authors”, notes Padmanabhan. Things like this, in addition to well-respected editors, have helped Westland win and retain author loyalty and respect.

Just over a year ago, Westland had to give back all rights to authors. Today, Padmanabhan estimates that out of approximately 600 authors on their old roster, about 225 have so far re-signed with them. These include big names in fiction like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Perumal Murugan and Manoranjan Byapari, as well as non-fiction favourites like Devdutt Pattanaik, Rujuta Diwekar, Parmesh Shahani, Nalin Mehta and Kabir Bedi. Some, like Kavitha Rao, Rukmini S. and T.M Krishna, also have new books in the pipeline. In parallel, about 100 fresh authors have also been signed on.

This makes me wonder about the craft of writing itself in a format-agnostic world of storytelling. Is a manuscript just another piece of “content”? “Our job is to just recognise the merits of the story…and whether we want to publish it,” Padmanabhan says. “At this point in time, the first objective is to make a story work as a book, everything else is an add-on.”

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 28 July 2023

Why the Anglophone reader should know the work of Tamil writer Jeyamohan

On the life and work of Tamil writer Jeyamohan, also the writer on films like ‘Ponniyin Selvan’, as his his books are being translated into English

Jeyamohan with his readers and fans. (Photographs courtesy the author )

Jeyamohan is not an easy writer. Nothing about his novels, short stories or essays is thrilling. He deliberately deals with tough topics, taking his reader through complex, yet fascinating and multilayered narratives—whether as novels, short stories or essays, they all demand a reader’s full dedication.

He is, therefore, not easy to write about either. The 61-year-old Tamil author’s works defy genre. While he says “realism works best for my mindset…because it is very close to life and (makes space for) sarcasm”, which he uses to bring humour to the darkest corners of his toughest stories, he also goes beyond it, and beyond contemporary ideas of magic realism and fantasy, to reconstruct worlds that reimagine, not just retell or recall, Indian epics, myths and philosophical traditions.

From 2014-20, for example, he wrote and posted on his website, daily, the chapters from his multi-novel reimagining of the Mahabharata, pulling together strands of philosophical and literary traditions without letting go of the sensibilities of a contemporary novel. Titled Venmurasu, the work spans 26 novels across 26,000 pages. In 2016, he refused to accept a Padma Shri, fearing, according to reports, that the literary effort may be perceived as politically motivated.

How does someone who has not followed a literary force like Jeyamohan begin to read and understand him? This question is of immediate importance to the Anglophone reader, since two of his books have been translated into English within barely eight months of each other.

In August 2022 came Stories Of The True, Priyamvada Ramkumar’s English translation of his short story collection Aram (2011), about people trying to find righteous ways to live. Earlier this month, a translation of his novel Ezhaam Ulagam (2003), about an exploitative begging cartel, by Suchitra Ramachandran was published as The Abyss. Ramachandran is now working on translating his 2021 book Kumarithuraivi,“a parallel mythology...and a grounded work of historical fiction set in the early 14th century”; and Ramkumar, having been awarded the 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, is workingona translation of Vellai Yaanai(2013), a novel about India’s great famine of 1876-78 and the failure of religious institutions to step up and help.

While Aram has been popular among contemporary Tamil readers for the inspiration and positivity that glisten through the tales of hardship and moral dilemma, his other grand magnum opus, 26 years old, is Vishnupuram, a metafictional fantasy novel that traverses 800 years and is inspired by the kavya tradition. Jeyamohan has also written a number of other popular, acclaimed works, including Kaadu(2003), an environmental, metaphorical novel about forests and life; Kotravai (2005), a retelling of the tale of Kannagi, the courageous heroine of Ilango Adigal’s ancient Tamil epic poem Silappatikāram; and Pani Manithan, a children’s science fiction fantasy about the yeti, serialised in 1998 and published as a book in 2002. This is alongside the blog posts and essays of literary criticism he posts almost daily on his website.

Over the last year or so, Jeyamohan has also been making headlines in a very different role: He is one of the two writers (with Elango Kumaravel, a theatre artist and writer) on Mani Ratnam’s epic historical, Ponniyin Selvan (PS), film series. The second part of the film, an adaptation of iconic serialised fiction (1950-54) by the writer Kalki Krishnamurthy, is set to release next week.

When speaking about all this, however, Jeyamohan embodies a sense of stoicism. He only wants to dedicate his life to literary interests and find ways to get people to read.

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Jeyamohan's Exhaam Ulagam (left) translated into English by Suchitra Ramachandran, as The Abyss.

Bahuleyan Jeyamohan turned 61 on 22 April. Born in 1962 in Arumanai, in Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari district, he was 19 when he ran away from home after completing his SSLC exams (the former state-board equivalent of class XII). The suicide of a close friend had triggered a sense of spiritual restlessness.

Most of The Abyss is drawn from this time, and what he saw when he was living as a vagabond in the temple town of Pazhani. In 1984, he lost both his parents. “By the time I had turned twenty-four, I had already suffered the harshest of sorrows that a human being can be faced with. Death, ignominy, loss of my home, my land, my people and endless wandering. I was literally on the streets, begging, and I had reached the very nadir, health-wise,” he writes in the preface to Stories Of The True, a translation of the afterword from the Tamil original.

Yet, this time on the streets was filled with learning and truths about life itself. “When I travel back to those incidents mentally, it is very hard. But this was also...a spiritual journey. Adu vazhiya naan kadandhu vandirkiren (That churn has made me who I am today),” he notes. He met “great minds” on the streets, he says, adding that he witnessed “an inherent goodness, spirituality…and generosity in people despite the circumstances...”

In 1984, he began working at a telecom department office. Much later, in 2003, he spotted a face on the road that took him back 22 years. He remembered Ramappan, a beggar afflicted with leprosy, and “also one of the greatest human beings…full of grace, love and a sense of justice”, as he writes in his author’s note from the Tamil original. He was struck by a desperate need to write about him. The result was Ezhaam Ulagam. He completed the novel in just five days.

This is one of the most fascinating things about Jeyamohan—his creative process mostly comes down to being in a feverish state of possession. A similar moment led him to start writing the short stories in Aram too. In that state, nothing can stop the stories from being written.

“Each writer has a different way, of course,” he says in a video call. “For me, the planning and intellectual part is secondary. In a way, before writing, I sense that I mentally prepare myself for it—I will read or in spurts collect data for something I am working on. But until the story actually emerges on its own, I wait. Once it comes to me, it comes fully formed, perfect, like a dream. And then, I write.”

He keeps himself open to such dreams by only taking up projects or tasks that keep him in and around the thought of it. All his other reading, too, veers naturally towards similar worlds and ideas.

It would seem Jeyamohan can afford this now, since he took voluntary retirement around 2010. But this is how he tried to live throughout. While he used to send short stories to children’s magazines like Ratnabala as a boy, it was only in 1987 that he published his first short story as an adult. Nadhi appeared in Kanaiyazhi, the magazine then edited by the noted writer Ashokamitran. As Jeyamohan continued on his literary journey, also becoming acquainted with literary greats like Sundara Ramaswamy, the telecom department job ensured food on the table.

His retirement followed a few screenwriting gigs. These started around 2005, after a Malayalam writer and friend, A.K. Lohithadas, asked him to help with a film. “At least in the Tamil literary space, no one can really just live off writing. I have almost never earned anything from my creative writing,” Jeyamohan notes. “It is only after coming to film writing that I started earning from writing at all.”

Regularity in screenwriting took a few years. In 2009, the director Bala made Naan Kadavul, an adaptation of Ezhaam Ulagam (The Abyss), with Jeyamohan writing the film version too. The film, now something of a cult classic, won the director a National Award. Jeyamohan’s other film credits, before his current work in PS-1and PS-2,include Kadal (2013), which became known for the original sound track composed by A.R. Rahman; A.R. Murugadoss’ Sarkar(2018), starring Vijay and Keerthy Suresh; S. Shankar’s 2.0, starring Rajinikanth; and Vetrimaaran’s Viduthalai Part 1 (2023), starring Vijay Sethupathi.

Regardless, “Jeyamohan has always wanted to be known as a writer of serious literature; and for someone who has been reading his works all along, his scriptwriting is not front and centre,” says Priyamvada Ramkumar, the translator behind Stories Of The True, responsible for the author’s first major imprint on the radar of English readers—a translation of Kaadu by Janaki Venkataraman, titled The Forest, came out in 2009 but disappeared without too much play.

Ramkumar’s day job is in private equity and she confesses she had no grand plans of becoming “a translator”. But when she read Aram in 2012, she was so moved she just had to share it with friends and family who could not read Tamil. “It was like nothing I had read before,” she recalls. “(Franz) Kafka had famously said that ‘a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us’; for me, Aram, and many other of Jeyamohan’s works, have answered to that description.”

When she had translated enough stories, she reached out to Jeyamohan to request him for the rights. He agreed. “I sent him samples...but he said that it feels too alien for him to read his own work in English, and that I could feel free to get feedback from anyone else,” Ramkumar recalls.

This is very much in line with Jeyamohan’s self-assuredness. Until very recently, he was almost indifferent to an audience wider than his readership in Tamil, content with the active community he shares with them. The reception to Stories Of The True may have changed that slightly, Ramkumar hopes with a smile.

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Jeyamohan's Aram (left) translated into English by Priymavada Ramkumar, as Stories of the True.

A wider audience would only stand to gain from reading his work. His latest translator, Ramachandran, says that “while he writes very local themes, his stories are universal…. In this modern age, Jeyamohan is trying to draw influences from Sanskrit, Malayalam, Tamil, to try and understand who we are today.”

Referring specifically to The Abyss, she says that despite the fact that “it takes the reader through something so oddly specific and far removed from their everyday life, it leads them back to themselves—that’s the power of great literature.” For Ramkumar, “he brings to the world…a complex picture of India and our literary and philosophical traditions”. Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag too wrote, “Our understanding of contemporary India is incomplete without reading his works.”

But pitching Jeyamohan to a national audience, especially to big English publishers, has not been easy. He has never hesitated to call it as he sees it, regularly inviting controversy. Both the left and the right have routinely, and by turns, labelled him a stooge of the enemy camp. A big English publisher rejected Ramkumar’s pitch for Aram, telling her they loved the translation but didn’t agree with the author’s views. Knowing Jeyamohan’s history of dabbling with both the right and the left, and ultimately distancing himself from both, Ramkumar wasn’t sure which views in particular they were talking about.

But Jeyamohan doesn’t let any possible drama faze him. “I am never one to get scared of controversies. I learnt this quality from the writer Jayakanthan,” he says; The Abyssis dedicated to the writer. “Jayakanthan melae enakku oru vazhipadu undu (I feel a veneration and adoration towards Jayakanthan). In a society that doesn’t give much social status to writers, unlike actors, industrialists or politicians, Jayakanathan oru nimiru oda irundhaar (he held his own and stood out). I knew I had to be like him,” he recalls.

He observes that in India, writers sidestep controversy by picking one side. “I am not like that. I maintain an equal distance from all sides. Every side writes against me. The Hindutva brigade condemns me for stories like Vellai Yaanai and EzhaamUlagam. The left wing also condemns me for works like Pin Thodarum Nizhalin Kural, which is about the fall of Soviet Russia andthe burden and violence of ideology against spirituality.”

Of the firm belief that “there’s a separate, centre path for writers” and that “writing is inherently against any ideology”, he quotes Ramaswamy: “He had famously said endha ideology uda thaaliyum writer kazhuthule irukkakoodadhu (a writer shouldn’t be married to any ideology), and that the writer’s ideology should be based on his/her own intuition and vision, not by anything previously defined.”

*****

Jeyamohan adds that he is “bitter towards all governments”. Understandably, he says, both the DMK and AIADMK, Tamil Nadu’s two big political parties, have kept their distance from him. It is interesting, therefore, that his works are finding a fresh spotlight through independent and organic translation efforts at a time when big state-led projects in Tamil Nadu are pushing Tamil writers and their works into other languages.

The big translation drive has been entrusted to the Tamil Nadu Textbook And Educational Services Corporation for implementation through tie-ups with mainstream domestic and international publishers. “Whatever their intention and whoever they choose to translate, it is good overall if more Tamil literature finds its way to larger audiences,” says Jeyamohan, indicating that it is natural for the government to want to promote writers and texts aligned with its ideological views. He adds, “I am sure other authors and works…will similarly find their way through other (channels of) support.”

Jeyamohan himself dedicates a big chunk of his time to forming and nurturing networks that can do just this: support and encourage upcoming and/or overlooked writers. Over the years, he has fashioned his website not just as a blog or repository of his own work but has built it, as Ramkumar notes, in line with the Little Magazine Movement of Tamil literature (1959-2000)—not commercial in intent, and regularly spotlighting new and fledgling writers and their work.

In 2009, his loyal readership came together to create and run, with his support, the Vishnupuram Ilakkiya Vattam (or Vishnupuram Literary Circle, named after his book). The community, which has branches in the US and the UK too, hosts meet-the-author sessions and honours unrecognised yet deserving writers with the Vishnupuram Award, which includes a trophy, a citation and a cash prize of Rs. 2 lakh. “There are some rules in the organisation, too,” notes Ramkumar, who first met Jeyamohan when she attended a meet in Thanjavur as a reader. “For example, if you register, you cannot cancel, and you cannot be late. He expects you to prioritise literature as much as you would any other part of your life,” she adds.

Jeyamohan also keeps all his work—fiction, essays, literary criticism—free to read on his website. If he had not, he may have sold more books; also, it could have guarded against his works being adapted into other media without his permission.

“I don’t care,” he declares. “I have never wanted to be a best-selling author. My intention is to create a literary movement…. All I say is, ‘please read’, avlodhaan (that’s all).”

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 23 April, 2023

Rajkamal Prakashan's Ashok Maheshwari: The legacy builder

The head of Rajkamal Prakashan, which published Geetanjali Shree's Ret Samadhi among other big Hindi writers, on its history, journey and future plans

Ashok Maheshwari, the chairman and MD of Rajkamal Prakashan (Detail of illustration by Priya Kurian for Mint Lounge)

I miss it twice but take one more round of the block in Delhi’s Daryaganj, wandering again into a by-lane filled with tikka and kebab shops that opens into a sludgy back lane. Surely, the office of one of the biggest Hindi language publishing houses in India, one whose writer won the International Booker Prize no less, should announce its presence with some fanfare? Apparently not.

To rescue me, someone from Rajkamal Prakashan descends from a little opening between a row of narrow buildings and waves me up a cramped staircase. As we reach the landing, a stream of white light behind a glass sliding door illuminates the many stickers and posters on it. One clearly stands out: a flyer of the 2022 International Booker Prize win for Geetanjali Shree, the 65-year-old Hindi writer. Rajkamal Prakashan first published Shree’s Ret Samadhi, translated into English as Tomb Of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, in 2018.

This is the only giveaway to Rajkamal Prakashan’s role in making history. The win opened up a new world for Indian language book publishing. Having coincided with the beginnings of a more mainstream market for translations within the Indian English publishing landscape, the award also became a moment for the Indian language publishing industry to see itself and its work a little differently.

But Rajkamal Prakashan, the Hindi language publishing house that is celebrating its 75th year of operations this year, and whose journey runs almost parallel with the journey of independent India, shows off its part in this global achievement in the only way most Indian families would show off their children’s laurels: in an almost overlooked yet “no-of course-we-remember!” kind of way, important mementos endearingly jostling for space with smaller wins and everyday things.

It feels almost on-brand. The office of Ashok Maheshwari, the Rajkamal Prakashan group’s chairman and managing director, is not through the main sliding door, which opens up to a bookshelf-filled, low-ceiling reception. In a tiny room at one corner of the landing, he sits behind a standard office desk, with rimless glasses and in a crisp beige shirt.

Maheshwari has been at the helm of Rajkamal Prakashan for 29 years. Having recently launched their multi-city literary festival, Kitab Utsav, to promote their rich Hindi and Urdu catalogue and writers, and to engage with literature in the cities they visit, he recalls that the possibilities seemed endless when he took over the reins as a 36-year-old in 1994.

“It was like a dream come true,” he says. In 1963, when Maheshwari’s father, a teacher named Premchand Mahesh, started Vani Prakashan, his own publishing house, Rajkamal Prakashan had already been running for about 15 years: “At that time, we used to view Rajkamal as our competitor, no one else—they had all the big writers like Nirmal Verma, Krishna Sobti, Bhisham Sahni,” Maheshwari says.

Vani Prakashan hoped to serve the cause of Hindi, says Maheshwari, reminiscing about how his parents would spend the two-month summer break from their teaching jobs to travel around south India and promote Hindi. In fact, Vani Prakashan initially focused on “publishing non-Hindi-speaking Hindi writers…so that they would be encouraged to write more in Hindi, so that they could get their kids to learn Hindi,” Maheshwari explains. His father died young but his mother and uncle kept the business afloat.

Some years later, his brother Arun was given full responsibility of Vani Prakashan; and after his master’s in Hindi literature from Rohilkhand University in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Maheshwari began to chart his own course in Hindi publishing, working with Lokbharti Prakashan (acquired by Rajkamal in 2005) and then Radhakrishna Prakashan (acquired in 1988).

By this time, Rajkamal Prakashan had changed hands from its original founders, Om Prakash and Devraj, the brothers from Punjab who started it on 19 February 1947. Sheela Sandhu, a fierce lady, full of ideas, took charge in 1964 and built up their literary catalogue, moving away from their earlier focus on academic titles—the establishment of organisations like the National Council of Educational Research and Training made it harder for private players to compete in this segment. For 30 years, Sandhu worked on making Rajkamal Prakashan one of the most well-regarded publishers of Hindi literature.

“It wasn’t easy when I took over,” Maheshwari says, recalling the day, 4 October 1994, when he joined Rajkamal Prakashan as its managing director, going on to become the group’s chairman in 1996. The change of guard was big news. But the literary stars and stalwarts Sandhu had brought on board were not sure if the young Maheshwari could lead such a big and respected publishing house. He too was in awe of a few big names: “Some of them even complained to Sheelaji and wondered if she was sure I was the right one to pass on this legacy to,” he recalls.

Slowly, however, Maheshwari won them over. He began by ironing out issues with sales, finding more agents and increasing the number of market visits to have a finger on the pulse. He also established direct relationships with universities, colleges and libraries, to whom they could sell books in bulk. For marketing, he began regular book launches, author felicitations and similar programming, then still relatively new to Hindi publishing. This included, for example, a big function to mark Nirmal Verma’s Jnanpith Award in 1999. “Once we streamlined our practices, and when writers started seeing that we were working hard, they were reassured and satisfied,” he adds.

Headquartered in Delhi, with branches in Patna and Prayagraj (UP), the Rajkamal Prakashan Samuh, with eight publishing houses, currently employs 150 people. Maheshwari says the Rajkamal Prakashan Samuh acquires 300 new titles every year and prints about a million copies of all its books, including those in the backlist. In 2012, Maheswhari’s son Alind, a graduate of the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, joined the group, starting their foray into e-books and e-commerce. He now heads their digital marketing and copyright divisions.

Rajkamal has built up a redoubtable list of 2,500 authors. “We have five-six generations of authors currently associated with us,” he says in Hindi. From a 92-year-old Vishwanath Tripathi to a 29-year-old Parwati Tirkey, Maheshwari rattles off at least 15 names, including Anamika, Vandana Rag, Mandeep Punia and Anuradha Beniwal. It’s an exciting time to be a Hindi reader.

In recent times, however, Rajkamal has come under fire for not being as responsible towards its authors as it should be. While the International Booker win for Geetanjali Shree catapulted sales of her Hindi original (over 35,000 copies in the week of the announcement), many writers and translators believe Ret Samadhi’s translation into French and English, and the subsequent recognition, happened despite the system. Around the same time, a video of the noted Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla claiming Rajkamal and Vani Prakashan had paid him peanuts by way of royalties over the years, had also gone viral.

In news reports, Maheshwari’s response was perfunctory. But he gushes about Rajkamal’s legacy: “There isn’t a writer in Hindi who has not been published by Rajkamal...whether it is Hazariprasad Dwivedi, Bhagwati Charan Verma, Sumit Nandan Pant, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Geetanjali Shree, Abdul Bismillah or Akhilesh. If I also consider the work of Radhakrishna Prakashan, we have translated big writers from other Indian languages into Hindi.” This includes Kannada writers such as U.R. Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad and Shivarama Karanth. In 2021, they published a translation into Hindi of Dayanadi, an Odia work by Gayatribala Panda; its original went on to win a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2022. “This has happened with international authors who have won the Nobel too,” notes Maheshwari—he mentions Olga Tokarczuk and Alice Munro. Their editorial leadership, under editorial director Satyanand Nirupam, wants to introduce good literature to Hindi audiences, he suggests.

This is important when considering the criticism about Rajkamal’s lack of role in Ret Samadhi’s journey to the International Booker. Some observers argue that pushing for translations of their lists need not be a publisher’s priority. However, Maheshwari’s life in publishing, including his father’s impulse of “seva” for Hindi literature, and his own work at Radhakrishna Prakshan, which focused on translating books of other Indian languages into Hindi, should have ideally ensured Rajkamal proactively pushed Hindi writers and their stories to a wider, non-Hindi reading audience.

The bigger problem, says Maheshwari, is that while there is a fair amount of work in translating from other languages into Hindi, there is a gap in taking Hindi literature into other languages. It is clear that his father’s initial approach of campaigning for Hindi through individuals or by tapping into the networks of organisations like the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, will not work any more. Maheshwari insists, however, that the solution is simple: A clear road map to systematise and professionalise translation from Hindi into other languages; “this would facilitate familiarisation, and any opposition would fizzle out”.

This is the vision that fills him with energy for the next 25 years, when Rajkamal Prakashan will turn 100. “Ye kayi dinon se mere mann me hai (this has been on my mind for a while now),” he says. “More translations…will of course help business but it will also do good for national integration. Aur ye desh ke boudhik vikas ke liye bhi accha hoga (this will help the intellectual growth of our country too).”

Over a cup of chai and a plate of til gazak, Maheshwari offers a belief in simple solutions and a low-key approach as the secret to longevity in business. The ceilings at the Daryaganj office may be low but Rajkamal Prakashan’s ideals and ambitions seem nothing less than sky high.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 7 April, 2023

Enter, tastefluencer: The rise of a curator economy

In the era of content overload, a set of ‘extremely online’ people have emerged as content ‘curators’, trying to perfect the art of selling their taste for cash or clout

Digital content is endless, tipping us into meaningless scrolling, addictive behaviours online and eventually, content-consumption burnout. A growing tribe of users is now stepping in as curators of this unwieldy world. (Illustration by Kokila B. for Mint Lounge)

(Co-authored with Shephali Bhatt)

People get thousands of likes on their wedding posts. Abhay Arora gets as many on a post about a wedding playlist. Last week, he uploaded a carousel post on his Instagram account, @thatmusicproject, featuring clips from nine popular wedding songs in Hindi and Punjabi. It fetched over 20,000 likes. His cheeky caption pegged itself to the viral news of the moment: “Leaked wedding playlist for Kiara and Sid’s big-fat Indian wedding.”

A few rows below, he has another playlist—a curation of songs that would appeal to 1960s youngsters, 1990s youngsters, and everyone in between. He captions this “Hey (with the intention of)”, a meme-play on a phrasal template that mocks our tendency to use “hey” when we have an ulterior motive for initiating a conversation. He has 45,000 likes for this.

On paper, Arora, 23, is a hotel management graduate from Delhi. On the internet, he is a popular playlist curator. He first started curating mood-based playlists on social media three years ago, as a way to pass time during the early days of the pandemic. Today, studios and streaming platforms regularly approach him to curate playlists to promote key characters from their forthcoming movies and shows for his 300,000 Instagram followers. He has a verified profile on Spotify with close to 18,000 listeners for the 20 curated playlists he has uploaded there. From clubbing to the monsoon to after-midnight blues, he has them covered for every mood.

Arora has made a name for himself as a digital content curator, joining a new tribe of online users who have, over the last few years, swept in to solve an ever-growing problem for anyone on the internet: too much content, too little time. This subset of content curators is taking shape within the creator economy. In a world where most of us passively doomscroll, they actively consume heaps of content to pick out shiny, worthy items to share with the rest of the world. They use the same tools for distribution and monetisation as their creator counterparts and deal with the vagaries of the algorithm much like every other creator, too, all while competing with the same creators for digital ad dollars.

For, whether it is in the ceaseless chatter of articles on magazines, news sites and Substack, or in keeping track of all the releases in a specific genre of music or books this quarter, it is an overwhelming task to sift through it all to find something that makes it worth your time. So people are increasingly acknowledging the need for legitimate, skilled curators, and are even willing to pay if they find value in their curation.

In 2018, roughly 20,000 songs were uploaded every day on music streaming sites like Spotify. Today, that number has increased fivefold to 100,000 songs a day, according to data collated by Music Business Worldwide, a London-based publication covering the global music industry. During the same period, the number of podcasts across platforms has gone up 10 times, from 500,000 to five million, according to multiple reports. Unesco, which keeps tabs on worldwide literacy, estimates that the global publishing industry brings out approximately two million books every year. The self-publishing revolution ensures that the numbers are far higher. To top it off, almost everyone and their brother runs a newsletter now.

In such a scenario, “a curator is like a friend with great taste that you depend on to help you figure out what’s cool and what’s not,” says Lavanya Mohan, a social and content marketing professional. “The content curators I follow spend time thinking about what to put together instead of giving an instant hot take. That draws me in,” she adds. Mohan is a paying subscriber for curated newsletters across interests ranging from economy to fashion. One of them is called Things Of Internet.

Started by Deepak (aka Chuck) Gopalakrishnan, a content and marketing professional, Things Of Internet has close to 500 paying subscribers— ₹400 for a month or Rs. 2,500 for a lifetime subscription. One-tenth of his subscribers have opted for the lifetime option. In the three years since it started, his newsletter format has evolved from offering just one marketing case study to including a dump of good reads often related to the theme of the newsletter, in addition to opinion pieces.

In the podcast Pivot, which Scott Galloway co-hosts with tech journalist Kara Swisher, the author and marketing professor says: “Consumers don’t want more choice, they want to be more confident in the choices presented.” Curators are able to fill that need gap for consumers, explains Gopalakrishnan.

“You would notice that some of the best-performing threads on Twitter carry curated lists of best podcasts, books, the works,” says a product manager, who did not wish to be named. She has worked with social media platforms. “People are looking to hear from a voice of authority to navigate the information overload,” she adds.

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For a brief period in internet history, the word “curated” was associated with the pressure of having a picture-perfect social media feed, a mood board of sorts projecting the lives we wanted people to believe we led. But as digital content exploded and social media displays moved from careful curation to mindless “shitposting”, the word gained a more positive connotation. Today, “curated” on the internet implies “distilled” and “decluttered” more than “deceptive”.

The idea of human curators of digital content is not entirely new. During the early 2010s, when online-native content was not yet king and trolls weren’t lurking everywhere, a few international curators had shot to fame. Their success was predicated on their novelty factor. Think, most famously, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings (now renamed The Marginalian), a compendium of posts that connected excerpts from books, letters and other oddities, which started in 2006. Or Danielle Krysa’s The Jealous Curator, a blog and later Instagram account which describes itself as a way of “turning jealousy into get-your-ass-back-in-the-studio inspiration”.

Launched in 2009, Krysa’s blog led her followers to discover a range of lesser-known artists. She has 277,000 followers on Instagram now but in the first decade of the new millennium, when Artificial Intelligence wasn’t yet as sophisticated (or intrusive), it was the intrinsic value of her effort, in providing an avenue of discovery, that made her a curator to follow.

Back then, Popova would describe Brain Pickings as a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness”. Today, the emphasis on “human” in her description cannot be overstated. Human curators are in demand even as social media and content platforms train their algorithm to create a “For You” feed.

Spotify, for instance, applies a lot of machine learning and its own editorial curation to facilitate artist discovery. Yet, “one of the biggest paths of growth for many songs and new artists actually happens through user-generated playlists”, says Rahul Balyan, head of music at Spotify India.

Ananth Talam, 28, has witnessed this first-hand as an amateur playlist curator. The digital marketer from Hyderabad made an account on Spotify when it first launched in India, in 2019. “It was hard to find songs of a particular mood or by specific (regional) artists back then, so I started creating playlists…initially just for my cousins and me,” he recalls.

Soon, friends and acquaintances would ask him to suggest songs to play on road trips or during parties, and, a little while later, his playlists began to gain traction on Spotify. Talam has even had young, fledgling artists express gratitude for, and appreciation of, his playlists, while others would message him on social media platforms requesting that he consider including their new songs.

Back then, Talam did not think this was something he could monetise, and he never tried. Newer curators, however, are more confident in the possibilities of monetising a combination of their taste and skills. For instance, Anurag Minus Verma, a podcaster and multimedia artist, recently launched four “premium” curated playlists of rare songs on Patreon, a membership platform that helps creators monetise their content. Each playlist can be accessed for a fee of $5 (around Rs. 400). Minus Verma noted that his social media followers frequently made Spotify playlists out of the rare songs he shared on his Instagram Stories. Given the time and effort he put into discovering new sounds, he thought it was only fair that genuine fans paid for this curated experience. “I have been getting new subscribers on Patreon since then but I provide a lot of content on the platform, so I can’t exactly tell how many are there only for the playlists,” he says.

With such players, curation isn’t only about finding a cleverer way to package already-made content. Curators quite literally forage in the deep woods of the internet to find just the right song, article, poem, piece of art that will make their effort worth paying for. This involves hours upon hours of work and years of practice.

Gopalakrishnan has been hunting for, and compiling, marketing case studies since 2009, when he first started working for a digital ad agency. Talam says he listens to songs for at least eight-nine hours a day (a full workday) to allow himself the space to discover music; Arora says it takes him anywhere between half a day to three to just put together one playlist.

The effort shows. Balyan at Spotify acknowledges that user-curated playlists have also helped identify new trends and tastes. “Genres like lo-fi…actually came about by users adopting them first (into their playlists), the artists taking cognizance of it, and then labels stepping in,” he says. Only then did “the whole machinery kind of kick in”, he notes, adding that close to 200,000 user-made playlists were created on Spotify every single day last year.

Platforms like Spotify also benefit from turning consumers into curators as it gets them to spend more time on the app, one of the determinants of an app’s popularity. There’s another benefit too: “Even though most social media and streaming platforms have an in-house curation team, manual curation is not seen as a priority function at these companies,” says the product manager quoted earlier. “When layoffs happened at some of these places, the majority of their curation teams were wiped out,” she adds.

User-led curation is, therefore, now necessary in more ways than one. “Companies are realising that their curated content flywheel can only go so far. Especially with plateauing audience growth. They need to create and empower enough curators and creators out of the consumers to keep this flywheel of high engagement and consumption going,” adds the product manager. For instance, Spotify not only allows you to follow other users’ public playlists, it also enables collaborative playlists—where a user can invite many other users to add and modify a single playlist with them, in a bid to encourage group curation. Platforms like Substack also allow other newsletters to be recommended to subscribers and encourage creators on their site to double up as curators.

*****

While content curation remains a side hustle for most members of the curator economy, it has helped them build their brand as subject experts and even fetched them lucrative jobs. During the first wave of covid-19 in India, Ankit Kumar, a 24-year-old tech professional, started a WhatsApp group called Random Internet to share interesting articles he found on the internet with other similarly enthusiastic readers. He built the group into a community of 15,000 members in two years and was regularly approached by brands for promotional campaigns. Within a few months of starting Random Internet, Kumar was offered a job at his current workplace, a creator economy monetisation company—its founder happened to be part of the same WhatsApp group and noticed his skills. He discontinued the group late last year owing to lack of time. “But I still get messages from members asking me to resume (it),” he says.

Curation isn’t only about finding a cleverer way to package already-made content. Curators quite literally forage in the deep woods of the internet to find just the right song, article, poem, piece of art that will make their effort worth paying for. (Illustration by Kokila B. for Mint Lounge)

Perhaps the best example of a curator’s outsized influence in a certain domain is that of Rohini Kejriwal, who runs a curated art newsletter called The Alipore Post. She regularly conducts poetry and zine workshops with a good turnout and is offered art direction projects, all because of the newsletter she started eight years ago, much like Krysa of The Jealous Curator had, when going through a low phase in life.

Kejriwal started The Alipore Post in the pre-Substack era, as a space to collect, hold on to and share art (visual, textual, musical) that resonated with her. In 2015, she took to Facebook to ask her friends if they would be keen on receiving a mailer with poems and art that spoke to her, inviting them to share their email ids with her on DM. Less than a year into the project, she crossed 500 subscribers and was forced to move her then daily newsletter to TinyLetter, a service which, unlike Gmail, allowed her to send out emails to more than 500 people at once. In its current weekly avatar, with over 9,000 subscribers, The Alipore Post now runs on Substack.

Thanks to its sustained popularity, “today almost 50% of my annual income comes from The Alipore Post adjacent projects,” says the 31-year-old curator from Bengaluru . She sells The Alipore Post merchandise and annual calendars. Her eight-year-old curatorial project is now “an extension” of her, she says.

When tastefluencers like Kejriwal curate a list of book recommendations—themed and pegged to festivals, notable days, and, most popularly, end-of-year round-ups—on Instagram, Twitter, or Linkedin, publishers see a marked uptick in organic traction towards the books featured. Industry insiders say that while there is no direct, causal way to establish the exact sales figures or revenue from a tastefluencer-led push, their recommendation or testimonial of a book—when included in its marketing campaign as a blurb in print or a quote on e-commerce sites like Amazon—helps drive up rankings. Its position on the Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales, also sees an improvement.

On condition of anonymity, a book sales professional notes that “each influencer has a different effect on sales, so it’s hard to establish an industry average...but it is clear that when a curator-influencer is not included in the overall marketing strategy of a book, whether at a publisher level or a book-store level, it takes longer to push it.”

This is also in line with what Aastha Verma, digital lead at Penguin Random House India, says when she notes that exposure through online curators “allows us to measure the success of a book in different, non-immediate terms”. She adds that “while working with influencers for book publicity campaigns, we put in a lot of effort into understanding whether (a particular candidate) should do a review, share an extract, or curate (a list)”.

That companies in various fields are seeing curators as a legitimate way to cut through the clutter and get the word out on something is a testament to their growing importance in the larger creator economy ecosystem. Despite the strides they continue to make, platform algorithms are still not able to satiate our growing need for content tailored to our taste. “Because algorithms are usually heavily trained on data sets from the West and may not show relevant content to users in, say, a country like India, which is a top 3 market for most global consumer internet companies now,” says the product manager quoted earlier. “Further, if you are a light user of their app, you give fewer signals to the platform to train its algorithm into giving you that ‘aha’ moment to keep you coming back for more,” she adds. Curators can make up for that too.

Human curators also bring an element of surprise, says Arora of @thatmusicproject. “I often get an ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting this song in this playlist’ in response to some curations,” he says. An algorithm may optimise for curating currently popular songs within a genre but Arora may include long-forgotten gems too. “That really impresses them,” he adds.

It’s not all rainbows and butterflies, though. Sometimes, content curators tend to intentionally “gatekeep” the good stuff. In some cases, it’s an engagement strategy. For instance, Arora says he avoids adding a particularly fitting track into a mood playlist at times to elicit a “how could you miss *that* song!” reaction from his followers and increase engagement on a post. Occasionally, he also faces the wrath of his audience for not gatekeeping enough.

Last week, a user hate-commented under one of Arora’s Instagram Reels because he used Hum Jab Door Ho Jaenge, an obscure song by singer-songwriter Osho Jain, for the visuals of the song Tere Liye from Veer-Zaara (2004), featuring Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta. “I was gatekeeping this song, I hate you so much *angry red-face emoji*,” the user wrote. With their influence in shaping people’s taste in music, curators can expose an “unsullied” song to the mainstream internet: an organism hungry for fresh melodies which can be mutilated to serve a bottomless pit of trending audios for short-video-sharing platforms.

The FOMO (fear of mainstreaming out, in this case) is real. Kumar of Random Internet say he has been gatekeeping a blog he discovered recently because he worries that if the writer is discovered by more people, their motivation to write may change. “When you have a huge audience, you start thinking about the number of people who are giving their time to you and that can create unnecessary pressure,” he says.

*****

The curator economy, then, has emerged as a small but strong part of the creator economy. Since it appears to the unacquainted that they don’t really create anything from scratch, it might be tempting to give this subculture the status of a “second-class citizen” in this space. However, not everyone can dream of breaking into the curator economy.

A low entry barrier formed the centrepiece of the creator economy’s growth story. The curator economy, on the other hand, is tough for a fresh curator, unless they have a completely different point of view or something unique to offer consistently, says Gopalakrishnan. To produce one pay-walled newsletter every week, for instance, he reads several pay-walled articles himself, spending close to a lakh on premium subscriptions every year.

Individual content curators also have to contend with the lack of adequate monetising opportunities, or at least those on a par with creators. “Typically, brands will pay curators 40-50% of what they will pay a creator with the same following,” says Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, CEO of Qoruz, an influencer data analytics firm. Brands don’t see them as key opinion leaders but as “resharers”, he notes. “They are seen as an alternative to creating an ad and boosting it on Instagram. Even the number of deals they get is very low compared to creators with the same following or even lesser in the same domain,” adds Bhuvaneswar.

There’s another competitor curators have to keep in mind: aggregators. “While individual curators have the freedom of expressing their opinion through their curation, aggregators, which are effectively ‘lite’ media organisations , tend to have more money and hands on deck to ensure consistency of output,” notes Subrahmanyam K.V.J., (SuB8u on Twitter), who works for a global consulting firm in Mumbai and runs a weekly tech newsletter, Curated Commons.

The curator culture also treads murky territories when it comes to copyright and disclosure labels. “If I am the author and the owner of the content, I have multiple rights under the Copyright Act, like the right of reproduction, public performance, adaptation…. All these rights get impacted when my content is curated on the internet,” says Abhishek Malhotra, an intellectual property rights lawyer and managing partner of TMT Law Practice.

“Broadly, authorship rights are covered if there is proper attribution. But if the curator makes commercial gains, my ownership rights come into play,” he says. In general, there is also a lack of understanding of copyright law and a lack of enforcement of rights on the part of the author/owner, Malhotra notes.

Additionally, content curators (much like content creators) may also not always disclose sponsorship deals upfront while recommending something as part of a curated list, notes Shweta Mohandas, a policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). Or they tuck it away almost unnoticeably, towards the end of a post. This makes it difficult to trust them.

“Also, there’s a veil of anonymity with a curator since you don’t see them, you don’t know who the person is…,” she adds. In addition to the trust factor, this brings two more distinct issues. One is that a curator loses out on any parasocial relationships that creators who show their faces and lives to their audiences tend to have with their followers, says Mohandas. The second, according to Arora, is that curators end up making less money than creators because they lack “face value”—“I know creators…get a lot more (because of said face value),” he says.

There is mettle to curation though, Mohandas notes. Seen in the larger context, the one lasting advantage is that curators can continue to bring to their audience the-best-of very many different things, whereas genre-specific creators can run the risk of their shtick getting outdated.

This is exactly what Arora picks up on. When asked if his family worries about a “more stable career”, he is not frazzled. “They are quite okay with it… (I am) earning well at 23 and that’s what they want right now. They feel like kuch na kuch toh karlega (he will do something or the other).” Arora is confident: With release after release of “shows, movies, series, and also releases by indie artists…there is just so much going on right now”. He knows his curatorial intervention is not only required, but also loved. It is pretty much his way of saying “hey” (with the intention of “curator economy is here to stay”).

This was first published as the cover story in Mint/Mint Lounge on 18 February, 2023

Victory City review: A grand historical, Rushdie style

‘Victory City’ by Salman Rushdie is a feat in world building: it is historical fiction and contemporary commentary infused with magic realism

Salman Rushdie. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The pre-eminence of Salman Rushdie’s writing—the textured tales with multiple threads; the deliciousness of his brand of magic realism; the glistening sentences that can be long and seemingly unwieldy but which never lose their reader; the playful puns with the poignant themes—is a given. There is not much that can be said about his craft that hasn’t already been said before. Any reviewer who sets out to do so surely only contends with two things: the first, readjusting to the “real world” while coming down from the headiness of a Rushdie they just finished reading, and second, the inadequacy of a critique in truly demystifying his spectacular world building.

In an interview with the author published two days before the book’s release on 9 February, David Remnick of The New Yorker writes that Rushdie’s “pleasure…in writing the novel was in ‘world building’, and, at the same time, writing about a character building that world”. Rushdie goes on to tell him: “It’s me doing it, but it’s also her doing it.”

He refers to Pampa Kampana, the heroine of Victory City. Having witnessed as a nine-year-old the end of the Kampili kingdom and a mass jauhar of which her mother was a part, she vows to “laugh at death and turn her face towards life. She would not sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld. She would refuse to die young and live, instead, to be impossibly, defiantly old”. With a celestial blessing at that very moment, she is able to do just that.

Pampa Kampana lives to be 247 years old. The duration of her life matches that of the rise and fall of Vijayanagara, the titular victory city which she creates with magical seeds that she gives to Hukka and Bukka, two former cowherds-turned-soldiers, some years after the erasure of the Kampili kingdom. An unnamed narrator (Rushdie, it is easiest to believe) is the translator and reteller of her story, from her epic poem Jayaparajaya.

If it weren’t for the larger-than-life Pampa Kampana herself, the most interesting role in Victory City would be that of this narrator. He is an efficient sutradhar in how he is able to hold the story’s many mini-worlds and subplots together, never giving in to the temptation of discursiveness to which the tale might have easily lent itself. Yet, where necessary, he presents competing narratives and other travellers’ accounts of the time as it were, to fill in any gaps in Pampa Kampana’s long poem.

In doing so, he is an ideal researcher-reteller, seamlessly keeping the plot tight while periodically popping by to raise important flags on writing, authorship bias, and the possible limitations in interpreting history from a poem.
Even with such disclaimers, the hold Pampa Kampana’s story has is never diluted. Notwithstanding some thematic similarities with Qara Koz in Rushdie’s 2008 novel, The Enchantress Of Florence, Pampa Kampana is perhaps one of Rushdie’s most compelling characters. It is with, and through, her that Rushdie is able to draw from a diverse range of storytelling traditions: the Indian epics and Greek myths, Grimm’s fairy tales and a bit also by way of Washington Irving. It is only through her that Rushdie is able to present historical fiction that spans over 200 years, inspired by the largest of south Indian kingdoms, the Vijayanagara empire, even as he sprinkles in highly allegorical smatterings about the early days of the East India Company and the tactics of power they, and later the British Raj, used.

Most tropes are, therefore, familiar—what epic story about human flaws and foibles hasn’t already been told?—but Rushdie is clever in the fresh ways that he employs them. With Pampa Kampana especially: She isn’t just a woman who births a whole new city and its people; she, and not a man, possesses the seeds to be able to do so on her own. After a battle in which she helps the forest dwellers win, she goes into a restful slumber spanning six generations, cut off from the world behind beds of thorns. She can only be woken up with an act of love—a kiss, of course, but this one from a great-granddaughter with a desperate need to belong somewhere and to someone.

With the blessing of an extraordinarily long life and slow ageing that she receives in the first few pages of the book and the hurt and emotional turmoil stemming from it, Pampa Kampana is as much Alfred Lord Tennyson’s version of the Greek character Tithonus from the eponymous poem, as she is a cleverer version of him, having her boon customised enough to see her through being a great ruler of Bisnaga, the mangled version of Vijayanagara as pronounced by Domingo Nunes, one of the city’s first foreign visitors and Pampa’s lovers. At one point in the book, she is compared to Vyasa narrating the Mahabharata to Ganesha, as she does Jayaparajaya to Tirumalamba, the daughter of the kingdom’s most popular emperor, Krishna Deva Raya. At another time, her ability to see the war, despite her blindness, and dictate its happenings for her poem, reads like a turning on its head of a popular image from the Mahabharata: the blind Dhritarashtra keeping track of the war through Sanjaya’s gift of vision.

Even in the very first line of the book, the unnamed narrator tells us that she was “a blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess”. The blinding, however, does not happen until the very last section of Victory City. It is only here that a reader realises its poignancy, especially in the context of the author’s own incapacitated state— Rushdie is now blind in one eye—after being stabbed in Chautaqua, New York, in August last year. The parallels between his situation and Pampa Kampana’s, from the time she is blinded, are eerie, almost clairvoyant, given that Rushdie had finished writing the book months before the attack.

Soon after the blinding in Victory City, Pampa Kampana struggles to write, and also suffers terrible dreams. As did Rushdie, according to his interview to The New Yorker. But once Pampa Kampana remembers that she has to act on the promise she has made, to record history as it happens, she begins “to feel her selfhood returning as she wrote…. She could not describe herself as happy—happiness, she felt had moved out of her vicinity forever—but as she wrote she came closer to the new place where it had taken up residence than at any other time”.

The book’s fictionalised version of Achyuta Deva Raya, successor and brother of Krishna Deva Raya, even tells her, “If I can’t burn you…I can certainly burn your book, which I didn’t need to read to know that it’s full of unsuitable and forbidden thoughts…” Soon after stabbing Rushdie, the 24-year-old attacker Hadi Matar, who had praised Ayatollah Khomeini in an interview to The Washington Post after the incident, also said he had only read “a couple pages” of Rushdie’s  The Satanic Verses, which led to the Iranian leader’s fatwa against the writer.

By way of craft, Victory City is pure, unadulterated Rushdie. There is nothing drastically new he is doing this time: The depth of research into history can match the work that went into The Enchantress Of Florence; the way he blends lightness and tragedy in historical fiction is reminiscent of Midnight’s Children; and while the word play in Victory City is nowhere near as delightful as it was in Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, it is still very much there.

Even as it talks of religious fundamentalism versus syncretic cultures, also at one point detailing the political advantages of the latter, Victory City shines a light on women’s ability to govern and fight, on the complexities of the weight of duty, of marriages, of the relationship between brothers, of the bond between mothers and daughters. It does all this even as it fleshes out how friends, lovers and loved ones are lost, irreparably, due to misunderstandings that neither can help nor explain, and foes are won over peacefully, almost miraculously.

But what Victory City does, best of all, is to remind us to keep examining the idea of fiction versus fact, truth versus lie, and that one isn’t always better than the other —it reinforces the power of tales we tell ourselves, the things that we can will into being; and it shows us how stories, and their telling and retelling, can save us in our times of need.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 10 February, 2023

The startling originality of Shehan Karunatilaka

The 2022 Booker Prize winning author Shehan Karunatilaka's bitingly confident, yet funny and self-deprecating writing is just what literature from the subcontinent needs

Shehan Karunatilaka (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The most electrifying thing about Shehan Karunatilaka’s writing is its sheer chutzpah.

Let’s start at the very beginning of his second novel, The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida, which recently won the Booker Prize 2022. The year’s literary newsmaker has one of the strongest opening pages in recent times. Readers and critics alike tend to find a second-person narration somewhat distancing, even confusing; we would rather have someone tell us “I saw this” and “I did that” than have a book that does not tell our personal stories liberally toss out “you-s” at us. But Karunatilaka is not here to play it safe. He understands that somewhere deep inside, we have all experienced discontentment and that we all identify, to differing degrees, as misfits.

As Maali and about Maali, he writes: “So you quit each game they made you play…. You left school with a hatred of teams and games and morons who valued them. You quit art class and insurance-selling and masters’ degrees. Each a game that you couldn’t be arsed playing.” Whether or not this applies exactly to every reader, Karunatilaka knows how to hold us by the shoulders, get us to turn our heads, and tell us that he knows us, knows the things we wouldn’t say out loud. Lest that part of the opening fool us into thinking the narrator is an empty and unempathetic contrarian, which none of us wants to be, the book also has this later: “You wish you had your camera, just as you wish you had somewhere to develop negatives and someone to show them to. Just like you wish you had more time and something to care about.”

Maali does not have time, though, not really anyway, since he is dead, and he has only seven moons, or a week in the afterlife, to figure out the way forward. And he needs to do this while trying to uncover how and why he died, and who “disappeared” him (used, he notes, as a popular “passive verb” in Sri Lanka of the 1990s, the time in which the novel is set).

It’s easy, therefore, to categorise this novel as a whodunit. It is. But unlike most books of the genre, it isn’t the exciting elimination of suspects that drives the plot. The pulls, pushes, and priorities are, just as in life, multiple: Maali also needs to understand the ways of the specific stage of the afterlife he’s in and come to terms with the pointlessness inherent in the purpose of his life’s work. He has to also jog back through memory to understand the impact a broken home had on him, and in turn the impressions his brokenness left on the two great loves of his life, DD and Jaki. All of this, as he tries to drive some of their actions from the afterlife. His death opens up the various strands of conflict in Sri Lanka’s civil war too, but first, Maali has to tell himself his own story, recalling it in non-linear snatches.

The other interesting thing about Karunatilaka’s work is that one can identify the ubiquity of certain tropes and themes, and how, despite this, the treatment does not slip into predictability or pretentiousness.

Just as Maali Almeida is about, and narrated by, a missing gay photojournalist who drinks, gambles compulsively and cheats helplessly and ceaselessly on his boyfriend, Karunatilaka’s debut novel from 2012, Chinaman: The Legend Of Pradeep Mathew, was narrated by an alcoholic journalist who tries to find a missing yesteryear cricketer. Most recently, even between Maali Almeida and The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises, his anthology of short fiction and vignettes that came out in September (Hachette India, 272 pages, Rs. 599), there is a clear recurrence of themes—the idea of breath and the significance of death. This repetition becomes particularly poignant if the books are read in close succession—it makes it seem as if Karunatilaka is an artist obsessed, someone who, with everything he creates and regardless of it, will keep digging till he reaches the kernel of the one thought, the one question, that is everywhere, yet teasingly out of reach.

Any such intentionality will not be surprising given the startling originality of Maali Almeida, first published in 2020 as Chats With The Dead, before its UK publication in August—the book bubbles, line after line, into a concoction you rarely see being brewed with words. It is as weird as it is wonderful, as snarky and funny as it is terribly dark, as driven by a supernatural adventure as it is held tight by the knots of a very real, bloody and long-drawn civil war. The dialogue mimics banter sprinkled with local phrases but it is tight, sharp and witty, and sometimes, in the same breath, segues into the most heartbreaking scenes. Reading Birth Lottery, written over the span of two decades, it becomes clear how Karunatilaka embraces the strange and signature tonalities seen in Maali Almeida—he even employs the same slightly self-deprecating but bitingly confident tone when he introduces the anthology to his readers.

Over the last few decades, a few authors from Sri Lanka have successfully held the world’s attention. Michael Ondaatje is, of course, Karunatilaka’s only predecessor from the island-nation on the Booker’s list of winners. The country’s only other finalist, Romesh Gunesekara, had made the Prize’s shortlist in 1994 with Reef, about the life of a young chef as unrest begins in Sri Lanka. His other titles, like The Match in 2006 and Suncatcher in 2019, were also about young boys beginning to understand the ideas of love, friendship and home, with Sri Lanka’s conflict raging in the background. Shyam Selvadurai, too, became most known for his 1994 title Funny Boy, which follows a young, gay boy and his well-to-do Colombo-based Tamil family, whose lives and loves are affected by the Sinhalese-Tamil issue.

These are all good books—and, in the case of Funny Boy, a moving and important queer narrative from South Asia—written by masterful storytellers. But none of these have been able to do what Karunatilaka has done with technique, tone and imagination in Maali Almeida. Here is a book that conjures up a spirited yet dark afterlife, fills it with its own systems and characters even as it draws from ancient thoughts, and has it engage closely with the living; on this it dusts a good dose of debauchery, alongside conflict and corpses. By making its politically moderate protagonist the bridge between life and death, it ends up also being a philosophical deliberation on centrism, conflict and the very nature of life itself. Karunatilaka misses nothing.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 5 November, 2022

Free speech is the biggest value I believe in: Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk discusses ‘Nights Of Plague’, his new book, using the concept of quarantine to understand authoritarianism and the limits of free speech

When he began writing Nights Of Plague, his friends wondered if anyone would care to read it. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

There are at least three more questions I want to ask Orhan Pamuk. I tell him that, with an eye on the tiny, blinking clock on a corner of my screen. “I don’t know, you have only three minutes,” he replies.

He is in New York, I am in Delhi, and he has more meetings lined up for Nights Of Plague, his new, 704-page meta historical-fiction and political mystery. It’s set on an imaginary island in the last years of the Ottoman empire, during a pandemic—the bubonic plague.

We had barely finished the “can-you-hear-me-can-you-see-me” routine of most Zoom calls when Pamuk tells me he is a bit jet-lagged. It is 9am Eastern and he has just returned from Paris. But just as I am about to start on my list of questions, he interrupts me excitedly.

“I want to show you, look!”

Pamuk dips away from the frame for a second before coming back with a book. It isn’t Nights Of Plague.

“I was in Paris to promote a book. It is this book. I hope it is published in India,” he says almost breathlessly. “It’s not Nights Of Plague,” he stresses, just in case I haven’t caught on. “A lot of this book is about India…(here) is my days in Goa…this is the Bombay train station…You see?”

The book he is showing me is Souvenirs Des Montagnes Au Loin, a just-published sketchbook of sorts, with handwritten and hand-drawn entries. It is, I sense, close to Pamuk’s heart.

When he was 22, the writer, who had always wanted to be an artist, stopped drawing. On the last page of his 2003 autobiographical memoir, Istanbul: Memories And The City, he recalls how his mother told him never to give up architecture for the one thing he had loved ever since he was a seven-year-old—art. “In a country as poor as ours…(y)ou’ll suffer terribly if you do,” she warns, pleadingly.

Now 70, the 2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature notes in a blurb for Souvenirs that he realised about a decade ago that the painter in him had never died. He has been drawing every day since. It’s his way of journaling, even talking to himself to sort through his thoughts—even thoughts about the books he’s writing.

“Anyway,” Pamuk interrupts himself, going on to explain that this unplanned tangent is a way of telling me that he feels close to India and his Indian readers. He pauses and nods. Let’s start.

*****

It isn’t surprising, perhaps, that Pamuk seems, at least initially, more excited about Souvenirs—he had been thinking of writing Nights Of Plague for 40 years and actually started writing it five years ago.

The initial thoughts were “about existentialism, about death, an overabundance of death, a pandemic killing people”, he says. “Oh, and also about an Orientalist representation of Eastern nations, countries and empires where quarantine was hard to impose. I wanted to write against that.”

This isn’t the first time he has been ahead of the curve. I tell him that critics are calling him prescient—they have done so earlier, too. “Oh, meaning they are calling me prophetic?” It’s a rhetorical counter question. There’s a faint smirk on his face. “I mean, thank you to whoever is complimenting me as prophetic, but there is statistics…that once in 80 or 100 years humanity has pandemics like this; it’s not a coincidence,” he says.

When he began writing Nights Of Plague, his friends wondered if anyone would care to read it. “These things have passed. No one will understand quarantine,” he recalls some as saying. “Three-and-a-half years into writing it, suddenly we had the coronavirus pandemic. Now the same people call me and say ‘you are lucky your book is so topical’.”

It was the same with his 2002 book, Snow. Before writing it, Pamuk had begun tracking the rise of political Islam. “But they didn’t see it in America…. I am writing my novel and suddenly we are overtaken by history, by such a big event (9/11), which made my novel very topical. In fact, it drove up the sales of that book globally,” he acknowledges.

Years before any of us had imagined the possibility of a global virus, Pamuk began extensively researching quarantine, trying to use it as a setting to study how authoritarianism could play out. However, it was only when he began experiencing life starting March 2020 that he realised a fundamental flaw in Nights Of Plague, one he had to address.

“When (the virus) came, I was so afraid. And it made me realise that ‘my God, my characters are not afraid. They are not as afraid as I am’,” he says. “And believe me, the bubonic plague was 10 times deadlier than the coronavirus. It killed one-third of the global population. If you got the bubonic plague, there was no way out: You are dead.”

The world is more informed today. But, Pamuk says, people acted exactly as they did in the past, just as he had found in his research for the book. First and foremost was denial, just like now. “There is no exception. Good government, bad government, dictators, or the most democratic, they all deny. Then, the second stage is that when you deny, the numbers go up. When numbers go up, people get angry. They blame the government, they blame everyone else. They say ‘the Muslims brought it’ or ‘the Jews brought it’ or ‘the Christians brought it’, or ‘the people in the next village brought it’. Then, there are conspiracies, like ‘oh, did you see this guy, he was putting the plague on in the fountain’, or they are poisoning (something),” Pamuk notes. “We also had that, that also has not changed…. In the end, people demand so much that governments are obliged to be authoritarian because that’s the only way you can make people (adhere to quarantine),” he adds.

The slightly overwritten and meta nature of Nights Of Plague lends well to this universality of experiences across countries and centuries. It is what fiction, ideally never myopic, hopes to achieve. Yet the book has come under fire in Turkey—some parties have been offended by one of its characters, Major Kamil, saying the character is an attempt at lampooning Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey.

Reading Nights Of Plague in another country, however, one of the major, most continuous strands is of Pamuk’s thoughts on the discourse of nationhood. “The story is about the formation of a secular nation state after the empire dies. The Emperor, whether you call him a Shah or a Badshah, or a Kaiser, or a King or a Sultan, it doesn’t matter—but he has godly qualities, he is a sort of a shadow of a god. And once he’s gone, you have to invent a secular god in a way.”

Nights Of Plague tries to chronicle just this—“the invention of secular mythologies because you need these sacreds to motivate people…so that in the next war they are dying or killing for the flag, for the land, for the country, when earlier they used to die for the Emperor only,” Pamuk adds.

*****

Yet the reaction of his detractors is understandable to some extent—like Kamil, Atatürk, too, was once a young military man, critical of the Ottoman empire; he later quells opposition to establish Turkey, while Kamil breaks Mingheria away from the fast-fading empire. But Pamuk holds his ground: “Since I have so many enemies in Turkey, they will say this is Kemal Atatürk. But my character, by his physical (attributes), his outlook (is different from him). In Turkey, Islamists attacked Kemal Atatürk because he enjoyed alcohol. My character does not touch alcohol. But this is not enough. They are just angry, anything is (good as) a source of attack at me,” he says.

He has faced this for so long that I wonder what he thinks is a productive way to be angry at someone’s work, and what the acceptable limits of backlash against creative expression or opinion might be. Pamuk calls this “the issue of our times”; it is a paradox, he says, quoting German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s antinomies. He goes over a range of scenarios, both hypothetical and real, and how he feels, how he responds through each. A few more detours later, he pauses. “Free speech is a value—the biggest that I believe in. And if that includes some insults to me, I accept it,” he says.

Maybe it was, as he had warned me at the start, the jet lag; maybe he was just in a hurry to wrap up, but it seemed that for the moment, Pamuk was tired of politics and pandemics. When I ask him what he thinks might come of the pandemic novel in general—the sub-category has been growing, perhaps an inevitable and natural consequence of recent experiences and traumas— Pamuk doesn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know,” he says. “I never wrote about it because it’s topical.”

He continues: “In fact, I was thinking when I was writing (Nights Of Plague), I was asking this question, did people after World War II read war novels? Once humanity suffers and that period ends, people don’t want to read about those horrors immediately; they want to read about rosy, flowery loves stories—they want to forget the horror, this is my experience.” Then he adds a thought that sums up not only his clever enmeshing of politics and pandemics, but one that has me expecting more works with quarantine as a launchpad for sociopolitical commentary: “In isolated situations, history concentrates in more dramatical ways.”

This piece was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 13 October 2022.

Why wordless books for children are getting better, popular

Wordless books, a specialised segment within picture books for children, are being seen as aids to visual literacy, not held back by language barriers

A page from Dugga by Rajiv Eipe (Pratham Books)

For many of us, large-leafed picture books have been the first steps to reading. As words grow into sentences and paragraphs, illustrations are edged out. But there’s a lot happening in the space of picture books, particularly in the wordless books that bypass the traditional writer-illustrator collaboration and tell stories only through illustrations.

In just the last few months, children’s book publisher Pratham Books has published two standout wordless books. Pankaj Saikia’s The Theatre Of Ghosts is set in Majuli, Assam, and follows young Jhunali and Rimjhim as they head for a traditional Bhaona drama. The other is Rajiv Eipe’s Dugga, which follows the (un)remarkable life of a stray dog that meets with an accident and is nurtured back to health.

“Overall, we are seeing many more (wordless books) since 2017,” says Bijal Vachharajani, commissioning editor at Pratham Books. She is currently working with animator Aithihya Ashok Kumar and multi-media artist Labonie Roy on a few such books. Other children’s publishers, like Tulika and Ektara, too are focusing on this niche segment.

A defining moment came in 2017, when Ammachi’s Glasses by illustrator Priya Kuriyan, published by Tulika, was shortlisted for the Children’s Book of the Year award announced by Publishing Next. The shortlist for the story about a pudgy grandmother who wakes up in the morning and is unable to find her glasses was a feat: A book from a niche segment surpassed titles that adhered to a more mainstream understanding of what children’s books ought to be.

“The world over, (people still wonder) why (these types of picture books) have no text, and what children will get out of this,” says Canato Jimo, an illustrator and art director at Pratham Books. “But it’s now becoming a popular, visual and artistic form of storytelling.”

For starters, wordless books are finding favour in a world marked by geographical mobility and multilingual families. Now the same book can be “read” to a child by grandparents who speak different languages, or by a nanny who may be literate only in an entirely different tongue. With such books, “bhasha ka koi bandhan nahi hai; words se mukti hai (language is no longer a barrier),” says Sushil Shukla, Hindi poet, editor, and publisher of the Bhopal-based Ektara that publishes illustration-led picture books for children.

Each page of Ammachi’s Glasses, for example, is filled with detail and visual humour, drama and suspense: What will Ammachi do next as she stumbles along without her glasses? While the title might refer to Ammachi, the heroine could as well be Nani, Baa, Paati or Bamma.

Kuriyan notes that “the interaction between parent and child while ‘reading’ a wordless book (is) very different” from that of a text-led one. In the latter, the parent is just reading the author’s words. In the former, the parent is asking the child what they see, and the child narrates the story.

A page from Pankaj Saikia's Theatre of Ghosts. (Pratham Books)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the National Book Trust had published a few memorable wordless books— Debashish Deb’s The Story Of A Mango and Pulak Biswas’ Busy Ants, for example, are now into their 10th editions. Kuriyan recalls Manjula Padmanabhan’s A Visit To The City Market. “This one stands out because (it was about) lived reality. (Others were) just animal and folk stories,” says the Lounge contributor who is known for works like The Poop Book and Around the World With A Chilli. Each page in Padmanabhan’s 15-pager is filled with details that depict the India of a specific few decades.

“The same story…is looked at from different angles, aiding cognitive development,” says Aarti Bakshi, a developmental psychologist and SEL (social, emotional learning) consultant at SAAR Education, a Mumbai-headquartered consortium that offers educational resources for children in the 3-14 age group. This introduces the child to differing world views, building empathy. Also, “the expectation of art and literature is that they open themselves up for various interpretations and wordless (spaces) are nice ways to bring back the emphasis on that,” adds Shukla.

Bakshi notes that illustrators currently place an emphasis on “factual detail (in their work)…developing (children’s) ability to correlate”. They “may play around with colours but (they don’t compromise) on the exactness,” she adds.

Eipe does just this with Dugga—colour drives emotion and plot as sepia-toned, dusty streets give way to grey, grim hospital scenes, with brighter shades seeping back in only when Dugga the dog starts healing. The panels in Dugga have a rich, graphic novel sensibility. Eipe encourages visual literacy in his audience, ensuring wordless books can cater to larger demographic bands and become early introductions to art appreciation.

“At Pratham, there is a focus on visual literacy,” says Jimo. “(Sometimes) we have done away with (text) since it felt…redundant,” he adds. This happens when an illustrator has a “very strong visual and narrative sense”.

“For many years, illustrations were only looked at as decorative elements,” says Shukla. With wordless books, however, illustrators are no longer playing second fiddle to writers. They are finally being recognised as specialised storytellers in their own right.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 26 September, 2022.

Roger Federer: Growing up with the champion's champion

What Roger Federer gave to his fans transcended the tight lines of the tennis court

Over the last two decades, the love that Federer’s game and personality inspired led to long lasting connections between fans.  (AP)

The year was 2005. I’d just moved cities, leaving home and friends who were like siblings. I was in a new school, reading a new syllabus, and trying to make conversation with classmates whose fast-paced after-class banter was in a language I was just picking up. Alone for a few dull hours after school that January afternoon, I was flipping channels on the TV and landed on a telecast of the Australian Open. What a day to have done so.

The first Grand Slam of the year was in its quarter-final stage. The legend Andre Agassi was playing the No.1 seed, Roger Federer. Agassi was 34; Federer had not yet turned 24.

I fell hard for the sound of the ball hitting the strings. Federer’s electric blue T-shirt stood out against the then green of the Australian Open’s hard court surface. The game took hold of me. I wasn’t sure what it was but I could sense something sublime.

For the rest of the match, a meditative transcendence calmed the storms of pre-teen angst. I basked in the playfulness and warmth of Federer’s game, the allure of its style and the safety of its confidence. I couldn’t articulate it then, but being engrossed in a Federer game was like escaping it all, while also finding a home.

To a non-believer (of any hue), this would sound ridiculous. I am no sports observer, nor an expert in Federer’s game, but what he gave me was unbelievably beautiful and poetic tennis, to which my mind automatically plays Pachelbel’s Canon in D major. If David Foster Wallace could declare in The New York Times in 2006 that “Roger Federer (Is) A Religious Experience”, then, I told myself, I wasn’t too far out.

To me, Federer is tennis, but also so much more. He is more than the GOAT, more than one of the greatest forehands in tennis history. Much more than the unforced errors he stacked up in recent years, and so much more than the record 237 consecutive weeks he spent as the ATP world No.1. For 17 years, Federer, his matches and his moments, have come to me when I needed them most.

In that cold January, he was my ticket to finding real friends. In the days following the Agassi match, I found out that one of my new classmates liked tennis too. She loved Lleyton Hewitt but she found Federer exciting. Who didn’t? Already world no. 1, and the defending champion that year, he wasn’t an underdog. Saying “I really like Federer” was an easy enough way to forge tennis-specific friendships. One turned into two in school, and extended to a neighbour. I met people I would carry in my heart for decades to come, and the city became one I would end up calling home.

Soon, another move meant keeping in touch with these friends through newly minted email IDs. The internet was young to us, and I found a whole world of friends on the official Federer website between 2007-2010. Rogerfederer.com had a thriving community of people from all walks of life, from all over the world, celebrating Federer. The forums had different threads — we could talk about games, rallies, specific shots, his shoes, his racquets, his family and friendships, and other players who caught our attention.

The fandom here was not blind in its love for Federer. Those who understood the technicalities of the game wrote short and snippety as well as longer, detailed essays. It was a sort of service within, and for, a fandom. They would break down his game, not with the acquired objectivity of a seasoned sports journalist but with the gentleness of an older sibling explaining the beauty of a math formula. During his then infrequent losses, they would cushion the minor heartbreak with tales of its universality.

Unexpectedly, it was through these Federer forums that I discovered new literature. More importantly, the communities there kept me writing through the loss of a grandparent and a beloved dog, and board exams. We exchanged notes, followed one another’s blogs, and discussed writing and reading. A Greek Federer fan I had become friends with introduced me to C.P. Cavafy’s poems, an Italian who diligently compiled a scrapbook to gift Federer on his birthdays connected with writers and artists over email to collect poems, essays, fan fiction, photographs, illustrations, or anything else one wanted to send to Federer. Whether they actually reached him was immaterial.

These were just the tip of the iceberg in collaborations and connections forged purely from the love that Federer’s game and personality inspired. As life and college got in the way, I had less time for the forums; and sometime in 2016, the site shut for maintenance, returning in 2017 without a “forums” tab. It all feels unreal, impossible, now— there remain many different kinds of fandoms but I believe that this one was, and is, truly unique, given the changing nature of the internet.

In the Goodbye Roger Federer episode of The Tennis Podcast, a speaker talked of his “creativity and that sense of fun, a sense that he was always playing a game—he never made it into a war”. In my experience, this trickled down to the RF fandom. We might have had a complicated relationship, especially with Rafael Nadal for example, but the discourse was largely not antagonistic.

Oh to be a teen, waking up in the middle of the night to watch Roger Federer win a slam. Those were the days 😭

— Fatima 🌸 (@rogerbestbystat) September 20, 2022

Many fans have since moved from the conversational nature of forums and onto a more announcement-friendly world of Twitter and Instagram now. And while that alters the inherent atmosphere for discourse itself, what hasn’t changed is the fervent and intensely personal way of expressing love and loyalty to Federer.

There is a Federer-fan gathering on Forumotion that’s still active, and a busy Federer tribute thread on Men’s Tennis Forums. It makes me wonder, had the Rogerfederer.com forums stayed, how would we have gathered and what would the threads have looked like since the heartbreaks of his defeats became more regular?

We first saw a blip sometime in 2008, when Nadal and Novak Djokovic started to close in. The gut punches began in 2016. There he was, in his mid-30s and struggling, out most of the year since his knee surgery and a back issue. After almost more than a decade of dominance, he was losing to younger practitioners of a sincere and industrious but less graceful game.

For a little over 17 years, regardless of where I was in the world, I have stayed up nights and woken up early mornings to watch him, to find those few moments of a sublime something—whether it was in my pjs at home in Hyderabad, in a sparse DU hostel common room with a few unexpected fellow-residents for company, at a neighbourhood CCD in Chennai, in the dead quiet of my apartment in a cold-to-the bones Chicago winter night, or out at an old bar in Delhi with friends as he won his 18th slam.

For some of us, watching Federer at his peak meant discerning almost no difference between opponents. We’d develop a tunnel vision, one that would have nothing between us and that his awe-inducing overhead smashes, his soft, silent drop shots, and those forehands down the line that would somehow fix us.

Over the last five years, however, being a Federer fan has meant sitting tight while he recalibrates to the frailties of being human. Watching him linger a little longer before a second serve; having your heart thump harder and harder with each shot in an unnecessarily long rally that he would end with an error off his racket and not, as we had come to expect, an effortlessly executed spectacular winner. It hurt.

It was still a spectacle every time he stepped on court though. Just a spectacle of a different kind. Every single time he drew from some miraculous reserve of strength, especially when it seemed like he had none left, when, despite an error-filled game, he could still show us a flicker of what we knew we had experienced before, even if was much muted by a TV telecast, we knew it was a reason to believe again — not just in him and not just in this game. That one championship point he’d saved, in the epic 2008 Wimbledon final, is a fine example. These moments of magic were getting rarer, but despite, or perhaps because of this, the pull they had on us felt even more real. It made the magic, for lack of a better phrase, just so much more magical.

It was a grey, rainy Thursday evening in Delhi when the news of Federer’s retirement broke. And on cue, Federer-friends old and new reached out. “Whattt, Roger noooo. why NOW, and why would you do this at an EXHIBITION?!” said one, in a one-way conversation she was having with Federer, but in my Whatsapp window. “Knew it was coming sometime but still made me so sad,” said another. “I don’t even know why I’m sad when effectively, he’s been retired for a couple years anyway,” texted a friend from J-School, now a sports journalist.

What next for us Federer fans? Some are looking to Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Nick Kyrgios, Daniil Medvedev, Frances Tiafoe and Casper Ruud. I enjoy Tiafoe's cheeky skill and Ruud's charm. After a long time, this year’s US Open felt more exciting than the Slams of the recent past. “Finally, no? This was fully different from the Big 3 era,” wrote a Federer fan to me. “And I think it’s good in a way.”

His point is similar to what hardened critics felt about the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic (and sometimes Andy Murray) era: Federer’s clean wins made for boring copy, Nadal’s very visible hard work and victories over the Swiss became predictable, and Djokovic was likely the only one introducing any drama.

I can empathise: Sports reports and statistics cannot ever evoke the inexplicably intimate quality of being drawn into Federer’s game. He was, as Billie Jean King tweeted upon his retirement announcement, “a champion’s champion”.

His retirement is so personal for some of us that it does not matter whether we have been in touch over the last few years. The minute we see the news, we unplug almost instantly and look inwards. We remember where we were when he first happened to us, we look at how far we have come, how much his wins and losses were ours, and how his example got us to many of our own milestones. We turn homewards, even if for just a few moments, to everything and everybody we have grown up with. Roger Federer brings us together and centres us again.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge, on 24 September, 2022.

How daily objects tell the history of India

Preserving objects to know history isn’t new. But to storify their role in people's and companies' journeys, and tell a nation's history is different

In 1955, Godrej’s first all-Indian typewriter, Model M9, launched, the first such in Asia. When an iteration was first shown to Pirojsha Godrej in 1954, he asked the engineers: “Is it as good as Remington?” Initially imported but later manufactured in Calcutta, and so popular there was a six-month waiting period, Remington’s typewriters were stiff competition. For Godrej, which mainly manufactured products involving fabrication, an intricate machine like a typewriter, with hundreds of parts and complex functions, was a challenge. A year later, the engineers finally pulled it off. Their typewriter found wide acceptance in India. Seen in the news clipping here is then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, trying it out in January 1955.  (Image courtesy: Godrej Archives)

One homesick night in a Delhi University hostel, I stumbled upon a blog post about memories of growing up in south India. I bristled at the idea of clubbing the lived experiences of four different states (now five) into one but desperate for something that seemed like home, I clicked on it anyway.

In addition to a smattering of intangible memories—distinctive calls from the hawkers we would hear every day, the tight braids and red ribbon bows that were mandatory in school—what really stood out in that rather poetic account was the common objects around us. One standout example was the almost ubiquitous olive green, or brown, steel almirah.

While there may have been variations of these, it was popularly known as the Godrej “bero”, or bureau. Such objects, when seen through the lens of personal histories, become a rich repository of public memory, of how the people of an area, even a country, lived. In retrospect, these seemingly everyday objects, some even dismissed as commercial products, can speak of generations of family history if accounts of their use, for example, are detailed. They become, as they did for me, triggers for memories and stories that at once ground you, not just in nostalgia but as reminders of so much more.

“The need to preserve is uniquely human and we do it to maintain a sense of belonging, a sense of self or community worth and to create a shared history,” says Deepthi Sasidharan, art historian, curator and founder-director of Eka Archiving Services. “With this perspective, anything can become a trigger of storytelling and history—it’s why we collect seemingly nondescript things.”

While preserving objects to tell the story of a certain time and place is, in essence, the idea behind most museums, the institution has, in popular imagination, come to be associated with a distant and hoary past. There is an in-between, however, with relatively newer private and corporate efforts to preserve and contextualise objects which speak to a more immediate present that may take on a new collective meaning as times and technology change.

Godrej’s is an example of such an archive, given that the company’s long history—it was founded in 1897—and reach across sectors, from consumer goods to space, is tied not just to the history of India but the histories of her citizens. For instance, the light, airy, springy and sturdy CH4 chair, with its strong association with dreary government offices, tells the story of the people who used these in the decades post independence.

The Tata Central Archives, the first corporate archive in India, launched in 1991, preserves the history of the group, founded in 1868. India’s pharmaceutical sector too—notably Cipla, set up in 1935, and Dr Reddy’s, founded in 1984—has been archiving and contextualising its developments, part of an attempt to position itself in tandem with the policies and progress of a nation and its people.

“Archives are custodians of a company’s history and journey. They are a reminder of the interplay between our history and that of post-independent India,” says Satish Reddy, chairman of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories. “As we build our future, we must remember what got us to where we are today—the vision, priorities, successes, challenges, key architects over the years. Archives build pride and act as a binding factor internally. They also reinforce brand equity externally. For all these reasons, archives are more than the sum of the various collections,” he adds.

This joint Indo-Pakistan passport, valid for one year, was issued to Hanwant Singh Hora, son of Prem Singh Hora, on 13 August 1955 in Lucknow, so he could be allowed to retrieve valuables that the family had buried in Pakistan during Partition. Hanwant Singh was issued a single-visit visa for Lahore and Peshawar district, with a validity of six months from the date of issue and a duration of stay not exceeding three months. He left Attari on 20 October 1955 and returned to India via Wagah on 27 October 1955. (Image courtesy: Partition Museum Archives)

This is in line with what Sasidharan says when she notes that “private and corporate players need to be aware that they are part of a larger narrative, a part of the community and national narrative. This awareness helps decisions that are fuelled by a larger good”.

Private players too have begun looking into peoples’ histories; working through either PPP (public-private partnership) models and/or crowdsourcing initiatives, they have begun archiving both tangible and intangible memories. The art gallery Chemould Prescott Road, established in Mumbai in 1963, the 167-year-old Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, and the Partition Museum in Amritsar, Punjab (and soon in Delhi), are heavily informed and populated by objects that speak of peoples’ histories and memories—be it of a family, a city, or an event.

The Partition Museum is a particularly notable example. It displays everyday objects, like a planter’s chair, a ration card or a passport, the stories and memories that they hold, and which acquired new significance after Partition.

Given the fast-changing nature of our world, such efforts at documenting the personal, which become an important part of collective memory, are crucial, says Kishwar Desai, chairperson of the Partition Museum. “It may be an ordinary piece of glass or clothing but (with its story, often a personal story) you understand it is vested with a moment we no longer have in real time,” she adds, stressing how important it is to tell people’s histories through everyday objects of present (in)significance.

Sasidharan adds that “whether it is a letter, a chair, a costume, or any object really, the ability to communicate why it represents a moment in history makes it important in telling the story of a people or, indeed, a nation”.

This story was first published on 13 August, 2022 in Mint/ Mint Lounge

Possessing more than one language has never harmed anyone: Geetanjali Shree

The writer, whose ‘Ret Samadhi’, in translation as ‘Tomb of Sand’ is on the International Booker shortlist, on process, writing in Hindi, and more

Author Geetanjali Shree. Image courtesy Penguin Random House India.

Most successful novels have blurb descriptions such as “gripping”. Some of them are praised for hooking the reader from the opening page. Tomb Of Sand, which made it to the 2022 shortlist of the International Booker Prize last week, does not fit this description.

In the book spanning close to 700 pages, the first quarter meanders, with the third-person narrator seeming to speak from a fever dream—an effect heightened by the fact that the dialogue is never demarcated by quotation marks. In an age when writing and “content” work to be the most attention-grabbing versions of themselves, Tomb Of Sand does not bother. Confident in itself and its world, it demands a certain discipline and stillness from the reader.

It begins with a chapter titled Ma’s Back, in which an elderly woman, is grieving and depressed. Her husband is dead. Her back turned to the world, she refuses to get out of bed.

The opening luxuriates in weaving in and out of a backstory, told with distracted charm. If impatient, you are bound to give up. Suddenly, though, sentences of deep, ancient wisdom will hit you: “Those who consider death to be an ending took this to be hers. But those in the know knew this was no ending; knew she’d simply crossed yet another border.”

And this is what the novel is about. The nature and effect of invisible, intangible, yet incontrovertible borders. Between countries, the realms of the mind, and people. Yet there is humour and lightness, undercutting the book’s physical and thematic weight. It takes Ma over a hundred pages to get out of bed but once she’s up, a sense of a plot takes shape. Its flow may not be for everyone but its spots of poetic wisdom resonate widely.

Shree, 64, is a well-regarded writer whose contribution to Hindi literature has been recognised over the years with awards like the Indu Sharma Katha Sammaan, Hindi Akademi Sahityakar Sammaan and Dwijdev Sammaan. In addition to short story collections, Shree has four more novels to her credit: Mai (1993), Hamara Sheher Us Baras (1998), Tirohit (2001) and Khali Jagah (2006).

Mai, about three generations of women in a middle-class, north Indian family and the way they navigate patriarchy, is narrated by Mai’s daughter Sunaina, giving the reader a layered understanding of their lives. In 2000, its English translation by Nita Kumar was shortlisted for the Hutch-Crossword Translation Award. Now, 22 years later, and two years after its Hindi original Ret Samadhi came out, Tomb of Sand too finds buzz with English readers, this time globally. It, too, focuses on women—a mother and daughter, with the latter discovering the unconventionality of her elderly, recently widowed parent.

Over the years, Shree’s stories have also found Gujarati, German, Japanese, Korean, Serbian and French readers. In 2020, Ret Samadhi was translated into French by Annie Montaut as Ret Samadhi: Au-delà De La Frontière. The English translation by US-based artist-translator Daisy Rockwell came out first in 2021, from Titled Axis Press in the UK. Shree’s first book published there, it qualified for the International Booker nomination. While Tomb of Sand had already begun making waves after the announcement of the International Booker Prize’s longlist last month, last week it became the first Hindi novel to make it to the Prize’s shortlist, which features five other books—Korean, Norwegian, Japanese, Spanish and Polish—in translation.

Soon after the shortlist announcement, Shree spoke to Lounge about her relationship with the process of translation, how she views her bilingualism, and how Tomb Of Sand’s original narrative style came to be. Edited excerpts from an email interview:

To many readers, publishers and fellow writers, you are already a well-regarded author. The shortlist means greater awareness of your work with a certain English-centric section of readers and publishers. In view of this, and in continuation of something you said in an earlier interview—that layers are gained in translation but your own “sounds and smells and tweaks and twirls” are lost—how do you see this wider recognition of you and your work?

I do not mean that sounds, smells, tweaks are lost, but that they are not necessarily the ones with my dhwani in them.

For me, translation is dialogue and communication which establishes a new friendship between the two texts—the original and the translated. As in communication there is something live and electric in what one says and in what the other receives, so it is here. It is not a dead object changing hands but a live and mercurial entity going from one place to another. A rich text becomes differently richer. It finds a new belonging in a new cultural milieu. And it also gives to the new homeland, if you will, cultural inputs from where it has originally come. It really is about a dialogue between cultures which brings to both new ways of seeing, being, expressing. 

How active was your involvement with the French translation of ‘Ret Samadhi’? How was each different?

Yes, Ret Samadhi has been translated into French and English (in that order). Given my respect for the autonomy of translation and translators, I cannot be hands-on. It is after a degree of mutual trust, respect and understanding has developed between me and the translator that translation in a different language is begun. Once it has begun, it’s for the translator to decide whether and when she (both the translators of Ret Samadhi are women) needs to get in touch with me for possible clarifications and explanations. That interaction during the making of the translation often turns out to be surprisingly rewarding. Several of the translator’s queries and comments offer clues to meanings and implications of which I had not been aware during the act of writing. This non-interference has been best for everyone.

A lot of Indians grow up at least bilingual, if not trilingual. Sometimes, a lot of this knowledge—of reading, writing, and at least being slightly fluent in our idioms and sayings—is neglected owing to the pressure of jobs, life, and the “convenience” of English. Language is, of course, a practice that needs daily nurturing. Can you talk a little about this?

For Indians, fortunately, it is natural to be multilingual. Our tragedy is that instead of nurturing that, we have let English hierarchise languages in our heads and hearts. English has become the language of success and getting about in the world. Which is fine, but that does not require letting go of other languages available to us. Possessing more than one language has never harmed anyone. It is, rather, a source of great enrichment, given the wealth contained within each, going back centuries. We should celebrate multilingualism, multiculturalism in the world and in our country rather than go astray towards a mono-culturalism, with its totalitarian impulse.

English was the medium of instruction in your education. Did you ever have to “consciously” choose to write in Hindi over English? Or did it come naturally?

Like so many other Indians in north India, I have grown up with Hindi and English. Most of us know English through formal education and Hindi through its informal proliferation in our lives. I think, on balance, the latter turned out better for me because I had picked up Hindi in many registers—the language of conversation within the family, of narrations of our bedtime tales, and the colloquial and lively street language, the exposure to serious, literary, classical Hindi and Urdu via mushairas and kavi sammelans, which were still widespread in my growing-up years in the small and big towns of Uttar Pradesh, and of course the reading that we did where there were still many Hindi children’s magazines available for us.

So, while I did go through some period of wondering and wandering between the two languages for my expression, it more or less quite naturally and intuitively became Hindi for me. This I say without rancour against English—we all write in the language we are most comfortable in.

‘Tomb Of Sand’ flows in poetic, meandering, third-person stream-of-consciousness. It’s almost sand-like—if you are trying to hold on to it and gain immediate meaning or direction, it slips from you. If you stay with it with stillness, the narrative, and the plot, seem to come to you themselves. I am assuming this is true of the original too. Can you talk about this treatment?

You have said it beautifully. That is the fun of (feedback from) readers, because they give the writer wonderful interpretations. What you say makes wonderful sense to me. I have achieved that intuitively, not by following a deliberate formula. The writing process has its own magic. You start off as if you are the controller but the work comes alive only when it acquires its own breath and soul. Once that happens, it takes over, in a manner of speaking, and you flow along with it. You are in a new partnership and sometimes you lead the way, sometimes the work leads, (sometimes) its characters do.

So whatever happened was in the dynamic of the narrative; and it kept happening (as if) that is how (it was meant to) happen.

This interview was first punished in Mint Lounge 15 April 2022

The appeal of analogue photography

Tired of digital, film-photo enthusiasts in India are coming together to bring back shooting slowly and with intent

The movement towards rediscovering analogue photography has gained significant traction in India over the last few years (Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

There aren’t too many like him around, and he knows it. Especially when dealing with a persistent, hopeful customer: “Okay but, ek aur baar try karoge? Ya koi aur hai yahan jisko ek aur baar yeh dikha sakoon? (Try again? Or maybe there’s someone else I can show it to?),” the customer asks, not wanting to give up on the analogue camera that once belonged to his father. The man facing him smiles patiently. The bright white of the tube light overhead bounces off a shiny black badge on his left front pocket. “KIV ENGINEERING. I AM KIV,” it reads.

“Leave it with me, I will check when I have time and call you,” Kiv, aka Kapil Inderjeet Vohra, replies. With this kind of client, half the job consists of offering assurance. The camera in question is, after all, a 30-year-old Pentax K1000, a mechanical, manual focus, single-lens reflex (SLR) camera that uses 35mm film.

There are many such amateur photographers with second-hand or heirloom cameras seeking out Vohra, a 40-something service-person at Chandni Chowk, Delhi. He has been in the trade of repairing cameras for close to two decades, catering to hobbyists as well as professionals with high-end digital gear. With very few stores and workshops taking on SLRs for repair currently, he has become popular with the Capital’s growing community of film-photo enthusiasts.

“Bilkul ek leher si aayi hai (it’s like a wave),” Vohra says, referring to the resurgence of analogue photography. Over the last two-three years, he has noticed that while older professionals are bringing in old analogue gear to sell, young people seem to be wanting to buy vintage cameras. Just a few days earlier, someone with a 40-year-old Nikon FM2 came to Vohra, wanting to sell the camera body, its kit lens, and a flash, for Rs. 22,000. “And there are people willing to spend this much—and more—on old non-digital cameras,” he says.

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A search for #filmisnotdead on Instagram reveals close to two million posts worldwide. On Tumblr, another creative blogging platform, there are 929,000 followers for this hashtag, with hundreds of accounts focused on shooting and sharing analogue photographs. On YouTube, tens of thousands subscribe to analogue photography tutorial channels run by the likes of King JVpes, Matt Day and Kyle MacDougall.

This movement towards rediscovering analogue photography, which has gained significant traction in the US and Europe over the last few years, has seen a remarkable surge of interest in India too, especially with young people.

“We have seen a strong increase in film photography in the last three years in APAC (Asia-Pacific),” says Clara Low, business development manager at the Singapore offices of Kodak Alaris, the British company that now partly owns the Kodak brand along with the American Kodak Eastman Company. “For consumer films, (the) interest (is) from a younger demographic, 18-26.... For pro photography, it is more niche and users are typically older, (in) the 30s-40s....While the increase in interest is not as strong as consumer films, (professional) films’ demand has been holding steady in the market for the past few years.”

We were already becoming screen-weary, hopping between digital devices for most activities through the day, before covid-19 hit—the pandemic only exacerbated this exhaustion. So it’s not surprising that a longing for tactility and tangibility during this time coincided with an increased interest in the full analogue shooting experience.

The last two-three years have seen film enthusiasts across the country coming together, more than ever before, on Instagram accounts, Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups to swap and sell devices, and trade tips and tricks. They have sustained a steady conversation and sparked commercial interest in analogue photography, making it easier than it was even a decade ago to understand the charm of analogue shooting. They are making a strong case that it might be interesting, and not cumbersome, to actually spend time framing a shot and having a basic understanding of how light can affect composition, feeling the metallic-but-warm sounds and physical feedback of a shutter snapping as it captures an image, than shooting rather blindly on a digital camera's “automatic” mode.

“There’s a huge resurgence in film photography, and it has come about five years too late to India,” says Varun Gupta, photographer and director of the Chennai Photo Biennale. “I think the challenge here for a long time was that there wasn’t film, or chemicals, available easily. There were no distributors, and the existing ones were winding down.”

In 2015, the Kolkata-based photo lab Eastern Photographics started bringing Ilford black and white film stock to India. In 2017, the Chennai-headquartered Srishti Digilife jumped in to become the official distributor of Ilford in India, adding Kodak’s colour films to their inventory in 2019.

Looking at a roll of film at Prabhu Studios; (in background) various film stocks, including the Kodak Portra, stocked at the store (Courtesy Prabhu Studios)

“It was not a commercial decision for me,” says R. Vijayakumar, director and group CEO of Srishti Digilife, which he started in 2007. “It's an emotional decision. We wanted to give back to the film community in India,” he says, specifically referring to those who continued shooting analogue despite a transformation in technology over the past two decades. It was also a way to “inculcate the habit” of creativity in young people, he adds, as analogue shooting requires you to be more mindful of what you actually shoot.

It was around the same time, between 2017-19, that communities too began to mushroom, especially online. Gupta calls these spaces—like Film Shooters India on the messaging app Signal, Analogue Resurgence and Project Hybrid Shooters on WhatsApp, and Film Photography India on Facebook, with over 5,500 members —“hotbeds of activity”. Here, members buy and sell film and cameras, organise independent photo walks and workshops, and share and discuss each other’s photographs. Close to 500-600 messages, all focused on analogue photography, are exchanged daily on these chat groups, says Gupta, adding that “the sheer volume of content exchanged on these platforms is a great indicator of a thriving ecosystem”.

Smaller businesses like The Film Lab India, which operate through a Whatsapp Business account, have also made it easier to try analogue. As soon as you open a chat with them, you can see their catalogue, which includes film stock from Lomography and Kono; vintage cameras from Minolta, Yashica and Cosina; and film processing and scanning services. Instagram accounts like The Vintage Collectibles source, repair and check vintage cameras for quality before transacting over Google Pay or other UPI channels.

Brick-and-mortar camera and electronics stores across cities like Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru have also started stocking film again.

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Raghuvir Khare, 29, first tried shooting with a film camera in 2016. Once he started using the Nikkormat FT that he bought at a thrift store in Chandni Chowk’s Kucha Chaudhary camera market, “there was no looking back”, he says.

When Khare moved to Prague for a graduate degree from the Czech Republic the next year, the availability and relatively cheaper prices of film rolls made it easier for him to keep learning and experimenting with film photography. Before returning to Delhi, he stocked up on bulk-bought 35mm film. Whenever he needs a new roll, he cuts and re-spools the film at home, working with a portable darkroom changing bag.
Over the last year, Khare has also begun using film rolls from the shop at Museo Camera, a museum and gallery dedicated to the photographic arts in Gurugram, Haryana. The space sells Ilford, Ketmere and Kodak stock; the growing popularity of such film means they are often out of stock.

To cash in on this demand, some smaller stores have even been selling expired Fujicolour C200 rolls with new use-by date stickers slapped on. Unlike Kodak and Ilford, Fujifilm doesn't have an official distributor in India; it has also been gradually phasing out its film stock. The results of an expired film roll can appeal to a certain aesthetic sensibility but there’s no guarantee it will develop at all.

The film processing ecosystem overall continues to remain patchy. Till 2021, when she was based in Chennai, Vidhyalakshmi Vijaykumar, 27, would courier rolls to the 50-year-old Prabhu Studios in Bengaluru to get them developed. She has since moved to Bengaluru but says that “even now, many photographers who shoot film in Chennai send their rolls here”.

“Even five years ago, we were barely getting any films for development,” recalls Dinesh Allamaprabhu, a photographer and the son of Allamaprabhu H.N., the founder of Prabhu Studios. Over the last three years, however, their studio has been getting “easily about 800-1,000 rolls a month”, including outstation orders, “even from (non-metro) cities like Nagpur, Kanpur, and some rolls even from north-eastern states like Assam and Mizoram”.

Today you can always find labs or individuals who will process film rolls—be it photographer C.P. Satyajit’s Dark Room or Adyar Photo Lab in Chennai; Rama Color or Siddharth Photographix in Delhi; Zepia Studio or Color Lab in Thiruvananthapuram; Idea Creative in Mumbai; or individuals like Abhinav Karhale in Nanded, Maharashtra. But analogue enthusiasts say operations in terms of an overall network of labs, tends to be haphazard and the quality—of the processing and the digitised scan—inconsistent.

In many labs, it’s usually either an older staff member who takes up the few film rolls they receive, or the store outsources processing. Many a time, labs wait till they have an adequate number of rolls, to process them together and efficiently use the potency and quantity of the chemical stock. Some even use old processing kits if there is no option, compromising the quality of the image.

So it can take a week to 10 days—or up to a month if the roll is sent to another city—before you can see what you clicked. The experts contrast this to cities in the US, UK and Europe, where the turnaround time at most labs, thanks to adequate demand and supply, is a day.

UK-based Giles Branthwaite, sales and marketing director at Harman Technology, which owns Ilford Photo, details how they have attempted to help. “We continue to introduce new products designed to make film photography easier for the person wanting to try it for the first time. In recent years, this has included...easy to use sachets of the photochemicals, starter kits and recently, a pop-up darkroom for those not able to visit a more established darkroom near their home.” India, he maintains, is an important market for them, with great potential for growth as interest in analogue photography takes hold.

Global logistics hit by covid-19, though, continues to throw a spanner in the work of the passionate and burgeoning analogue community here. Stocks that met demand through the early pandemic months are only being replenished slowly, creating a shortage and driving up costs.

“The pandemic hasn't just presented a logistical challenge in getting inventory into India, it has also thrown up a manufacturing challenge for companies as the raw material costs consistently kept going up. They had no choice but to keep increasing the cost of the product,” says Vijayakumar.

Currently, a roll of film on which you can take 36 pictures starts from Rs. 500 for the more common Kodak ColorPlus 200. Add processing costs, at about Rs. 300-500 per roll, scanning, at another Rs. 500 per roll, courier costs for those whose preferred labs are in another city, and each analogue photograph you take can cost approximately Rs. 30-50. For some who prefer to scan their developed rolls at home and convert the negative image using software like Adobe Lightroom —not very hard to do—the process is slightly cheaper.

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Despite the hurdles, however, analogue shooting has become a peaceful, centering activity for many young people. For one, analogue cameras do not overwhelm you with buttons, modes and on-screen menus. All they require you to know—but know well—are how the basics interact: the light sensitivity (or ISO) of the film you are using, the speed you are setting your camera’s shutter to, and how much of the lens aperture you are opening.

This makes them perfect to cater to the desire among millennials and Gen Z-ers the world over to be more mindful, slow down. “With digital, (shooting) can be done faster than I can think it. But film photography works at the same pace that I work. It works better with the frequency with which I assimilate thoughts,” explains Khare in Delhi.

Gupta says this is “almost like a psychological reversal”. In spite of shooting professionally on digital cameras for over 15 years now, he says he is “fatigued” by his digital images. “I think universally...there is a desire for something tactile, for something that has value.” At the core of this belief is the idea that a digital photograph, whether taken on your phone, a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, does not require you to stop and think before you shoot. Incidentally, mirrorless cameras, one of the developments in digital camera technology, are all modelled to look more or less like 35mm cameras.

Aditya Arya, director of Museo Camera and a commercial and travel photographer for over 35 years, says he has always believed that film photography is about “pre-visualisation and perfection”. The ease of digital technology lets the shooter get too trigger-happy to photograph with thought and intent. “People always say ‘we can fix it in post’,”Arya says, shaking his head, referring to the now common almost-joke with photographers that any mistakes can be set right in post-production—on a computer, on programs like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. For mobile photographers, there are the mobile versions of these apps, in addition to scores of others, like Snapseed or VSCO, which help enhance and beautify photographs—sometimes to unrecognisable degrees.

Veteran photographer Raghu Rai agrees. He says the proliferation of digital technology has encouraged a penchant for shooting endlessly, without valuing and thinking through each shot. “It’s a disease,” he says, and “while even colour film used to exaggerate things a bit, I think that digital—oh, it’s exaggerating everything devastatingly.”

Rai loves shooting on his digital devices, though. Since he switched to digital, sometime in the early aughts, he has never looked back. He says, however, that photographers like him, who have shot analogue for decades before moving to digital, have an edge over digital natives because it has embedded “the rules and spirit of photography” in their practice.

For followers of this school of thought, there is a silver lining, despite the stock and processing hurdles. While new analogue SLRs aren't easily available any more—Nikon discontinued the F6, its last SLR camera, in 2020 and only Leica still produces two models, costing upwards of Rs. 3 lakh—sturdy, pre-used analogue cameras are affordable and easily available. Devices that were immensely popular in India in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have found their way back into the hands of those in online analogue communities, and to offline, unorganised flea markets, in a big way. A basic Yashica is available for Rs. 2,000-3,000; a manual Nikon F series or an Olympus OM 10 for Rs. 8,000-10,000. Depending on who is selling, in what working condition, and the power of the haggler, prices can be lower.

*****

This gives vocal members of the analogue community hope. If it was the older labs and photographers who tried to step in pre-covid and help by acquiring distributorships, now young analogue enthusiasts are moving in. Indie photo labs, for example, have begun buying branded film in bulk, cutting and re-spooling it into smaller cannisters and rebranding it as their own. This helps cut film and processing costs. And since companies like Kodak or Ilford allow for a reseller market, this has become an imaginative way, in India and abroad, to bring down costs and diversify image results.

A portrait of Vidhyalakshmi Vijaykumar; of Sarbajoy Paul working in his darkroom; and a couple rolls from Zhenwei Film Lab. (Credit: Akshaya Vaidyanathan, Santanu Paul; Courtesy: Zhenwei Film Labs)

For the hurdles in getting affordable film had begun taking a toll. “We have noticed how (people) who got into film enthusiastically over the last few years have recently started giving up now because they can’t afford (film) any more,” says Yash Yeri, 26, a Mumbai-based photographer and co-owner of Zhenwei Film Lab. Yeri and his business partner, Aditya Tawte, 25, started selling a line of repackaged and rebranded black and white film stock a couple of months ago under the Zhenwei label. Their three varieties are made from re-spooled Ilford stock: Yuma, with 50 ISO; Sin City, with 1000 ISO for nighttime; and one called You-Name-It, a professional T-Grain film, 320 ISO.

In Kolkata, Sarbajoy Paul, 28, too has a line of rebranded film. His stock differs from Zhenwei’s in that Paul buys Kodak film stock that is used to shoot cinema, or motion picture, in bulk and adapts that for use in still photography. Inspired by the Kolkata-based movie industry, Paul’s line of film is called Tollygrunge, and has three variants: Noir is black and white; Colour is for daylight; while Neon is a tungsten balanced film meant for night shots. Between March-July 2021, at the peak of his business, he “was moving roughly 300-400 rolls a month”. Then, his scanner broke and he had to get a new one; he is now trying to regain momentum.

Many of these boutique labs have come up with custom in-house processing methods for their rolls, becoming end-to-end solution providers for what becomes a captive market: You buy film rolls from such a lab because at Rs. 350-400 a pop, they are less than half the price of a common Kodak 200; you also take it back to them to process, since only they know how to develop their roll in a way that achieves the results expected. Yet processing and scanning together cost Rs. 300-600, half of what older, mainstream labs will charge.

*****

In spite of such efforts being spearheaded by those under 40, Srishti Digilife’s Vijayakumar believes that “youngsters lack patience” to keep up an interest in analogue, and that “despite the growth we have seen over the last three-four years, there's a decline we are expecting will happen over the next five years”. He estimates that 80% of the community is actually between the ages of 45-70.

In the meantime, however, this impatient younger lot continues to drum up noise around analogue photography. Globally, demand has gone up for Fujifilm’s Instax cameras, which result in Polaroid-style pictures that develop right in front of their expectant eyes. The devices achieved screaming levels of popularity, with Fujifilm even collaborating with global pop icon Taylor Swift, now 32, to launch a special edition in 2018. According to a report by the German broadcaster DW (Deutsche Welle), Fujifilm only sold under half a million Instax units worldwide in 2010; in 2020, this jumped to a staggering 10 million units.

The appeal lies largely in the soothing tones, artsy light leaks, and texture-lending grain that film results in. Many try to mimic these results in digital photographs too, through the indiscriminate use of filters on editing apps. In the premium version of the popular app VSCO, there are filters that achieve the exact tonal qualities of various specific Kodak, Ilford, Fuji and Agfa Vista films.

“Whilst there are many people who remember film photography from the first time round, the growth we are seeing now is being driven by 18- to 35-year-olds who are learning about film photography for the first time,” confirms Branthwaite. “Often this is from being taught the basics...in a photography class, and increasingly the interest it sparks continues. We are also delighted to see the increasing interest from mainstream retailers, a further sign of the resurgence moving into the general public’s mindset.”

Over the last few years, some wedding parties of millennials in India have also offered point-and-shoot disposable film cameras (Ilford and Fujifilm are popular) to guests—they could shoot pictures through the events and leave the cameras behind so that the rolls could be developed later for add-on albums. In Kolkata, Paul, whose commercial projects include wedding shoots, says the photographers he has worked with would also offer to shoot an album entirely on 35mm as an add-on premium package for clients. Matt Parry, marketing communications manager at Harman Technology, points out that in 2019, Ilford even featured leading Indian wedding photographer Ankita Asthana capturing a wedding on their black and white film.

Some young fashion photographers, too, have been exercising their artistic discretion to shoot parts of their commercial assignments on film. Ashish Sahoo, 33, analogue photographer and founder member of Maze Collective, a Delhi-based collaborative space for photographers, cites Sarang Sena, a photographer in his mid-30s, as an example. In July last year, Sena, who has a 17-year career across editorial and commercial work, had posted outtakes from a shoot for the designer duo Shantanu and Nikhil on his Instagram account—all these pictures were shot on a medium format camera, which uses a 120mm film roll.

A portrait taken with the Nikkormat FT, with Kodak Gold 200 film. (Credit: Raghuvir Khare)

With hobbyists and amateur film photographers, however, it is the 35mm film and camera that is popular. This is the crowd that participates in the film processing workshops Sahoo runs at Maze. “Very few professional photographers come in—it’s all kinds of other people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who want to learn. It’s about a kind of intimacy with the image they are making from scratch—understanding the basics and shooting, and then watching it appear in front of their eyes” as they learn to also work with the chemicals and develop an image, he adds. This is in line with what others, such as Arya at Museo Camera and art and photo-focused studio spaces like Kanike Studio in Bengaluru, which run such workshops, have noticed.

Longer-duration workshops, which take on interested students and practitioners, are also being organised. In August 2021, the not-for-profit MurthyNayak Foundation funded The Analogue Approach Project—a Delhi-based initiative, set up in 2020—to select image-makers every month to spend time under the guidance of photographer Srinivas Kuruganti. These “Darkroom Workshops” ran till the end of January, with practitioners studying and refining their analogue photo, printing and processing skills. Kuruganti hopes to hold more such workshops.

Over the last two decades, the proliferation of DSLRs helped to make learning photography more accessible, simply by virtue of giving the shooter immediate feedback. With film, the time between shooting and seeing the photo had made the craft that much tougher, and the learning curve steeper. Now, however, having been through point-and-shoots and DSLRs, a lot of those born into, or those who grew up at the cusp of, a digital-first world are seeing the inclusion of analogue formats in their practice as a way to shoot better.

“Film has helped me grow as an artist,” says Bengaluru-based Vijaykumar. “With digital, it’s easy to get trapped shooting one frame a bunch of times,” but with film, you know that you have only 36 exposures on one roll, and you become intentional and careful, to (use them well and) shoot variety,” she says. “Once I saw the output of my first roll, I was stunned…film has helped me see better, it helped me look for things.”

Mint Lounge, issue dated 26 February, 2022. Cover photo by Vidhyalakshmi Vijaykumar

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The current moment is really a make-or-break one for the fledgling analogue film photography community in India. Regardless of age, those shooting film agree that this isn’t a fight for film to replace digital—that’s just not practically possible, nor is it necessary or desired. The idea, instead, is to have a stronger and more stable ecosystem of film shooting.

The lobby for film internationally is a strong one— Hollywood directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino had made movie studios agree to sign contracts with Kodak in 2015. According to reports, these were renewed as recently as 2020, ensuring a continued supply, to a certain degree, of both cinema and still-photo stocks.

In India, with the increased interest and activities—in learning, shooting, processing and innovating—members of the analogue community are trying to stay the course and not lose steam in streamlining, and perhaps scaling, their operations. Eventually, the goal is to force film and camera companies the world over to take note of this interest and need.

“There are reasons for (such) experimentation and effort that have to do with the sociopolitical moment that we live in,” says Rahaab Allana, curator and publisher at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. “It’s not just about art and craft at the end of the day, it’s about how we are experiencing the world around us, what we see happening, and how we would like to change that,” he says. After all, art—given that it offers different ways of looking at the world, quite literally so with photography—is a motivator for change.

This was first published here. It was the cover story for the Mint Lounge edition on 26 February, 2022

With 'Run and Hide', writer Pankaj Mishra returns as a novelist

Twenty years after ‘The Romantics’, acclaimed essayist Pankaj Mishra’s second work of fiction, ‘Run And Hide’ is now out

Pankaj Mishra’s second novel comes more than two decades after his debut, The Romantics, but Run and Hide is worth the wait.

Arun, Aseem and Virendra, all from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds, meet as batchmates at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Hungry to better their circumstances, Aseem and Virendra reach dizzying heights of material and social success; their eventual fall from grace is just as spectacular.

Arun’s aspirations are fuelled by a different desire—of what he thinks could be love. Told from his point of view, Run and Hide is a slow burn. It covers three decades, recounting stories of lives on the cusp of economic liberalisation in India and globalisation in general, takes cues from high-profile cases of both white-collar crime and the MeToo movement, while tracing political changes in the country and identity politics globally—till the scene is set for a global virus.

This interview was first published in Mint Lounge on 19 February, 2022

Yet no page feels bogged down by the weight of contemporary issues; no strand is underserved. Arun, self-effacing and almost unselfconsciously prone to philosophising, makes the book immensely readable. He observes and articulates minutiae with rare lucidity, grippingly sketching the emotional intricacies of trying to stay afloat through tides of change.

In the time between the two novels, Mishra has earned acclaim as a sharp yet sensitive essayist, a keen observer of our times. This also keeps Run And Hidefirmly rooted in reality, exploring motivations and sympathies, and how these play out.

While it is unfair, of course, to compare works 20 years apart, the arc is nothing short of phenomenal. The sharpness of experience and softness of wisdom find an alchemical balance in Run and Hide. A world-weariness is evident, but so is a deep romanticism towards life itself.

In an interview in the lead-up to the book’s launch today, Mishra talks about experiencing the world through fiction, the challenge of covering three decades of change, and more. Edited excerpts:

The book’s characters share similarities with people who have been in the public eye.

I think the reason why anyone turns to fiction is essentially to do what cannot be done in any other form, whether it’s reportage or essay, or poetry, or a play. The novel is just a much more spacious form that can accommodate different ways of understanding the world; the play and clash of ideas. In an essay you more or less end up taking one side—you might present the other side but you have to put your own position forward.

The fiction form gives you an opportunity to critique your own views, positions, your own class and caste. You can take very many different sides without coming out conclusively on one side or other. It’s a very democratic space; it’s a space that allows all kinds of characters to have their say, to have their inner freedom.

Obviously, I went back to the novel with these advantages in mind. But that does not mean I am going to break with everything that I have been thinking about or experiencing over the last three decades. I have encountered a wide variety of people, ways of being. They will inevitably make their way into my fiction, as composite characters.

These are (also) the themes that have concerned me over the years—the rise of a “new India”, what that actually means, who is rising, how they even seek fulfilment now that they have been freed from old restrictions and constraints, how fulfilled they even are, and how they pursue happiness, so to speak, in this new, very heady world that has been opened up to them by economic liberalisation and globalisation.

I’ve written about the political consequences of that, but the reason I turn to the novel is that only fiction can explore the spiritual and emotional consequences of this massive transformation we have undergone over the last three decades.

Is an essay exploring these concerns not as effective as a novel ?

These are two very different ways of reading and engaging with the world. (With fiction) you are asking the reader to enter into a kind of communication with the author; they are being asked to imagine certain situations, certain landscapes and people, (with) little signs of recognition all around. Which is not to say that only people in India will (relate).

Someone from a working-class background in the north of England emailed to say that the book spoke to him as an account of the humiliation you grow up with as a member of a lower class.The shame of growing up poor, of growing up ignorant—how much that follows you around even when you become successful. (With fiction) a reader brings their own life experience and imagination to the process. Non-fiction isn’t really asking you to do much of that. It’s giving you a set of facts around which a narrative has been woven.

Arun is an interesting choice as narrator. He seems never fully present in the events he recalls. Yet he is observant, reserving it all for a later telling.

This really goes to the heart of how you conceive of the novel and the strategies you adopt to tell the story. It was very clear to me that I had to choose somebody who is on the margins of the world he is describing, and yet, at the same time, not have a particularly moralistic point of view of it. I could not give Aseem the voice of the narrator, even though he is supposedly a novelist; he’s too egotistical and self-seeking to be able to see and observe the world around him. Whereas Arun, while working within the realm of literature, is on its margins too as a translator. It is a unique position—someone who does valuable work, and yet remains invisible.

Once I found this way of thinking about him and his relationship with the other characters, the novel started to fall into place. It was a challenge to think about covering three decades in the lives of these people. But the notion that he can be traumatised into eloquent speech helped me a great deal.

You meet people like Arun all the time—who don’t speak much, aren’t part of the cultural mainstream, who don’t go to parties, but are incredibly observant and insightful.

A certain unease is central to the story. Arun is uncomfortable with both the “victimhood” of the elite and the rage of the socially disadvantaged that lets them aid in oppressions of other kinds. For him, love, friendship, family fall away because of this. Is running and hiding the only way out?

One reason I went into fiction was to get away from easy generalisations or conclusions. It was really to demonstrate that there are so many different ways of being and perceiving the world. Living alone in the Himalaya can be much more exalting and liberating than, say, being at a dinner party in London, where you feel uncomfortable with all the opinions that are being expressed around you. Especially if you come from a background like Arun’s, where you know people have a very good reason to be angry at the way they have been treated by their social systems. He sees that his own father, regardless of how horrible he is, has known what degradation is much more than the people claiming that their rights and identity as a black or brown person should be honoured.

I think he has left open the possibility (of what he will do next). (The novel is at) an impasse he has been driven to, by his experience of all these different realities outside the little world he had created for himself. I would not want the book to be seen as my own kind of general statement on where we are today, and that there’s no other possibility except to run and hide.

Arun has influences of your life. Does inhabiting the book’s world influence you too, and shift how you view your life after writing it?

I do feel that every novel changes (the writer) deeply. Apart from everything else, you are exploring parts of your own self while writing fiction. Non-fiction engages only a very shallow part of yourself; mostly the mind—you have had an experience, you have talked to people and you are putting it in some shape. But when you are writing fiction, you are pulling stuff out of yourself, you don’t know where from. You are conducting a very intense dialogue with different parts of yourself. So if I were to go back and start identifying myself (in this novel), I would not identify myself in just Arun, I would also identify myself in Aseem, in Alia. We all consist of multiple selves—and all those characters carry traces of my own self. It’s only in fiction that you can conduct this dialogue with these different selves—where else would there be an opportunity to do so? So, to answer your question, I think writing it was really a unique experience. If people like it, it will be a bonus but it has brought me into a conversation with aspects of my experience I wouldn’t have otherwise engaged with.

This interview was first published in Mint Lounge on 19 February, 2022

Where is the big covid-19 novel?

Events of a certain scale and magnitude have always shown up in literature, influencing not only subject but form. Will covid-19 similarly affect the novel?

When she answers my call, Mita Kapur is sending off an apology email to a writer. She was to write back about their submission nearly 12 weeks ago but has not had the time to get to it, prompting a reminder from the writer.

It’s not as if she has been on a break. Kapur, who heads Siyahi, one of India’s leading literary agencies, has been reading more than ever: “We are all frantically reading, all the time,” she says. It’s just that her organisation has seen an almost fivefold increase in the number of submissions. Ever since covid-19 sent people into forced lockdowns and isolation, literary agents and publishers have been inundated with manuscripts from writers who have finally had the time to work on their novels.

Especially before the second wave of the pandemic hit India in the summer of 2021, many of them took the opportunity to hunker down and work on old, half-finished drafts. Yet others thought it was time to seize the moment and channel their fledgling ideas into dystopian fiction or medical thrillers.

Along with the first flurry of isolation-driven submissions, all sorts of writing gathered steam online. Instagram poetry flourished. In prose, the online writing platform Wattpad saw a surge in subscribers. In late 2020, its country head, Devashish Sharma, told Scroll.in that “from January through April, the number of new stories grew 151%. In the same period, the number of new writers increased by 125%. Writer activity, overall, increased by 200% from January through April. In India, these growth trends meant a 50% increase in reading time, a 30% increase in new stories, and a 60% increase in writers.”

But there is still no big covid-19 novel. Is it too early to expect one?'

“Let’s look at it like this,” says Namita Gokhale, who came out with her 20th novel, The Blind Matriarch, this September: There were no Partition novels till a few decades after the event. “It took that much time to process (it). World War II is still a (very) good subject to write on. And every time we go into World War II, we find more and newer dimensions, or aspects of the war that were overlooked at that time or brushed over. I think that this pandemic will recur in fiction, perhaps with greater depth, in the years to come.” Rahul Soni, executive editor (literary) at HarperCollins India, echoes Gokhale’s observations. “It may take 10 years to address the pandemic (in fiction) in any significant way, or with any depth,” he says.

Expectedly perhaps, the first movers in the traditional publishing spaces were in non-fiction. They were mostly the scientific and explanatory kind, about disease outbreaks and viruses, specifically about the coronavirus. One notable Indian title was The Coronavirus: What You Need To Know About The Global Pandemic by Dr Swapneil Parikh, Maherra Desai and Dr Rajesh Parikh, published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI). It came out as early as March 2020.

In creative writing, the pandemic started showing up first in poetry and short stories . The novel, even just by virtue of the length and approach to world-building it requires, was not even in the race. One of the first responders, so to speak, was Shobhaa De, with her short story e-book series, Lockdown Liaisons, published by Simon and Schuster—now, a year-and-a-half later, actor Lillette Dubey is adapting five of the book’s stories for the stage. Journalist and writer Udayan Mukherjee followed in October 2020 with his book of short stories, Essential Items And Other Tales From A Land In Lockdown, published by Bloomsbury—recently, it was longlisted for the Tata Lit Live Book of the Year Award.

The same month that Mukherjee’s book came out, PRHI had brought out a book of poems called Singing In The Dark, edited by poet and critic K. Satchidanandan and U.S.-based academic Nishi Chawla. It featured over 100 poets from around the world reflecting on what a crisis of such global magnitude meant. “We did realise that poets typically privilege a slow churning of their art, and that not many poets would embrace the idea of immediately responding to the pandemic as it is shaping and reshaping our lives,” the editors acknowledged in their foreword. This need for a “slow churn” applies also, and perhaps more so, to novels.

Currently, there is a sense that while novelists have begun engaging with the pandemic, both publishers and readers are not very open to books about it. “I am already representing two books that feature the pandemic, both are by well-known women writers,” says literary agent Kanishka Gupta, of the agency Writer’s Side. However, there is “major covid-19 fatigue”, he says. “Even if the treatment is fictional and creative”, such novels are being rejected by readers and, in turn, publishers. “Also, publishers feel like (a novel based on the pandemic) has a very limited shelf-life,” he adds. The uncertainty is in whether when things open up, and life regains a sense of normalcy, as it seems to be doing now, more newsy stories set in or featuring the pandemic years will still be of interest.

Inevitably, the recent months have seen a few prominent books directly or indirectly involving the pandemic. While Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch is primarily the story of a family and its various members who also incidentally experience covid-19 and its consequences, Puja Changoiwala’s Homebound, launched this month by HarperCollins, takes a more granular, newsy approach—it situates itself in the migrant crisis of 2020 to tell the story of a family based in Mumbai’s Dharavi, forced to head back home to their native village in Rajasthan following the nationwide covid-19 lockdown. Last week, PRHI announced that it would be publishing popular writer Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s next book, Soft Animal, “about a young couple enduring an unhappy marriage just as India embarks on its surreal COVID lockdown”. The book, Madhavan’s eighth, will be out in 2023.

Through this all, though, an ambivalence about the quality of pandemic-influenced submissions lingers. “A lot of people are addressing the pandemic itself but that’s almost like just doing something timely to make a submission,” says Poulomi Chatterjee, editor-in-chief and publisher of Hachette India. “To me, nothing else has changed otherwise…. I haven’t yet seen a change in what (authors) are submitting, or a change of form in literary or commercial novels,” she adds.

Barring novels that have featured the pandemic largely in the background, like Gokhale’s, the general consensus is that any attempt to write a “pandemic novel” any time soon may see only superficial and not very well-considered results. It would be as bad as some hastily put-together drafts “swapping out a fascist regime for dystopia as a trope”, notes one publisher. A chunk of the drafts agents and publishers have been inundated with in recent months have tried this tack.

At Siyahi, however, swimming in a sea of submissions, Kapur is already seeing a slight change in the very way the novel is being written. “There is a coincidence (of the pandemic years) with a generation of writers who are willing to experiment. The very physicality of the situation—there has been loss, grief, paranoia, and emotional suffering on so many levels—is bound to impact the way you think, imagine, dream and the way you plot your next move,” she says. The change may not be “ubiquitous”, Kapur adds, “but I can assure you that there will 100% be an experimentation with voice, in character development, and in the way a story arc develops. I am seeing all of this in a few of the books that have come to me, and it’s quite fun to read.”

When the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and World War II started to inform novels written in English, these were the very elements through which the form began to change, ushering in Modernism. Today the novel, which Soni calls “a shape-shifting, accommodating form that’s not dying any time soon”, is possibly seeing glimmers of such change again.

This story was first published in Mint Lounge on 27 November, 2021

The Illuminated: Finely rendered study of grief offset by predictable politics

Recently, Anindita Ghose, who was previously editor of Mint Lounge and features director at Vogue, launched her debut novel The Illuminated to much fanfare and love. A quick look at the blurb tells us this is about a mother and daughter, separately coming to terms with themselves and their lives after the sudden death of the husband and father.

To drive home the point that this narrative is about women reclaiming their space within themselves and in society, the book mines the age-old link between women and the lunar calendar.

This begins with the beautiful black hardback, designed by Bonita Vaz Shimray, slit silver and showing various phases of the moon. The chapters too are named after these lunar stages. The two women protagonists are Shashi and Tara, along with their house-help Poornima, named after the moon and stars; Shashi’s husband and Tara’s father is named Robi, after the sun. In keeping with the title, the secondary characters have names denoting ‘wisdom’ and ‘light’ — the women’s trusted confidantes are Bibek and Noor, respectively; the man that Tara falls for is Amitabh, ‘limitless light’.

The meticulousness with which the storyline was crafted is apparent. The narrative deliciously dips into different times in the characters’ lives, never disrupting the flow. Overall, there is no doubt The Illuminated is the sort of book that could be tagged as lyrical and beautiful. Individual bits, like “[i]t was beautiful prose, the kind that emerges from the minds and mouths of people who do not speak much,” attest to this.

But — and this review wished there wasn’t a ‘but’ to elaborate on — The Illuminated tries too hard to be ‘The Novel of its Times’. The book is crowded with touch-points. It’s almost as if a list of current preoccupations was being checked off as it was being written: a privileged, ‘liberal’ girl chooses to study Sanskrit over say, English Literature; a ‘right wing’ militia group’s members regularly knock on people’s doors, taking gulps out of “Goumutra™” sachets; a #MeToo situation; a character who ‘runs away’ to an alternate-living commune; and later, an utopian feminist state that’s formed in India.

In stuffing in all of these, the book is unable to give each one their duly deserved space for real depth or nuance. Especially the feminist icon and her utopia on the one hand, and the right wingers on the other are terribly unsubstantiated caricatures — disappointing in an otherwise intellectual exercise quoting poets and thinkers from Bhartrhari to Barthes.

Another problem is the lack of clarity in the book’s narratorial tone. This is dangerous because it is unclear if the narrator says (many) problematic things suo moto, or if it is her exploration of a particular character’s flaws that calls for this treatment.

For instance, early on, the book rightly, but not very overtly, calls out the right wingers for saying women living alone will “develo[p] lesbian attitudes”; but a little later, the narrator, telling the story of Tara, an academic and apparently woke character says, “Even a gay man she had once kissed drunkenly…told her he wished they could do it right there on the dance floor….” Did successive drafts overlook the problematic use of a nameless and faceless LGBT character as a prop to establish the sexual desirability of a cisgender, straight woman?

Another huge paragraph on Tara thinking about her previous sexual companions has the line “she had a dream where all the boys…were naked, lined up against a wall…[t]heir faces obscured but she knew them by their bodies.”

Perhaps the idea is to replace the male gaze, but the same critiques against fetishisation and commodification could apply to this brand of feminism too.

This review was first published here

The Illuminated, Anindita Ghose
Harper Collins, ₹599

Mapping Love: Editing fails Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari's debut novel

There’s a lilting alchemy of desi-kitsch and gentle self-awareness in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari films. She did win hearts with Nil Battey Sannata (2015), Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017), and Panga (2020). This quality, if the potential in the heart of her novel is anything to go by, was more than essential here too.

The story is of narrator-protagonist Oorja Chaturvedi, a US-returned-Indian, whose father is a forest officer and mother a homemaker, who despite great promise, chose her husband and child everyday, over her own life, career, and ageing father.

Oorja, barring one traumatic romantic relationship she suffers through, comes off as nurturing unsubstantiated bitterness. Using this as a gateway to her story, does little to help empathise or relate to her more than superficially — we are left wondering what really shapes her confusions and pain. This is especially stark since most of the book is a stream-of-consciousness from Oorja’s point of view. The benefit of retrospect could have helped immensely. Instead, we are in a fever dream.

The snippets of subpar poetry through the book don’t help. Their purpose presumably is to add some metaphorical exploration. They don’t.

There is also a chunk of (unintentional?) identity crisis — in Oorja as well as with the the editing of the book. Let’s start with Oorja. She only goes to the US for her higher studies, so we know she spent at least 17-18 years of her life in India — yet, she cannot understand if a rickshaw wallah’s nod is a yes or a no. Later, she arbitrarily states that she is going to follow “each chakra”, “intending to heal every energy path”, and also refers specifically to her “Made-in-America cooling sunglasses.”

Now the editing: Mapping Love annotates basic Indian words — like gully, chaat, and raaga, among many others — which are now mostly common knowledge across national and international borders. It is 2021, even American singer Jason Derulo is making and singing about jalebis, but the author and Rupa, an Indian publisher, feel the need to let us know that this is “an Indian sweetmeat.” The book could’ve also done with a better edit — for instance, a recurrent oversight of using the word ‘shift’ where they meant ‘move’; then, there are the sentences that try so very hard; and finally, a conclusion that might’ve done better in an unoriginal, predictable film.

Could this be a problem of medium? Recently, Iyer Tiwari addressed this in an interview with a prominent wire service: “…in a screenplay, you are showing ‘this is what it is’…in a book, you are creating a world through words and metaphors”. In order to build a world through their stream-of-consciousness, the author needs a better fleshed-out and self-aware narrator-protagonist; and surely, the one tenet common across films and novels is that they’d both do well to show, not tell.

This review was first published here

Mapping Love, by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari
Rupa, Rs. 295