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

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.

*****

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.

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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

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