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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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