GOING NATIVE: HarperCollins and Penguin have brought out books in Hindi

In the swanky new offices of publisher HarperCollins just outside Delhi, there’s a new kind of buzz these days. A brand-new editorial team is being rapidly put together, and the computers are being fed new fonts meant to bang out non-Roman scripts for the printing press. Seven books of the well known C.S. Lewis series The Chronicles of Narnia have just been translated in Hindi. Another big publisher is going vernacular.

Indian publishing giants — which earlier flinched from anything that wasn’t written out in crystal-clear Roman type — are rapidly doing an about turn, to explore the regional language market. “Let’s face it, one out of three Indians read Hindi, and we’ve been ignoring them for so long,” says P.M. Sukumar, CEO, HarperCollins. “Things would be so different for us if we could reach out to this huge yet unexplored audience out there,” he ponders.

HarperCollins is not the only publisher venturing into the regional market — it is just the latest. Penguin, one of India’s biggest publishers, went vernacular three years ago, and have since printed nearly 130 titles in Hindi, Marathi and Urdu. “Vernacular publishing comprises almost 20 per cent of our annual domestic production,” says associate editor Naved Akber, chief of Penguin’s vernacular division. Rupa & Co. has also been at it for a while now. “It’s just that we don’t go around telling the world about it,” laughs Rupa boss Kapish Mehra.

Clearly, the shadow lines in India’s publishing industry, which once told the chic from the slovenly, are being erased. “There was a time when Hindi was considered infra dig by Indian city breds,” says Sukumar. “But Indians now no longer shy away from identifying themselves as a Hindi-speaking mass. The emerging trend in publishing is only a reflection of this change,” he says.

The figures tell a larger story. According to publishing experts, English titles comprise almost 40 per cent of India’s annual domestic publishing in terms of copies, and about 50 per cent in terms of value. The remaining is accounted for by regional language publishing, carried out by thousands of big and small publishers scattered across India’s cities and towns. “Of course, we cannot think of capturing the entire vernacular market,” says Sukumar. “But we definitely can reach out to the top layer of the regional audience which is keen to read good literature but can’t, because of the language barrier.”

In keeping with that view, HarperCollins’s Hindi catalogue will include translated titles such as the Narnia books, Chandi ki Kursi (The Silver Chair) and Antim Yudh (The Last Battle). Paolo Coelho’s The Witch of Portobello, Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas have all been translated into Hindi.

But the publishers stress they are also promoting original talent. “We’d also like to publish already established Hindi writers if they want to write for us,” says Sukumar, adding that they have plans to print at least 25 Hindi titles — alongside about 150 English titles — annually in the coming years, and diversify into Bengali publishing as well.

Penguin has been upping production too. It has plans to soon include Malayalam in its ambit, meeting at least a fifth of its total annual publishing. A slew of new writers has been roped in, such as poet Viki Arya, writer of Dhoop Ke Rang, and Lucknow-based author Chaudhary Zia Imam, whose biography of musician Naushad has just hit the stores. “The public response to our vernacular venture has been far more than we expected,” says Akber.

Despite the optimism, however, publishers have been cautious about numbers. Print orders of Hindi titles seldom exceed 1,500 copies, compared to 3,000 or more for English titles. In the case of bestsellers (for example, the Hindi translation of Shobhaa Dé’s Spouse, which Penguin says sold 8,000 copies) serial reprints are ordered, as is the norm with established regional language publishers.

The price is a factor too. The vernacular market, experts say, is extremely price sensitive. To refrain from overshooting the price cap, the bigger publishers underprice their books, while maintaining their quality. Roughly, vernacular titles come about 30 per cent cheaper than their English counterparts. “Compared to our basic English price of about Rs 250, a basic vernacular title would come for about Rs 175,” says Akber.

Subsidising, publishers hope, will soon see the vernacular audience wake up to high quality products sold at affordable prices — though there are regional publishing houses which have been offering readers quality in both form and content. Writers, on their part, have already taken note of the benefits that have come with the big imprints. “Penguin gave me a contract that was extremely professional, and paid me more than any other Hindi publisher said they would,” says Zia Imam. “And they stuck to their word, unlike others who promised one thing on the phone and then wrote something else in the contract.”

Veteran Hindi author Vishwanath Tripathi would agree with Imam. “Vernacular publishing has long been plagued by unprofessional behaviour,” says Tripathi. “Publisher-author relations quickly sour, and there are endless issues over contract or royalty. So if big publishers with a global footprint now enter the scene, it will undoubtedly clean up the industry.”

Insiders stress that compared to some regional publishers who wheedle writers out of royalty and other benefits, bigger companies such as Penguin and HarperCollins treat them on a par with their English authors. The royalty amount — between seven and 10 per cent — remains unchanged in their cases, as do other terms and conditions.

Not everybody, however, is happy with the development. Veteran Bengali author and critic Bani Basu, for example, believes that while the gesture may be good, the coming of the giants will wipe out several fringe players in regional publishing. “Besides, the new entrants may only be interested in signing names who sell, irrespective of literary quality,” fears Basu. “That would only take nepotism in publishing a notch further. After all, not everyone writes to make money, and not all small publishers are dishonest. The quality-quantity divide will thus sadly remain,” she observes.

On the other hand, vernacular publishers who’ve established themselves in their own niches believe that the foray by the big players will not tell drastically on their own business. “We will be playing at different levels,” says Ashok Maheshwari, managing director of Hindi publishers Rajkamal Prakashan. “They may bring big names into Hindi, but we’ll continue to address grassroots issues which our regional readers are more interested in, and that’s where we have an edge over English publishers. We’ll still sell 7,000-plus copies of books like we always have.”

Maheshwari points out that his publishing house is focused on print quality, and keeping to a price range of Rs 60-150. “In a price sensitive market, that’ll definitely see us through,” he says.

For the vernacular bibliophile, though, it’ll only mean more books to devour. And the more, the merrier.