The way forward: India’s publishing boom and its authors

In some ways, publishing in early post-independence India was like publishing in pre-sixties Canada: cautiously seeking native voices without much financial success. Take GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr (1948), the first Indian novel to ‘go beyond the Englishness of the English language’ as Salman Rushdie once said. It languished out of print for many years, despite critical acclaim. Anita Desai and VS Naipaul’s classics may sell well today, but when they started out in the sixties, their readership was select and modest. In the seventies and eighties, new writers like Manohar Malgaonkar and Aubrey Menon as well as the popular RK Narayan, came to prominence in journals like the seminal Illustrated Weekly of India. Its elite audience sought to supplement the Western literature they read with a cabal of Indian writers whose literary ambitions were tempered by low expectations and tiny print runs. Everyone else made do with Mills and Boons and James Hadley Chase.