As the Market Focus country for 2009, India was front and centre at this year’s London Book Fair. In an article sure to be of interest to next year’s Market Focus participants – South Africa is in the spotlight in 2010 – Liz Thomson looks at the growing world of publishing in India and the 2009 LBF Market Focus legacy:
This year’s India Market Focus went a long way to showing how richly contoured the map of Indian publishing has become. The joint LBF-British Council cultural partnership initiative brought some 50 authors, with 15 published languages between them, and around 90 publishers to Earls Court last spring. There was a good deal of highly positive media coverage and a benediction from both the British and Indian governments. As with all such events, the many seeds sewn will take root and flower over a period of months, if not years, but it’s already clear that the meeting of minds and cultures is yielding results, not least among them invitations to India to be the market focus country in Moscow this month and in Turin and Beijing next year, while the LBF will act as facilitator between Indian and international publishers at LBF 2010. New business is notoriously hard to quantify, but the aforementioned Zubaan signed upwards of 25 contracts, while Motilal, the UK-based distributor of books from India, estimate it generated around a dozen new contracts (including one with Waterstone’s for children’s books), as against the usual “three or four”. Sahitya Akademi, India’s literary academy, has digitised 60 titles for the blind in Hindi and English, while Ratna Sagar laid plans to collaborate with Oxford Brookes on a publishing course (though the Institute of Book Publishing website reveals the many training initiatives already available in India). Bhavit Mehta and Jon Slack of the Society of Young Publishers have started to plan a South-Asian literary festival to take place in 2010, and discussions are in train to set up a BookScan India, possibly as early as next year.
As always, there remains a need to change perceptions. Just as, over the last 25 years or so, publishers in Australia and Canada and, more recently, Ireland, have asserted their right to be treated as independent territories, not merely an add-on to UK contracts or (more insultingly in many ways) as a bargaining chip in the so-called Turf Wars between British and American publishers, so Indian publishers are increasingly asserting their independence.
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