Occasionally, hearing me chuckle or gasp, the occupant of the next cabin would come to have a look. Named Rivka Israel, she was a senior editor at the OUP, and the person who was in charge of—and lovingly tended—the archive. (She came from a family of Bombay Jews who made their living as craftsmen of learning—her father, Samuel Israel, had been an admired editor himself.) Rivka, in turn, would sometimes call in the branch manager, a cheerful Gujarati named Ramesh Patel, and have me read out once more that passage about, for example, life with Gandhi’s ‘sexless and joyless entourage’.
A historian’s happiest days are always in the archives. In the case of this now somewhat elderly historian, the days have accumulated into years. Yet of all these days and years, the weeks in the OUP archive in Bombay may have given me the most joy. The letters I found there were, for my purposes, infinitely rewarding; but the real pleasure (and honour) lay elsewhere, in seeing (and sensing) oneself as being part of a great, continuous scholarly tradition; a freshly-minted OUP author entering a building stocking the works of the greatest OUP authors to work on the letters of a long-dead OUP author—all for a book that would one day be published by the OUP itself.
II
The year 2012 marked the centenary of OUP in India. In the history of the Press, two men stand out: one white, the other brown. In 1930 an Oxford graduate named R.E. Hawkins came to teach in a school in Delhi. The school closed down during the non-cooperation movement, so Hawkins found a job with the OUP in Bombay instead. In 1937 he was appointed general manager. By now he wore khadi, though this may have been a mark of gratitude rather than an affirmation of political solidarity—by closing down that school in Delhi, the Gandhians had given him a new life.
When Hawkins became general manager, the Indian branch of the Oxford University Press had been in existence for a quarter of a century. In its first year, 1912, it published the first book of a then obscure academic—S. Radhakrishnan’s Essentials of Psychology. However—as described by Rimi Chatterjee in Empires of the Mind, her history of OUP India’s early years—the branch was viewed by Oxford as more vendor than publisher. It was set up chiefly to sell textbooks written by Englishmen in England, and prescribed by the Raj for schools and colleges in the subcontinent. Sensing the mood, Radhakrishnan himself soon moved to another publisher, Allen and Unwin.
Under Hawkins, the OUP continued to make its money selling textbooks. However, this Englishman recognized that some Indians were now producing serious works of scholarship. He published a few such—A. Appadorai’s The Substance of Politics, A.A.A. Fyzee’s Outlines of Muhammadan Law, and, most notably, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri’s A History of South India, which, seventy years later, is still in print and still indispensable.
While not antipathetic to intellectuals, Hawkins’s real interests lay elsewhere, in nature and natural history. The three authors he most enjoyed publishing were the ornithologist Salim Ali, the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, and the hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett. Their writings gave him much pleasure, and their books made the OUP a good deal of money. (None more so than the books by Corbett—Man-Eaters of Kumaon was bought by the American Book of the Month Club, whose first print run of 250,000 sold out in weeks. This book, commissioned by Hawkins, was translated into twenty-seven languages, and was even made into a Hollywood film, of which Corbett commented that ‘the best actor was the tiger’.)
In the 1940s and 1950s, Bombay was the intellectual capital of India. It had the country’s best social scientists, and its only decent English-language poets and writers. In this literary culture, an Englishman known affectionately as the ‘Hawk’ set new standards of editing and publishing. The writer Laeeq Futehally, working at that time with the magazine Quest, remembers that when they had to choose a printer they settled on the Inland Press, ‘for it was also patronised by the Oxford University Press, whose General Manager, R.E. Hawkins—in spite of having only one functioning eye—was known to be the best editor and proofreader in South East (sic) Asia’.
The books published by Hawkins were carefully edited, rigorously proofread, and often beautifully produced. In the works of his favourite authors, words and pictures were exquisitely matched. No books produced in India before or since, equal in this respect, such gems as Verrier Elwin’s The Tribal Art of Middle India and Salim Ali’s Indian Hill Birds.
Hawkins retired from the OUP in 1970. Five years later, he was present when the tenth and final volume of the Handbook of Indian Birds was released in the presence of the prime minister. Asked to speak, the Hawk read out the following verse:
William Shakespeare’s a master of words
And a tusker a leader of herds
But wherever you fare
Over land, sea or air
Salim Ali’s the raja of birds
In his last years as general manager, Hawkins was assisted by two gifted young Indians. Girish Karnad was a mathematician by training and a playwright by temperament. Ravi Dayal was a history scholar who had read widely in the social sciences. After seven years in the press, Karnad left to make a career in films. Dayal stayed on, and in 1971, moved to Delhi to start a branch of the OUP there. The city was coming to replace Bombay as the intellectual capital of India. An air of self-confidence was abroad. Scholars in Delhi University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University thought they were among the best in the world. Some certainly were—such as the sociologists M.N. Srinivas and André Béteille, the historians Sarvepalli Gopal and Romila Thapar, the economist Sukhamoy Chakravarty, and the unclassifiable social scientist and social critic Ashis Nandy.
Meanwhile, Hawkins was succeeded as general manager of the OUP by Charles Lewis, a gentle, understated Englishman with an effervescent and politically active Indian wife. Lewis took the sensible decision to move the firm’s headquarters from Bombay to New Delhi, from where it could focus on the scholarly list. In 1975, the Emergency was promulgated, and Mrs Lewis was put in jail by Indira Gandhi’s police. The OUP thought it best now to move Lewis back to Oxford. Ravi Dayal was appointed general manager in his place.
The early works of the best Indian historians and social scientists had often been published overseas—by Cambridge, Chicago, Blackwell and other presses. Ravi Dayal persuaded them to offer their next books to the OUP, so that they would be edited and printed in the country where the scholars lived and about which they wrote. Most agreed, because they recognized that there were now more Indian than foreign readers of their books, and because it was impossible to refuse Ravi Dayal.
A small, dapper man dressed (by choice) in churidar-kurta, Ravi Dayal had a great (if subtly subdued) intelligence, and a greater (and visibly manifest) charm. He was a Kayasth, from a community that produced north India’s best scholars and scribes, but also its finest cooks. The Kayasths were also keen patrons of Hindustani classical music. Dayal himself could talk food like an Indian and talk Dickens like an Englishman. He was both vernacular and cosmopolitan, a mixture that characterized the scholars whose books he was seeking. For, men such as André Béteille and Irfan Habib were likewise desi and videsi in equal measure. They were naturally drawn to a publisher who bridged their worlds.
By the end of the 1970s, Ravi Dayal and the OUP had shifted the locus of scholarly publishing on South Asia out of the West. This was the stamp that scholars working on the subcontinent most craved. Historians and social scientists, whether living in India or overseas, of whatever nationality or ideological affiliation, were, so to say, lining up outside the OUP’s offices in New Delhi. Their manuscripts were subject to rigorous vetting—scrutiny by the editor concerned, and by at least two external referees, in a process that saw perhaps four out of five proposals turned away to other, lesser, publishers.
In the summer of 1979, Dayal, now the most respected publisher in India, received a proposal from a middle-aged, middle-ranking Bengali academic based in England. His name was Ranajit Guha. At that stage Guha had published one rather obscure book, and that too twenty years previously. This was a very spe
cialized study of a single aspect of agrarian policy in eighteenth-century Bengal. As a student in Calcutta, Ranajit Guha had been a fiery orator, and as an academic, he continued to work for the most part in the oral tradition. So, although he had himself published little, he had gathered around him a group of bright young devotees who promised to publish a great deal.
Ranajit Guha’s proposal to Ravi Dayal was that he and his acolytes would publish a series of collected essays under the running title ‘Subaltern Studies’. Where other editors might have been deterred by Guha’s lack of distinction, and turned off by the confusing (not to say bizarre) series title, Dayal saw here an exciting move away from the elite-centred narratives of Indian historiography. For, Guha and his disciples were genuine interdisciplinarians—historians who reached out to anthropology and political theory to make meaningful sense of the past. They had also moved beyond the colonial archive to seriously explore sources such as vernacular tracts and oral testimonies.
A first volume of Subaltern Studies was commissioned, and duly appeared in 1982. Three more volumes appeared in quick succession. Although some librarians persisted in placing them in the military section, the first four volumes of Subaltern Studies were to radically alter our understanding of Indian history. For the first time, the voices of peasants, tribals, workers—those hitherto excluded from the standard narratives—were brought to centre stage.
The OUP had also begun publishing the works of creative writers. Girish Karnad persuaded Vijay Tendulkar and Badal Sircar to pass on the English translations of their plays to the OUP. An even greater coup was the rendition in English by A.K. Ramanujan of U.R. Anantha Murthy’s Kannada novel, Samskara, which may by now have sold more copies than any other Indian work in translation, the writings of Tagore and Gandhi only excepted.
To the scholars he wooed, Dayal was a publisher who understood scholarship. To his staff, he was a boss with no sense of hierarchy. One who worked with him wrote that Dayal ‘refused an airconditioner in his room because it would have made the organization inegalitarian in a way he considered unacceptable. This was the sort of Gandhian trait that earned him huge respect, and which made his organization congenial and unhierarchical. It created a sort of “Dayal Bagh” in which everyone grumbled about low salaries but where everyone stuck it out because the bidi-smoking boss at least looked like he was in the same boat as the bidi-smoking chaprasis. No one cultivated unglamorous socialist fellow feeling with as much perverseness as Dayal. Most people who worked with him secretly hoped he would one day see the light of capitalist hedonism. But he never did.’
It was not, of course, merely a matter of personality. The subordinates respected Dayal because he knew every side of the business—finance, marketing, sales, etc.—and cultivated an atmosphere of professional pride all around. The scholars trusted Ravi Dayal because he was a superbly skilled editor. After he retired from the OUP and set up his own list, he published the early novels of Amitav Ghosh, who says that Ravi Dayal was the best editor he has worked with.
Ravi Dayal may have left the OUP in part because the prose of academics requires far more work than the prose of novelists. He had stayed long enough in any case, so long that (as one protégé claimed) Dayal ‘coauthored and ghost-wrote and may well have rewritten more books and authors than any editor in the history of Indian publishing’.
There is a story that nicely illustrates Ravi Dayal’s integrity as well as his achievement. Sometime in the 1990s, a young journalist went to interview the man who had been India’s most respected academic publisher and was now India’s finest publisher of literary fiction. She found him walking in the small—fifty feet by hundred feet—park that lay outside his apartment. Since the capacious (and glorious) Lodi Gardens lay just down the road, the journalist asked Dayal why he didn’t take his exercise there instead. ‘Too many rejected manuscripts,’ was the answer.
Shortly after this I went to meet Ravi Dayal myself. I had come to ask for a favour—that he recommend me for membership of the India International Centre. The IIC needed ‘full’ not ‘associate’ members to provide recommendations, and I knew only two such grandees, an old family friend and Ravi Dayal. He suggested I find another signatory. ‘I would be happy to recommend you,’ he said, ‘but I fear it won’t help your case, since I have offended all the trustees of the IIC.’ I took this to mean that he had turned down their various, and variously mediocre, book proposals. But I didn’t know any other full member, so asked him to sign on the form any way.
My application was approved, whereupon a friend commented that the IIC trustees perhaps hoped that they could now make fresh approaches to Ravi Dayal with me as their messenger.
III
In 1989, two years after Ravi Dayal had moved on to start his own firm, my first book was published by the OUP. It was commissioned by Rukun Advani, an introverted scholar from Lucknow who was recruited by Dayal immediately on completing a Cambridge PhD on the non-fiction writings of E.M. Forster. Advani lacked—and still lacks—Dayal’s charm, but in my view he was, and is, an even better editor of historians and sociologists. Like Dayal, Advani is deeply attentive to language. Unlike his mentor, he has a scholarly background. To write and defend a PhD thesis, and convert it into a book, means that one can conceive of a large, complex project, break it up into discrete parts, do a great deal of original research, and then write it up as a coherent and connected narrative.
It took a Ravi Dayal to see the potential of Subaltern Studies; and it needed a Rukun Advani to edit the volumes and see them through the press. As a well-trained scholar, Advani knew what made a book (or essay) credible, original, readable, and saleable. It was fortunate for the OUP, and for the world at large, that he was the main editor for the Subaltern Studies series, and that he edited, too, the individual monographs that the Subalternists published under their own names, among them such influential works such as David Hardiman’s The Coming of the Devi and Shahid Amin’s Event, Metaphor, Memory.
To be sure, Advani published some superb studies by non-Subalternists, too. These included Harjot Oberoi’s dazzlingly original The Construction of Religious Boundaries; Chetan Singh’s Region and State, which radically altered our understanding of the later Mughal Empire; Vasudha Dalmia’s important work of literary history, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions; and Mahesh Rangarajan’s fine environmental study, Fencing the Forest.
Speak to any or all of these writers, and they will tell you that they were profoundly fortunate to have had an editor like Rukun Advani; that, in fact, he rewrote their books as effectively and elegantly as his mentor rewrote the books of an older generation of scholars.
Speaking for myself, when I wrote a first draft of my biography of Verrier Elwin—the writer whose correspondence with the ‘Hawk’ lay in the building in Apollo Bunder—Advani told me to tear it up and start afresh, since a biography had to be approached differently from the sociological treatises I was accustomed to writing. As advised, I went back to my notes, and wrote them up chronologically, rather than by theme. This draft came back marked up everywhere in red ink, with a final comment: ‘This is fine as a study of Elwin the scholar and public intellectual, but where is Elwin the man?’
I now read, more closely than before, my subject’s correspondence with his mother, sister and friends, writing this all into the next draft. Advani had, as before, very many stylistic suggestions, ending with the remark that ‘this is fine as a book about Elwin the son, brother, friend and husband, but where is Elwin the writer and polemicist?’
I went back to my desk and rewrote the damn thing again. Advani approved, on the whole, of this version, but before it went to press he inserted some references to (among others) Eliot and Handel, references that enriched the narrative while giving the impression that the historian who was its author was a connoisseur of modernist poetry and classical music.
What I owed to Rukun Advani, other OUP writers owed, more or less, to their editors. Ashis Nandy speaks with much affection of
Salima Tyabji, the lady who edited his manuscripts. And my late friend, the combative Bangalore critic T.G. Vaidyanathan, became an OUP author only because his editor, Anita Roy, had great skill and even greater patience.
In 1988, the year after Ravi Dayal left, his successor as general manager, Santosh Mukherjee, was persuaded by Rukun Advani to launch the ‘Oxford India Paperbacks’—the attractive republication in soft cover of the less recondite of their scholarly books. Advani also conceived a ‘Themes in Indian History’ series, under which appeared collections of pioneering papers, edited by an acknowledged expert in the field. These books also appeared in paperback, thus continuing the work of the ‘Hawk’ and Dayal in bringing the fruits of Indian scholarship to a wide audience of scholars, students and thinking citizens.
I have spoken so far of the editors, but the production and marketing staff of the OUP also had a proper respect for the books they printed, bound, displayed and sold. Whether working in editing or printing or sales or finance, the staff had a noticeable sense of belonging. As publishing houses go, this was a very high quality operation. It was also an organization at peace with itself, its sense of cheer radiating the OUP’s branches around the country—in Mission Row in Calcutta, on Mount Road in Madras, in Koramangala in Bangalore, in Daryaganj in Delhi, and, not least, in Apollo Bunder in Bombay, all places which this Indian who read and wrote books in English once regarded almost as an extension of his own home.
IV
In 2011, the Indian branch of the Oxford University Press entered its hundredth year. Plans for an extended celebration were afoot: new releases of classic works by OUP authors in India, seminars and conferences, a great big bash at the World Book Fair in New Delhi in February 2012, to be attended by the Delegates of the Press, men of distinction in British intellectual life.
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