About a month ago, Alind Maheshwari of Rajkamal Prakashan Group called me to conduct a Facebook Live session on Indian language publishing....
About a month ago, Alind Maheshwari of Rajkamal Prakashan Group called me to conduct a Facebook Live session on Indian language publishing. I reckoned that while the entire publishing world seemed to be looking towards New York or London or Frankfurt to show the way forward, why didn’t we instead look to get into a huddle with publishers from New Delhi, Kolkata, Nagercoil, Sangli and Dharwad – among other places – to understand their problems? Why not bring language publishers together on one platform, to grasp and tackle our particular problems in a post-COVID world, so that no one gets left behind?
To take this idea forward, some of us independent Indian language publishers came together for a video discussion in early April, with the intention of discussing how our colleagues across different geographies were handling the situation in the face of the lockdown.
Getting to know the participants
Our first discussion included diverse publishers and literary professionals from around the country, such as Kannan Sundaram from Kalachuvadu in Nagercoil; Ravi Deecee from DC Books in Kerala; Meera Johri from Rajpal and Sons; Tridib Chatterjee and Esha Chatterjee representing the Kolkata Publishers and Booksellers’ Guild (headed by Tridib Chatterjee) and Patra Bharati (their Bangla publishing house,...
