A personal account by S Anand on what it means to win the Indian Young Publisher of the Year award.

A week into the New Year, my neighbour Shiva Shankar ran down the stairs to point me to a news item buried in The Hindu inviting applications for the Indian Young Publisher of the Year award instituted by the British Council. I was initially skeptical, but the words worked on me: £7500, a 10-day trip to London to interact with the British publishing world, a chance to compete for the International Young Publisher of the Year award, with a stall at the London Book Fair (LBF), 2008. For a small, independent publisher like Navayana, this sounded most attractive.

First about Navayana. Starting a press exclusively devoted to a critical engagement with issues of caste was primarily the idea of Ravikumar, a well-known Tamil critic and writer who is also an activist in the Dalit and civil rights movements. In India, there are publishing houses devoted to various political and niche issues: Women Unlimited, Zubaan and Stree focused on gender, LeftWord on issues of the Left, Tulika and Tara for children’s books and the like. Yet, there was not one publisher willing to engage with caste – a social reality that inflected the lives of most Indians. A category that has changed, morphed and evolved; at once a source of embarrassment and pride; at once denied and asserted. A category that has assumed renewed significance since the 1990s.

We decided to address the lacuna and founded Navayana Publishing in late 2003. Navayana refers to Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s term for the new, empirical Buddhism that he espoused. With the objective ‘publishing for social change’, we offered a platform for issues most publishers – commercial, academic and independent – shied away from. With an investment of Rs 50,000 pooled from personal savings, we printed four titles priced at a modest Rs 40 to Rs 60. Within six months we had to reprint all the titles. There has been no looking back.

In the media and mainstream common sense, any talk of caste largely meant talking about ‘reservation’. At Navayana, we challenge this perception by seeking to unmask privilege and demonstrate how caste plays a crucial role in the accumulation of invisibilised privileges. Race and racial discrimination are more visible – and become international political issues – unlike caste and caste discrimination. Shilpa Shetty’s case very easily became an issue, but do we ever ask ourselves, like one of Navayana’s authors Chandra Bhan Prasad did recently in his column Dalit Diary, “What if in the Big Brother-inspired TV show Big Boss (broadcast in India) the issue of caste discrimination against a Dalit emerges? If it does, will the Dalit contestant have a chance to emerge victorious like Shetty did?”

These are disturbing questions we have swept under the carpet for long. And Navayana believes in dusting this centuries-old Indian carpet.

In London I will be spending time with eight other participants from across the world. I find it exciting that last year’s IYPY winner was Joanna El Mir, a children’s books publisher from Lebanon, and there were participants from the Third World – from Argentina, Thailand and Jordan. I am equally excited about doing ‘book pitches’ at LBF, where I get to showcase four titles to a live audience and offer “an opportunity for the UK and international audience to discover some literary gems they don’t yet know of”. I have decided to make the primary pitch for Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld, which offers a selection from the poetry (1972–2006) of the radical Dalit Panther Namdeo Dhasal. Sample this: “I am a venereal sore in the private part of language.” Translated from the Marathi and introduced by eminent bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, the book is annotated with German filmmaker Henning Stegmüller’s black and white photographs that reveal the gastrointestinal tract of Namdeo’s Mumbai/Bombay.

We shall also be pitching for two other in-house titles: our first children’s book Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times by Kancha Ilaiah, illustrated by Adivasi Gond artist Durgabai Vyam, and historian Dilip Menon’s The Blindness of Insight which tells us why communalism is about caste. The fourth title would be Meera Nanda’s Breaking the Spell of Dharma: A Case for Indian Enlightenment published by Three Essays Press.

For me and Navayana to win the Indian award was recognition of independent publishing in the time of corporatisation of books and ideas.