- By Bound Team
Urvashi Butalia is the Director, Founder, and CEO of Zubaan books, she is also the co-founder of Kali for Women. Urvashi has over 35 years of experience in independent and feminist publishing, and is a renowned publisher in the Indian and international publishing industry. She is an accomplished literary and academic writer who has received many awards, including the Padmashree which is the highest civilian honour in India.
ENTERING PUBLISHING
1. Could you take us through your journey in publishing?
For my generation, publishing journeys didn’t begin the way they do now, because the context and industry was completely different. People who entered publishing at that time fell into it by accident, especially people like me who didn’t know what they wanted to do.
I knew that I did not want to teach English Literature, because Spenser and Milton had very little to teach about the violent spaces of Delhi at that time.
My entry into publishing was with the inglorious job of a paster-upper. A friend of mine with whom I used to study French told me about a freelance job at the place she worked in, which was the Oxford University Press. I was, as the job suggests, pasting and typesetting things by hand because the technology at that time was nothing like what we have today.
There was this series of textbooks called ‘Active English’ which had characters named John and Mary who lived in London and rode on double decker buses. My job was to cut pieces of paper with Ram and Sita written on them, and stick them onto John and Mary. There was also another artist, Dean Gasper, who would remove the tops of the double decker buses, paint the golden hair black, and the blue eyes black. Dean and I were engaged in the process of Indianising these textbooks, and that began my love affair with publishing which goes on to this day.
I fell in love with the act of making books and with the smell of printing ink when I made my first press visit, and I thought this is where I’m going to stay all my life.
2. How did your involvement in the women’s movement of India coincide with your publishing journey?
I had been involved in the women’s movement since my college days, and my journey at Oxford University press ran parallel to it. At some point during our campaigns, we began asking questions about the knowledge with which we would enter these campaigns. We had a very basic idea of the issues we were campaigning against, but nothing about its history, where it came from, who it impacted and how to change it. So we naturally began looking for material to understand the issues we were confronted with, but of course there was nothing. That was where the thought of setting up a feminist publishing house began.
It was several years later, around 1984, that we set up Kali. The idea was to create knowledge about women, by women, and to bring women’s writing to public attention. This publishing house was a little ahead of its time because the market was not really receptive to books about women, but also books which would be considered part of general readership today. In English, the market was dominated by textbooks, and none of the publishing houses like Penguin or Bloomsbury existed. There wasn’t a need for feminist books in this type of market, which was hostile to both general books and books from the margins.
We didn’t know where to sell these books, but because we were connected to the women’s movement, a lot of women activists picked up Kali books, and that is what set us up. When you do something that is against the grain, you seldom question yourself on whether it is sufficient or complex enough. People saw us as radical and revolutionary. It soon became apparent that publishing in English, based in Delhi, coming from the privilege of being upper middle class, and Western Educated was very limiting. You could hardly call yourself a feminist publisher in India and be publishing books from only that background.
THE DAY TO DAY
1. How do you decide what to publish in a feminist literary list?
When we started we decided to publish two kinds of books, academic books and general books. Under the general category we published short stories, novels, and some translations.
For the academic books, we sourced them through people that we knew, and publishing can often become incestuous like that because you could get published only if you knew someone. In our time, we had no courses like this which would allow for a professional entry into publishing.
We started by publishing our activist friends, and then decided to go out of our comfort zone to publish voices from the margins. We started attending meetings and political discussions to find voices that were not usually picked up or heard. That made our list more inclusive, and ensured that we were not a poor mirror image of the big publishers.
We see ourselves as political publishers, so that has to be reflected in the policies of our workspace as well. Many of us who occupy these alternative spaces don’t have experience in running institutions, and the only model we have is the corporate model, which we reject. We tried to create an atmosphere where you can ask questions, and through that we changed our commissioning model. It stopped being the one individual editor from a particular class and privilege, that was me, who chose the books. We started asking our colleagues and readership to point us in certain directions and give us suggestions for what could be put on the list. It is rare for us to pick up a mainstream voice, and our list consists of voices that would be hidden or marginalised occupy centre space.
2. Is a feminist text more likely to be noticed when published by a feminist press or a mainstream publisher?
It is difficult to answer that question, because mainstream publishers have the resources to distribute a book across a wide geographical region, but whether they can convince people to buy it is another matter. You just have to hope that because it is visible in shops people will want to buy it. Whereas with a small political publisher like ourselves, we know who the buyers are.
Take the book ‘Seeing Like a Feminist’ by Nivedita Menon, we co-published it as part of a joint list with Penguin because they would help to distribute it to a wide audience. Penguin did not understand the popularity of Nivedita Menon among students. We did a book launch and asked Penguin to bring 500 copies of the book, but they brought only 50. There were 350 people at the launch and everyone was queuing up to buy the book.
CHALLENGES
1. What are the challenges faced by writers who write about sexuality?
One of the major challenges is simply finding the vocabulary to write about such topics. Our culture does not allow us to speak about sex, so where can you find the words to write about such topics? I am full of admiration for writers who are able to find the language to write about a subject to which the initial reaction is always fear and hostility.
The biggest challenge is to write in a way that allows you to cross that border of hostility and have people engage with your writing. It’s a real art to be able to do that, and only a few writers have that ability.
Queer literature is filling a need in the market right now, because there is so much curiosity and interest among young people. Many of them are exploring their own identities, and there is a lot of talk about it on the internet. Queer literature will grow and change, and we will see where it goes. You can almost compare it to the trajectory of women’s writing. There wasn’t a very strong opposition to it, but rather a lot of indifference to it. After some time, women’s literature had shown itself to be sellable, so now everyone wants it, and you can’t push it out or dismiss it. Queer literature is not yet powerful enough for people to feel the need to push it away in the same way that people push literature by religious minorities away, because that is the agenda right now.
2. What are some of the challenges faced by independent presses in terms of financing?
It is a fragile existence, but it is the kind of existence we have chosen. It’s always been a fine balance, because we cannot pay advances to authors like other publishers can. That means you won’t get the authors you want to publish, and the authors you do publish will not sell in large quantities because they are not mainstream. Money is not the only thing, our focus is to keep doing what we want to do, even if we have to do a little bit of jugaad to get there. We will do one big consultancy which will be enough to cover our employee’s salaries for a year. It’s the way women function, balancing many things at once.
Publishing is not a straightforward enterprise for us, it is a political project. The process of keeping Zubaan alive is a process of publishing voices from the margins and trying to build a workforce that is diverse, inclusive, and not exploitative.
When you do this kind of work, there are difficult concerns, concerns which I am facing now, about the longevity and sustainability of this work. If you can’t live forever, your only choice is to sell to a larger publisher, and if you don’t want to do that, then you have to understand that the many works you have published are not going anywhere, and that maybe your task is over. That is the stage I am at right now as the founder of Zubaan. The demise of this publishing house is part of a larger movement, and disappearing off the map of publishing does not mean that the work we created was meaningless.
ADVICE FOR THE FUTURE
1. What are the Do’s and Don’t of distribution when starting an independent press?
It’s very difficult to get distributors when you start. Even when you are reasonably well-established, distributors want size and scale. Distributors want expensively priced books so that they can sell one book and earn lots of money, which makes it hard to price books reasonably.
In the beginning, we did all the work ourselves. We would pack the books, take it to different places, ask friends to sell it, sell a set of 10 copies to people at a discount and more. In terms of what books to publish, you need to make sure that your first few books are remarkable, so that you are taken seriously, because there will always be people who want to be published.
Selling on platforms like Amazon and others works because it is direct selling. These days with social media, you can create enough buzz on all the platforms to convince people to buy your book. You can also start your own website to sell from. To do that efficiently you will need a certain volume of books coming through every year, and a payment gateway which can help you manage the finances.
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