Sunday December 30, 2007
Finding his own stride
By SHARON BAKAR
The man who made Penguin India a name to be reckoned with in the publishing industry shares his thoughts on his own new novel and what it takes to get a book published nowadays.
THE list of authors David Davidar has either edited or published reads like a who’s who of literature’s brightest and best, and certainly includes a large proportion of my favourite authors.
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All you need is talent and discipline, advises David Davidar, who has published some of the biggest names in the trade. |
“Sure, there’re all these horror stories of neglected geniuses and so on, but they’re exaggerated.
“There are some very good publishers in the world and if there’s a great book, it will be published, it will be noticed. So I can’t claim to have discovered them, it would have happened regardless.
“All you can do is provide an opportunity to get their work out to a readership. And if it isn’t you publishing the work, it would be somebody else, if one is being absolutely honest.”
He stresses the need for a publisher to build a quality list of authors.
“Writers like to keep company, they don’t want to be published in a list that is mediocre or not ‘quite there’. Your imprint is only as good as the writers it publishes.
“And you have to be consistent, and you have to keep finding new talent to add to the list. That I think is something that distinguishes some publishers from the rest.”
A few years ago, Indian writers seemed to be taking over the world. Does he think that this trend has now levelled off?
“I think it’s always a losing game if you’re trying to follow a trend, as the trend is always moving faster than you can publish books to keep up.
“You should always try to be slightly ahead of a trend and wait for the trend to catch up and you can do that by just going back to the most basic rule of publishing – find a great book and publish it as well as you can.
“Indian writing has now become part of the mainstream,” he says.
“My greatest joy was having been there at the inception when it was all starting off. (Publisher) Penguin was just slightly ahead of the curve, and some of the names you can conjure with were just starting out. The company’s grown with them.
“But today there are writers from all over the world, Somalia, Thailand Botswana – the world is hungry for stories, you know.
“It doesn’t matter what the author’s nationality, race or religion is.
“And all you need is talent, and the discipline to produce good work and you’ll find publishers wherever you are.”
But not necessarily a fortune it seems, for he reckons, “Only about 1% of the world’s writers make a living from it.”
Davidar also made the transition from publisher to author with his first novel, The House of Blue Mangoes in 2002 and he recently published The Solitude of Emperors.
Was it a difficult moving from one role to the other?
Davidar says that he actually wrote his first novel when he was about 20. He says now that he’s glad it was never published and takes pleasure in quoting Salman Rushdie’s maxim that, “Every novelist should have a first novel that is burned or put in a drawer,” so that a writer carves for themselves the space to learn the craft of writing and gets beyond the biographical elements.
He wrote his new novel, he says, because of a compelling need to join the discourse on the misuse of religion. Solitude is a very personal search for answers about one of the most pressing issues of our time.
He wanted to look at India, and to examine how a country of so many faiths can cohere. He was interested in what could be learned from India’s past.
“All the lessons are there: the problem is not new,” he says.
He weaves into the narrative essays about three of India’s greatest leaders: Mahatma Gandhi, Shahenshah Akbar and Ashoka.
“Any country that has 5,000 or 6,000 years of history like India has a plethora of heroes. But I wanted to have people from different religions, and I think if you polled most Indians nobody would object to the fact that these are probably three of the greatest ever Indians.”
He also wanted to explore the idea of good versus bad religious faith.
“It struck me that the only people who manage to find solutions were those who used religion to find the answer to the misuse of religion.
“I found that the strident secularists were as fundamentalist in their views as the fundamentalists they were condemning.
“And I was interested that a lot of religious fundamentalists were often quite modern men who used religion as a means to an end and were not religious in the strictest sense of the word, meaning spiritual.”
Davidar cites novelists George Orwell and J.M. Coetzee as major influences on The Solitude of Emperors, authors who were able to combine compelling narrative with political insights.
And like them, he has aimed for a pared down prose which he describes as “stripped down, very straightforward”.
I can’t resist asking him whether some of those great writers he’s published were sitting on his shoulders when he was writing?
“If you are worshipful of someone else, you would never be able to do your own thing. There are authors who propel you forward into the writing game, but then you find your own stride.”
With a third novel in preparation, which Davidar promises will be “more normal” than The Solitude of Emperors, he certainly seems to have found his stride as an author, even though he still finds it necessary to strictly compartmentalise his time.
As he says, he just can’t afford to think like a publisher when he writes!
Related Stories:
Davidar in a nutshell
Great first, lukewarm second
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