'Keep at It' - Naveen Kishore : Seagull Books

Guest for this Episode is Naveen Kishore, Founder and MD of Seagull Books. Born in Calcutta Naveen Kishore received graduation in English Literature in 1973, and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing program focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature including poetry, fiction non-fiction and English translations from 25 languages.At present, the company has registered divisions in London  New York and calcutta.

In 1987 Kishore established The Seagull Foundation for the Arts and set up The Seagull School of Publishing in 2012.

Kishore is a photographer who has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. Kishore exhibited his work at Chatterjee & Lal in Bombay in the exhibition Greenroom of the Goddess.

Kishore is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, and was awarded the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

Kishore has had his poems published with Scroll.in, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, RIC Journal, Poetry at Sangam, Sylph Editions, amongst others.

Transcription:

Harshaneeyam: Welcome to our podcast. So nice of you to agree and come over to our podcast. Thank you very much.

Naveen Kishore: Thank you for having me.

H: You were interested in theatre initially during your school days and college days. How did it lead to publishing?

N: The theatre actually happened at school, everybody does theatre in school, so that was okay, but then I think it was in college that I really tasted blood, as it were, as far as theatre is concerned. But I remember there was a theatre group called the Red Curtain, which was essentially made up of young people from different colleges who had left school, started a theatre group as the school leavers. They started to do amateur theatre, but with great quality, aesthetic, style, production values. When I joined them, I was a backstage person. My first theatre experience was a play called Wait Until Dark, where I used to sit behind a refrigerator with a small cassette recorder. And every time the blind leading lady opened the fridge, I would have to put on the duct to create the sound of the machine and synchronize it with her shutting it. And at one point in this thriller, which was also a good film, this blind woman is trying to smash all the bulbs because she is going to be attacked by these two people. And I have to synchronize the swinging of her sort of stick to the bulbs and simulate a crash in a waste-paper basket with old bulbs and metal brass. This was my first beginning.

H: Sounds too complicated.

N: It was good fun. You were assisting backstage and then, immediately, you were plunged into the deep end. The next play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. The Red Curtain was a very democratic set up, so they said: You design the sets and light. I knew nothing about it, but the British Council Library was very useful, so I used to go and study lighting-design books. But at that point, I was playing by the rules, where I was lighting your face as an actor at 45 degrees. But I was frustrated because I couldn’t achieve darkness, so that was a disaster.

I made a mess of it, I think. But for the next play I designed, Ibsen’s Ghosts, I think I threw the rule book out of the window and I started to light the air around the actors. In real life, you’re not lit well. You could go in and out of shadows.

So I became a lighting design person and what often happens in India is that sometimes life turns your hobbies into a livelihood. My father lost a job very early in life. I had to start to be the support and I turned to lighting design and discovered people were willing to pay me, but there was never enough money in theatre. So I started to become what you and I now call event managers. I presented everybody from Yamini Krishnamurthy to Birju Maharaj to Begum Akhtar, jazz festivals, theatre, dance. All of this fed into the theatre, and over a 10–12 year period, there came a moment when we felt the need to document things.

The word document came into my sort of lexicon, as it were, and I turned to a very dear, much older, wiser, scholarly being, Samik Banerjee, who was then an editor at Oxford University Press. And he used to edit and publish for them, people like Girish Karnad and Badal Sircar and the early plays. They had a series called New Drama in India. I was airing my frustration about how the ephemeral nature of a certain kind of theatre activity would disappear because there was no way of freezing it, and I didn’t have the words, so Samik said: Publishing.

If a publisher is devoted to the theatre, the arts, the media, the visual, the cinema, and not worried about feeding 400 mouths like Oxford is, where you cannot survive off the slow-selling niche publishing, you have to do other things. I liked the idea, I said to him, ‘I don’t have a clear sense of scale and I don’t have the money, but we have a name, we already exist as Seagull, so Seagull Books, one more bird publisher.’ And that’s literally how it started.

H: I thought the name refers to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

N: No, unfortunately, no, because the name Seagull actually came, as you may have read or heard, from a rock concert I had done in 1972 which was called Seagull Empire. And we used to present everything as Seagull. Anyway, so we decided to start this literally overnight, and I learned on the job. I was lucky that I fell into the hands of this wonderful editor mentor and founding editor of Seagull, Samik Banerjee. But we both fell into the hands of an even more interesting printer, a man called P. K. Ghosh—Prabhat Kumar Ghosh—of a legendary letterpress house called East End Printers. He was a very interesting printer because he would not say yes to a book unless he’d read the manuscript. So if you and I as colleagues went to him with a book, he would say, ‘Leave it with me, let me read it.’ He would then discourage you and say, but ‘I’m so expensive, why do you want to come to me?’ Once he accepted your book, he would have discussions with you after you had copyedited it, and discuss books. He was actually an editorial mind. And I learnt from him, literally I had no experience. But what I had was a kind of theatrical aesthetic, if you like. When you look back, you can find words for it. And instinctively, in a publishing culture in India, which was very suspect in the eyes of the rest of the world, where people always felt we had shoddy binding, terrible lamination, cheap, it’s like we couldn’t do it. But that was not the case, really, because I found there was good paper available, there were good binders available, there was good everything available. It was intent. 

But good literature needs to be well produced. You need the touch and feel of something material. So I instinctively gave this printer, P. K. Ghosh, the best of paper, the best grammage for cover colours. There were blocks made in those days. And he immediately understood what I was instinctively doing. In an environment with the same paper merchants and block makers that, say, Oxford use, I was able to produce better looking books because the intention was there and I’d had no sense of scale. We had started this company with borrowed money from a bank and we learned very quickly. I’ll jump a little here. In independent or any publishing, you do not publish one book and then say, I’m going to sell this, then the money that comes in will produce the second book.

No. The world, and particularly the world of publishing, distribution, book selling, demands that you make your presence felt by consistently bringing out books. It can be two books a year, can be six, can be sixty, that’s not the issue. The issue is that your distributor, as well as the chain that goes all the way to the bookseller and the book buyer, simply wants to be assured that you’re going to keep producing, it’s not a fly by night thing.

Where you do it from, how you do it, is a different issue, you build up a list, or what we used to call a backlist, which is the spine of any good publisher. Because, the nature of the publishing was very serious, after all, what were we doing? We were translating from different languages, Telugu or Tamil or Marathi or Bengali or Hindi, into English.

Not because we thought everybody would run around performing all these plays in English, but English was the link language, where you, sitting in Hyderabad, could translate something from Manipur, because you read it in English. I thought I’ll go to the original and translate. Retrospectively, it took 30 years of this before these books started to become texts. These are all texts now. At that moment it was just the excitement. Nobody had done it before and you did it. There was a very exciting cinema movement at that time. Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, so you were documenting this. There was a 10-year period of very rich cinema that you would know. We started to do the screenplays. So that’s how the early Seagull started. There are other aspects of it, but they will come a time later: it took us a long time to build a backlist. In the back list, what happens is that you sell small numbers across that and then your economics work out. It’s not the success of one book. And we learned very early again on the job that sometimes, let us say, Satyajit Ray screenplays of the Apu Trilogy could sell 5,000 copies, but maybe Jabbar Patel’s The Threshold could only sell 500. So you learnt cross-subsidizing, which is actually a negative word in today’s publishing.

Today’s publishing wants every book to be a profit centre. What is known as a profit and loss management, PLM. So editors like you and me, when we are pitching something to our bosses in a publishing environment of a large house, we have to prove how much the book we are commissioning can sell. This is it. So you need to work that out. It’s impossible for anybody to do this, because no amount of market search will teach you how. Eventually, that book buyer is going to absorb what you have put out. What you put out may be half a dozen or twenty people’s excitement in your publishing house, but you don’t know that will translate into two thousand or twenty thousand people, right?

It’s a chance you take. You can’t predict whether the emotional truth of readers will be in sync with what you’ve published. It’s hard to make it a profit-and-loss matter. The same is true for other media. The Anand Bazaar Group in Calcutta that we’ve always grown up with, they used to have a lovely magazine, a literature magazine called Desh, but then there came a time when that literary magazine had to change its content because it was asked to become a profit centre, even when there are other magazines and papers around it which are capable of funding it. That’s the important thing. Even now, we’ve kept that principle in Seagull (this is our 42nd year) where it’s always a handful of books that fund a lot of the other books. It’s cash flow, right? It’s not about whether every book must make a profit or a loss. 

The other jump would happen in 2005, which had to do with the politics of one’s geographical location. Here you are in India for X number of years, maybe over two decades, doing these wonderful books, which everybody’s loving. The community of publishers also loves you. They don’t find you competitive because you’re publishing in a very serious niche. And so everyone’s showing you off to the world as it were.

But even now after 75 years of Independence, the English-speaking West expects Indian publishers to buy the right to sell within our country or our subcontinent, right? Whereas we felt at that point, when the word globalization hadn’t totally lost its meaning, that in a globalized world we should be able to be anywhere, it doesn’t matter, our location is not important. When I do good-looking books and my money is the same as yours, why should I just buy rights for India when I can buy rights for the world? So we experimented and set up Seagull Books London Limited. And the whole political twist to that was that we were just a tax-paying entity, based in England. Your location changes. You’re no longer in a black hole called Calcutta. So suddenly you’re a UK-based company. And suddenly everybody wants to distribute you because you’re doing good-looking books, so that was an amusing thing for us, that kind of a thing. But we also told ourselves that in the beginning we would be a registered, independent, tax-paying publishing house, not a branch or anything, just incorporated in Great Britain. And we would deal with the world. We would buy world rights. And we are distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The idea was to not spend money on infrastructure, but to have staff and offices. In any case, most British publishers are outsourcing production to other countries. You’re typesetting in Pondicherry or Chennai, you’re publishing in Korea or Hong Kong or China. So we said we have infrastructure in Calcutta. That becomes a servicing thing. So that experiment is over 500 books old. We own world rights to the books. We are distributed by University of Chicago Press. At that point, we had to take a decision on what the content would be—you’re going from a certain Indian theatre, cinema, culture studies into something more international on which the Indian end would ride piggyback eventually. But at that point, we were into translations. We turned to Europe. You have to understand, at that point, the world, the English-speaking world, let us say, was not encouraging translated literature. It had disappeared. When I was growing up, it was there. In the 70s, late 60s, early 80s, India was full of it because somebody was doing it.

And then, later, in their wisdom, the American publishing houses and the British ones felt that perhaps translation does not sell enough for them to meet their numbers. So it slowly disappeared. I’m talking about the English world everywhere. Because the chain effect is – How were books getting to India, you have to understand. A handful of importers, distributors in Daryaganj and in Calcutta, old man Rupa, who was a legendary figure who started Rupa, used to import some of the best books, because they were being done, so he could choose and he could bring in literature. But when it stopped happening, it was difficult to do that.

So when I turned to European literature in translation in 2005, I remembered it was going to be 100 years of Jean Paul Sartre. I went to Gallimard and asked for various Sartre volumes. There was great confusion as to why would you want to do this for India? And, it was interesting because it took us a while to explain that we wanted world rights for a French writer called Jean Paul Sartre. And that we were going to translate, not sitting in New Delhi at two rupees a word with some commercial translator who does business letters for consulates, but the person who usually translates Sartre. And we went to Christina. And we paid in those days 70 pounds per 1000 words. That was the rate then set by the UK Translators Association.

So you were learning that you had to get the best of everything, to get the quality, to make a name. And once they were convinced, and the first books came out, it opened a floodgate, because then you could show they are distributed, they are reaching America, they are reaching New Zealand, and they’re reaching Australia through Chicago’s network. But what was interesting at that moment in time was that when the Americans bought rights from the French, or the Germans, or the Italians, they would often buy just for the US and Canada. The UK would buy just for the UK. Some of them would buy for the world, but they could never get to India because their pricing didn’t work. I was offering them India as a given at a subsidized rate, we were letting the dollar market subsidize the rupee thing. And I was giving them America and Australia and everything, using their own systems of distribution. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but that’s the magic of theatre.

You make something look like it is very simple. But it is exciting, and you have to remember that the nature of independent publishing is precarious worldwide. It’s not just Seagull. It’s everybody, there are some wonderful independent publishers in this country. And there are some wonderful independent publishers in the rest of the world that we admire and respect, and they all have to be on their toes constantly. It is a tightrope act. You’re juggling resources, but you’re not giving in to a certain kind of philosophy that says, we actually wish to publish this kind of serious literature, but to make that possible we have to do 70 percent of something else. It doesn’t work. I think you should rather accept the fact that we are going to do 70 percent of what brings in the money and 30 percent of something else. It’s okay. But you don’t fool yourself. Or you have to do what a lot of independents like us do, which is: You somehow persist with just a wish list of what you feel needs to be published, right?

Eventually the market has a way of finding its way to you if you build enough pressure. So when you have a corpus of 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 books over, they get noticed. It takes that kind of patient persistence to be able to get noticed in today’s difficult publishing environment. And the other thing that is often asked is, are you threatened? In the old days we were asked, are you threatened by the Ebook? Are you threatened by this? I used to sometimes joke and say, where’s the time to be threatened? One would say that we like producing the book as an object, but we do it by using the very technology that you claim is threatening us. We do Ebooks. It’s useful. And we do it not necessarily as a revenue earner, so much as a reinvention. You’re the author. You’re alive. We owe it to you to keep your book from disappearing because in today’s world, the way distribution works, every season, every six months, your book becomes history and something else is replaced. So here you do a hardback. A bunch of sales people from Chicago promote it. Six months later, it disappears. You do other hardbacks. Then 18 months later, you bring back this book as a paperback. So they push it again for another six months. You bring in the Ebook simultaneously. Now, we’re turning our entire list into audiobooks. So what you’re doing is what publishers are meant to do. If you’re a dead author, it’s even more interesting. We handle the estates of Mahashweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya, her son. And we keep reinventing, you’re doing paperback, hardback, new editions, sometimes new translations, sometimes pairing books together, the whole idea is to keep it new. You don’t want a dead archive of a backlist, you want books that are continuous and therefore you have to embrace the technology. If the young people are listening to Spotify, put the audio book onto Spotify. It’s perfectly all right. It brings them to the book...