When we would go abroad, people would talk in terms of a million copies. We said, we did not print a million at a time, but we did manage half a million. In the 2012 interview, Dina Nath Malhotra, the founder, publisher, and editor of Hind Pocket Books, looks visibly frail with age. In a barely audible yet measured voice, Malhotra recalls his company’s unprecedented massive print runs and successes, also recounting the time when he first commissioned such a print run.
In the early 1970s, Malhotra’s friends and other publishers would often talk about an extremely prolific and wildly popular romance fiction writer named Gulshan Nanda. During a road trip, giving into curiosity, Malhotra decided to read one of Nanda’s novels put out by another publishing house. By the end of the trip (and of the novel), Malhotra had decided to publish Nanda. Jhil ke us Par (Across the lake), published in 1972, is the novel that holds the distinction of having been published with a first print run of half a million copies, a figure unprecedented in the history of Hindi publishing. The novel ultimately sold twice that number.
This chapter focuses on the beginnings of the Hind Pocket Books success story: it returns to 1957, the year it all began. I examine the first paperbacks produced in Hindi, which, at their initial cost of one rupee each, were priced the same as Sarita. The story of Hind Pocket Books is significant for several reasons. First, it was extraordinarily successful. Second, the genres it published further contextualize the preoccupations of the post-independence Hindi-speaking middlebrow readership. The genres on offer were many. Printed at the back page of one of the paperbacks, an advertisement enumerates some of them:
Books from writers famous both at home and abroad—Hind Pocket Books publishes novel[s] [upanyas], short stor[ies] [kahani], poetry [kavita], plays [natak], Urdu poetry [urdu shayari], scientific knowledge [gyan-vigyan], comedy and satire [hasya-vyangya], health [svasthya], “useful for women” [stri-upyogi], and “useful for life” [jivan upyogi]. Hind Pocket Books is famous throughout India for its writers of the highest standards [uchcha koti ke lekhakon], attractive getup [akarshak getup], beautiful printing [sundar chhapai], and cheap rates. Every book is just priced at one rupee.
Hind Pocket Books published even more genres than those given above. Fiction included melodramatic social novels, Progressive social satires, literary classics written in both Indian and foreign languages; poetry comprised both Urdu and Hindi high literary poetry and film songs; nonfiction ranged from household management literature and self-help to political treatises; and, finally, manuals and guides included topics like health and first aid. However, the books were also curated through notable exclusions. Genres such as detective fiction, horror, thriller, and pornography were not included. Also not included were other popular genres such as patriotic novels and poetry, popular wedding songs, folk songs, and seasonal songs.
This middle ground, where the publisher provided a variety of genres with clear exclusions of some prominent lowbrow categories, as well as some acceptable but deemed unnecessary-for-consumption genres such as nationalist writing and folk songs, again created a middlebrow space. This choice of genres, along with several standardization decisions in terms of pricing, branding, and circulation of the books, comprises the first half of this chapter, where I examine what Dina Nath Malhotra termed a “paperback revolution” ushered in by Hind Pocket Books, where the large print runs, cheap print technology, and paper quality contributed to the burgeoning middlebrow consumer of the years following India’s independence.
What Malhotra rightly called a “paperback revolution” also owed its success to one of its highly successful circulation schemes called the Gharelu Library Yojana, or the Home Library Scheme. Hind Pocket Book paperbacks were available at cheap prices at time-tested and commercially viable points of distribution such as railway stations and roadside pavements, yet the publisher also adopted a third distribution model, that of the Gharelu Library Yojana, where books in a range of fiction and nonfiction genres were delivered directly to readers’ homes every month, a proposition made sweeter by offering six books for the price of five.
This scheme led to three pivotal results: First, given its inexpensive pricing, targeted branding, and, most importantly, easy reach for consumers, the scheme firmly enshrined Hind Pocket Books into the everyday, domestic middlebrow economy. In other words, the scheme was substantively responsible for enforcing and ensuring what I call an everyday “repeatable” reading habit: a variety of books were delivered home every month, a variety of books were read. Second, again uniquely, the scheme famously mixed into one bundle its numerous genres and authors established elsewhere as “high” literary and ones that were “not.”
In this way, the everyday repeatable reading habit developed a robust palate: books cut across genres, concerns, and demarcations of “good” and “not quite so good” literature. Lastly, and closely linked to the second feature, was the scheme’s other unique attribute: readers did not choose books but instead read titles that Hind Pocket Books had curated and made available for that month. The everyday “repeatable” reading habit solidified here on a consensus about taste: because these books were approved by Hind Pocket Books, they must surely be worth reading. Through this method, Hind Pocket Books made its range of curated genres not only aspirational or desirable but also habitual for its sizable readership.
Indeed, through this system, Hind Pocket Books not only expanded or defined a variety of new reading genres but also actively suggested, even encouraged this eclectic reading. Through its Home Library Scheme, a canonical novel by Rabindranath Tagore came home in the same reading bundle alongside a biting social satire by Krishan Chander. A songbook based on the theme of romance accompanied an autobiography of Nehru.
These selections created a wide-ranging and eclectic library at home. And repeated subscriptions to the Home Library Scheme were an important component that kept Hind Pocket Books’ printing and publishing expenses low, which then enabled it to procure a variety of genres and, in turn, ensured continuation of this varied reading list. Also important was the very successful efforts of Hind Pocket Books at book branding. Given the uniformity in size and design of the book cover, the Hind Pocket Books brand came to be identified as much as and, in many cases, even more than the title or the author’s name on the cover.
The emphasis on branding the series emerges largely from Dina Nath Malhotra’s own focus on his role as a conscious publisher-editor. Therefore, a substantive part of the chapter investigates Malhotra’s “self ” and how he projected himself as a pathbreaking visionary responsible for creating a middlebrow publishing space for a burgeoning reading market. At the same time, self-fashioning efforts can often be deceptive, and I do not aim to read them at face value. In fact, members of the Malhotra family tell different stories about this publishing legacy.
However, his self-canonization makes Malhotra’s presence felt throughout our discussions of Hind Pocket Books. Although Hindi literary histories of the twentieth century provide us with examples of visionary writers, critics, and editors who understood their role emphatically in relation to the literariness of the language and literature and its often nationalist goals and connections, Malhotra’s project and projection interrogated none of these questions.
Reminiscent of the service of his contemporary Vishwa Nath to readers (pathako ki seva), discussed in chapter one, Malhotra’s first goal focused on how to make the book reach its reader. In this, the role of the publisher-editor was paramount. At the peak of the Home Library Scheme, Hind Pocket Books counted around six hundred thousand subscribers, and forty thousand packets were delivered monthly out of the publisher’s own premises through a post office setup in the compound.
This excerpt from ‘Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and The North Indian Middle Class’ by Aakriti Mandhwani has been published with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.
This post was originally published on here
