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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Essay |
Shelf Life
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| A personal history of the Oxford University Press India at 100 |
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Published : 1 February 2012 |
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BIPLAB MUZIBAR RAHAMAN / DELHI PRESS IMAGES |
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| I |
N THE 1990s, I spent many weeks in what must be, or at any rate should be, every Indian’s favourite city—Bombay, a city whose depth of history and richly lived (and intensely felt) cosmopolitanism is in such stark contrast to the even-tempered blandness of my own home town, Bangalore. I would go there twice a year, in February and November, and book myself |
a room in the Cricket Club of India. Every morning, I would walk across the Oval Maidan, dodging joggers and the odd flying cricket ball, and then skirt round the High Court to the side entrance to Elphinstone College, where, after climbing a staircase stinking with piss, I would arrive at the reading room of the Maharashtra State Archives. Three or four hours of work in the files was a reward in itself, though I often gave myself the further bonus of a Rajasthani thali at Chetana restaurant before returning for some more digging.
In those days, the Maharashtra State Archives were moderately well run (I remember in particular an experienced hand named Lad), and their collections were very rich indeed. Still, my warmest memories of research in Bombay are linked to a private archive that lay down the road, in Apollo Bunder off Colaba Causeway. This archive was housed in the third (and top) floor of a sturdy, stone building owned by the Indian Branch of the Oxford University Press (OUP), the world’s oldest (and greatest) publisher.
A British historian once said that being published by the Oxford University Press was like being married to a duchess—the honour was greater than the pleasure. My experience was otherwise. Not long before I began working in their archives, the OUP had published my first book. As scholarly books go, it was a work of art—set, using hot metal type, in an elegant Baskerville by the legendary PK Ghosh of Eastend Printers, Calcutta. The cover was arresting—a photograph by Sanjeev Saith of a Himalayan oak forest cut up by the designer to represent the ‘unquiet woods’ that the book documented. The prose inside, jargon-ridden and solemnly sociological in its original incarnation, had been rendered moderately serviceable by the intense (and inspired) labours of the book’s editor, a young scholar with a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge.
To enter the Bombay office of the OUP in 1993 and 1994 was, for me, like entering an ancient club of which I was a privileged new member. The honour was manifest, but so also the pleasure. In the foyer were displayed the works of the best Indian sociologists and historians—André Béteille’s The Idea of Natural Inequality, Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy, Irfan Habib’s An Atlas of the Mughal Empire. Also on display were the works of OUP authors who were not Indian, among them such colossally influential scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Dworkin and HLA Hart. The gentry and literati of Bombay came to this showroom, and I spent some time there myself. But my main work lay upstairs, where, in a locked cupboard, lay the correspondence between a writer whose life I was writing and a publisher who had once dominated the building in which I now sat.
This writer and his publisher were both Englishmen who had gone native. They were expatriates of standing who knew, or knew of, the most powerful Indians of the day. Their own relationship was personal as well as professional. They were (as in those days writer and publisher sometimes could be) really close friends. In their correspondence they discussed books, but also food, music, politics and, occasionally, sex. Their letters were sometimes businesslike, at other times warm and gossip-laden. Reading them, 50 or 60 years after they were written, was an exhilarating experience.
Occasionally, hearing me chuckle or gasp, the occupant of the next cabin would come to have a look. Named Rivka Israel, she was a senior editor at the OUP, and the person who was in charge of—and lovingly tended—the archive. (She came from a family of Bombay Jews who made their living as craftsmen of learning—her father, Samuel Israel, had been an admired editor himself.) Rivka, in turn, would sometimes call in the branch manager, a cheerful Gujarati named Ramesh Patel, and have me read out once more that passage about, for example, life with Gandhi’s “sexless and joyless entourage”.
A historian’s happiest days are always in the archives. In the case of this now somewhat elderly historian, the days have accumulated into years. Yet of all these days and years, the weeks in the OUP archive in Bombay may have given me the most joy. The letters I found there were, for my purposes, infinitely rewarding; but the real pleasure (and honour) lay elsewhere, in seeing (and sensing) oneself as being part of a great, continuous, scholarly tradition; a freshly-minted OUP author enters a building that stocks the works of the greatest OUP authors to work on the letters of a long-dead OUP author—all for a book that would one day be published by the OUP itself.
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HIS YEAR, 2012, marks the centenary of OUP in India. In the history of the press, two men stand out: one white, the other brown. In 1930 an Oxford graduate named Roy Ernest Hawkins came to teach in a school in Delhi. The school closed down during the noncooperation movement, so Hawkins found a job with the OUP in Bombay instead. In 1937 he |
was appointed general manager. By now he wore khadi, though this may have been a mark of gratitude rather than an affirmation of political solidarity; by closing down that school in Delhi, the Gandhians had given him a new life.
When Hawkins became general manager, the Indian Branch of the Oxford University Press had been in existence for a quarter of a century. In its first year, 1912, it published the first book of a then obscure academic: S Radhakrishnan’s Essentials of Psychology. However—as described by Rimi B Chatterjee in her history of OUP India’s early years, Empires of the Mind—the branch was viewed by Oxford as more vendor than publisher. It was set up chiefly to sell textbooks written by Englishmen in England and prescribed by the Raj for schools and colleges in the subcontinent. Sensing the mood, Radhakrishnan himself soon moved to another publisher, Allen & Unwin.
Under Hawkins, the OUP continued to make its money selling textbooks. However, this Englishman recognised that some Indians were now producing serious works of scholarship. He published a few such—A Appadorai’s The Substance of Politics, Asaf AA Fyzee’s Outlines of Muhammadan Law and, most notably, KA Nilakanta Sastri’s A History of South India, which, 70 years later, is still in print and still indispensable.
| COURTESY THE HIMALAYAN CLUB |
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RE Hawkins, affectionately known as the ‘Hawk’, set new
standards of editing and publishing while at the OUP from the
1937-70. |
While not averse to intellectuals, Hawkins’ real interests lay elsewhere, in nature and natural history. The three authors he most enjoyed publishing were the ornithologist Salim Ali, the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, and the hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett. Their writings gave him much pleasure, and their books made the OUP a good deal of money. (None more so that the books by Corbett—Man-Eaters of Kumaon was bought by the American Book of the Month of Club, whose first print run of 250,000 sold out within weeks. Commissioned by Hawkins, this book was translated into 27 languages, and was even made into a Hollywood film, of which Corbett commented that “the best actor was the tiger”.)
In the 1940s and 1950s, Bombay was the intellectual capital of India. It had the country’s best social scientists, and its only decent English-language poets and writers. In this literary culture, an Englishman known affectionately as the ‘Hawk’ set new standards of editing and publishing. The writer Laeeq Futehally, working at that time with the magazine Quest, remembers that when they had to choose a printer, they settled on Inland Press, “for it was also patronised by the Oxford University Press, whose General Manager, RE Hawkins—in spite of having only one functioning eye—was known to be the best editor and proofreader in South East (sic) Asia”.
The books published by Hawkins were carefully edited, rigorously proofread and often beautifully produced. In the works of his favourite authors, words and pictures were exquisitely matched. No books produced in India before or since match, in this respect, such gems as Verrier Elwin’s The Tribal Art of Middle India and Salim Ali’s Indian Hill Birds.
Hawkins retired from the OUP in 1970. Five years later, he was present when the 10th and final volume of the Handbook of Indian Birds was released in the presence of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Asked to speak, the Hawk read out the following verse:
William Shakespeare’s a master of words
And a tusker a leader of herds
But wherever you fare
Over land, sea or air
Salim Ali’s the raja of birds
In his last years as general manager, Hawkins was assisted by two gifted young Indians. Girish Karnad was a mathematician by training and a playwright by temperament. Ravi Dayal was a history scholar who had read widely in the social sciences. After seven years in the press, Karnad left to make a career in films. Dayal stayed on, and in 1971 moved to Delhi to start a branch of the OUP there. Meanwhile, Hawkins was succeeded as general manager by Charles Lewis, a gentle, understated Englishman with an effervescent and politically active Indian wife. In 1975, the Emergency was promulgated, and Mrs Lewis was put in jail by Indira Gandhi’s police. The OUP thought it best now to move Lewis back to Oxford.
Appointed general manager in place of Lewis, Ravi Dayal shifted the head office of the OUP to New Delhi. The city was beginning to replace Bombay as the intellectual capital of India. An air of self-confidence was abroad. Scholars in the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University thought they were among the best in the world. Some certainly were—such as the sociologists MN Srinivas and André Béteille, the historians Sarvepalli Gopal and Romila Thapar, the economists Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Kaushik Basu, and the unclassifiable social scientist and social critic Ashis Nandy.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Arijit
4 May 2012
01:33 PM
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I liked it. Having worked for OUP 15 years back, and having worked with stalwarts like Rukun and Anita Roy, it brought back fond memories.
(And Guha isn't a Bengali, he is originally Gohain, a Tamil Brahmin, if I know right. It was when he studied in Calcutta that he changed his surname to a Bengali-sounding one. So, being a Tamilian settled in Karnataka, he has the liberty of making that comment. Had it come from a Bengali, it would have sounded pompous, IMHO.)
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Poisoninvy
10 March 2012
02:36 AM
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A distressingly boring memoir where the 'author' has been at pains to bring us into his proustian memories, when in fact he should be focused on the future rather than the past. This is a distressingly self-indigent piece of writing shedding no light on the issues it attempts to discus.
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Martin Pick
8 March 2012
04:40 PM
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For me a very moving piece of my own history, having started as an apprentice editor under Hawk and Ravi in Bombay in 1967. Both men remained mentors for me for the rest of their lives, and in 1998 I spent an enjoyable week in that same archive in the Bombay office of OUP researching Hawkins' publishing life. Someone needs to write a proper book about Hawkins as a publisher.OUP never did him justice, just as they have never recognized the real contribution of Ravi Dayal.
I never imagined that the archives could have been lost; that is a tragedy, but perhaps some of them will turn up in Delhi, where I thought the Corbett material had been taken by Ravi at some stage.
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Ashish
15 February 2012
02:12 PM
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Extremely poorly written piece;on a topic that is not really interesting; i couldt complete the piece; the writer couldnot hold me ; that is the worst thing you can say about a long form piece; Sounds more like a personal piece full of hubris; also the aglophile disdain is apparent in the piece;guha is writing for foreigners ; alas caravan is becoming an india magazine for foreign readers..Alas
(Not sure if they accept critical comments but still lets see)
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Soundararajan Srinivasa
4 February 2012
10:51 PM
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After a long time, I had a good read. Ramachandra Guha, as Alexander Morrison put it, is elegant, intelligent and is also forthcoming, all the more elegantly. Incidentally, it is decades since I had browsed Caravan.
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Nalin Chauhan
2 February 2012
10:56 PM
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GOOD ONE.
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MANISH BANERJEE
1 February 2012
05:19 PM
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Though Guha in my view is not a scholar who goes deep enough & is rather facile historian but I think his his chatty style once in a while produces eminently readable essays. This one is one of them . Since this article is on rather current issue informations about the OUP is very interesting.
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Wm Hogg
31 January 2012
08:30 PM
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The content (historical-political) is fascinating. The context (style of writing) lazily amusing.
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G Krishnamurthy
31 January 2012
07:45 PM
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What a wonderful article! It really puts the history and the current tribulations of Oxford University Press in perspective.
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Alexander Morrison
31 January 2012
06:45 PM
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Guha proves yet again that he is the most elegant and intelligent of Indian historians writing today. This really makes me feel I missed the boat by being born thirty years too late. Academic publishing is not what it was, and OUP UK haven't matched the standards set in India by Dayal for many years now.
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AK
31 January 2012
12:18 PM
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@ Tiyash
Me thinks you people are judging Guha a bit harshly with his comment on "literate Bengali". The context does not warrant your criticism.
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Ramesh Raghuvanshi
31 January 2012
10:55 AM
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Had Guha not heard government changed nameof city as a Mumbai?Are he donot want to forget his Anglo.phile psyche?Is he intentionly writing Bobay in his eassy?
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cantordust
29 January 2012
12:21 PM
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curiously enough, there is no mention of Permanent Black! as is widely known, The Subaltern Studies series in no longer with OUP
you would expect that there would be some reflection on the current state of academic publication in india - or the relationship between other university presses and OUP - or the entire concept of an university press - but finally you get the sense that its not really a essay in that sense, but more of an extended personal memoir.
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Supriya
28 January 2012
07:56 PM
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It would be regional chauvinism if Ramachandra Guha were himself a Bengali. As he is, in fact, a Tamil, you could simply regard it as a perhaps misplaced compliment.
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Tiyash
28 January 2012
02:32 PM
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Are my eyes giving up on me in my old age, or has Guha really written the following "Perhaps because Bengalis were disproportionately represented, the production and marketing staff of the OUP were also extremely literate…" Does this mean, by implication, that other parts of India did not produce literate, intelligent, or book-loving folks? While I generally enjoy Guha's writings, this is honestly carrying regional chauvinism to the extreme.
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