How a university press built its list, was shut down by the pandemic and a cyclone, and fought back

On an otherwise ordinary afternoon in 2016, the Jadavpur University Press received a mail for which the entire team had been anxiously waiting. It came from the office of Murakami Haruki. Murakami had indicated his approval for the hand-drawn cover options the Press had sent him for Samudratate Kafka, the Bengali translation of Umibe no Kafuka, and picked two of the options.

Another mail said that he particularly enjoyed the design innovation of the graphic cat moving through the margins of the translation, climbing up the left margin, over the centre, and down the right margin. The office, at that time all of three people, burst into cheers. All the hard work it had taken an establishment of limited resources to get and work on the ambitious project of bringing the writing of Murakami to Bengal felt worth it.

The Publications unit of the Jadavpur University Press, or the JUP as it is called on campus, started publishing in 2011 with a clear mandate from the University. The JUP was required to publish quality volumes of scholarly and intellectual value that would reinforce the reputation of the university as a place of learning. The University provided infrastructure and overheads, invaluable support and encouragement, and access to a heritage of intellectual heft.

The fledgling JUP team had no Indian model for this undertaking. Larger questions of direction, and a variety of publishing decisions had to be worked on simultaneously with questions of process and accountability pertaining to work within the larger context of the University. In terms of books, 2012 to 2015 saw translations to Bengali of Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli, both from the original Italian, as well as books in philosophy, book history, literature, psychology, and film studies.

Two volumes from this period deserve mention. The first is Upendrakishore Raychowdhury’s essays, Half-Tone Photography (English), which brought together and published for the first time in India essays establishing that a pivotal innovation spurring the development of print technology was made in India by Satyajit Ray’s grandfather, and not by a print-maker in England as it is popularly assumed.

The second is a volume of freedom fighter Pulin Bihari Das’s research on the martial arts of Bengal. Astracharcha (Bengali) is a remarkable collation of work that no one knew existed, until Das’s grandsons handed it over to the University. The book is the product of long and careful rescuing of waterlogged pages from the old box in which they came, by the School of Cultural Texts and Records, who are skilled in matters of the archive.

At this time, the Press catalogue was mostly in Bengali. The aim over the next few years was to expand this core strength, as well as develop a parallel strength in English books, which would bring the publishing work of the Press to the attention of a larger audience. But reaching a larger audience is no easy thing, and there were never enough resources for advertising or marketing. In any case, it was rapidly becoming clear that the audience of the Press was niche, exacting, and widely spread. How, then, could we hope to meet and talk to the readers of our books?

Building a list

The Kolkata Book Fair is an important event in the book fair calendar, and a very important event for small publishers and booksellers. By January 2014, the Press was looking for a wider audience among booklovers who throng the fairgrounds in lakhs, sometimes to buy enough reading material to last until the next book fair. The challenge was to make our presence visible there, with a budget that would cover little more than basic wall-paint, turpentine, and brushes.

The JUP has always been dependent on the kindness of others, the grateful recipient of a range of goodwill, and of volunteered time and energy from students, researchers, teachers, administrators, alumni, and many others within the campus and beyond. The first time this collective mode of Press life was publicly visible was in the run-up to KBF ’14, when a number of students decided they wanted to turn the JUP’s approximately 18 square-meter stall into a public art project.

With the energy and joy only young people can muster, fortified with large amounts of sugary fairground tea, they successfully converted a small, unremarkable stall of cheap plywood into an art exhibit. Booklovers thronged at the stall, and the JUP won a best stall award at the book fair that year.

The years 2014-19 were fruitful for the Press. The Italio-Bangla Anubaad (translation) series was extended by Alpana Ghosh’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, with detailed commentary by renaissance scholar and series editor, Sukanta Chaudhuri. The translation of Murakami’s Kafuka by Professor of Electrical Engineering Abhijit Mukherjee received a prestigious Japan Foundation grant, and was published in two volumes, like the original Japanese.

Two volumes of Nepali to English translation in literature and folklore from the Darjeeling hills came from a collaboration between the Department of Comparative Literature and Southfield College, Darjeeling. Suresh Biswas, lion-tamer, adventurer, and mercenary soldier for Brazil featured on the English list, as did an empirical treatise in water management that laid out the grave consequences of rapid urbanisation to the future of habitation in cities.

Somdatta Mondal’s English translation of Hariprabha Takeda’s historically important travelogue to Japan, starting in 1912, and including the story of how she became the Bengali voice of Radio Tokyo during WW2, featured original art by Japanese manga artist Shohei Emura on the cover.

The JUP ventured into the YA space with a translation of Ursula le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea to Bengali. Continuing in the public art tradition, a rather spectacular papier-mâché mache dragon was created for the 2020 book fair to publicise this book. Next was the children’s literature space, with a translation of Girindrashekhar Bose’s Bengali classic Lal-Kalo, to English. Both the books for younger people feature hand-drawn illustrations, commissioned for these volumes.

By this time, the Press had published translations from the Bengali, English, Nepali, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese and German, among several other kinds of volumes. More interesting projects were in the pipeline.

Then the coronavirus arrived.

The pandemic and Cyclone Amphan

The Press is located on the Jadavpur University campus, and subject to its rules. When the campus closed its gates for the lockdown in March, the team’s immediate concern turned to the plants. After several years of effort, the little garden of potted plants on the terrace was finally flourishing. Late March is already hot in Kolkata, and the plants would die without regular water.

To prevent this, Director of the Press Abhijit Gupta completed the required paperwork to gain periodic access to campus and the Press office. Masked and carrying sanitiser, he would ride his bicycle to campus, sign in at the main estate office, open the Press to water the plants that his team had carefully nurtured, complete any essential tasks that needed attention, then lock up, sign out, and leave. At this time, the rest of the team and the vast majority of campus denizens worked from home.

No books could be sold offline, or online in the first few months of the lockdown because delivery personnel were not allowed onto the locked down campus, where the books are stocked. By mid-May, team members were beginning to feel cabin-fevered at home, and had started discussing hypothetical wish-fulfilment scenarios of being able to go back to the Press. That was when super cyclone Amphan struck Bengal.

Possibly the largest tropical storm to have ever brewed in the Bay of Bengal, Amphan is estimated to have caused damage to the tune of Rs one lakh crore, and South Bengal is still recovering. Amphan had a terrible impact on the book publishing and selling industry in Kolkata. Uncounted books and bales of paper were destroyed as water entered buildings and submerged stacks of stocked books, as well as printing technology and machinery.

From College Street, the round-the-year mecca for booklovers, came heartbreaking images of hundreds of books floating in standing water on the streets. It was clear that recovery was going to be painful and slow, compounded as it would be by the fact that workers in the printing and binding industry are largely migrants, and had returned to their homes at the beginning of the lockdown.

The campus was impassable for two days while the debris of fallen trees was being cleared. During this time, members of the team worried from home about the premises of the Press, with a stockroom full of books. Finally, after a path was cleared, the Director was able to reach the Press on foot and confirm that the computers were safe, and the stockroom had not been damaged. It was a huge relief, tempered by the knowledge that Amphan had complicated the process of dealing with the pandemic.

Members of the team are used to handling book projects and seeing them through. The small size of the team, and the consequent necessary ability to perform several tasks competently, calls for a fairly steep learning curve, to which young people with an interest in publishing have responded quite well. Work had been moving on home computers before Amphan, and it seemed that the setback on account of the pandemic and the lockdown could be in some measure made up by the team continuing to get books ready to print.

But publishers are dependent on the printing and binding industries, which fell into chaos following Amphan. The Press was working on projects with funding, production, and rights deadlines. Tuttle Mori in Tokyo, and Curtis Brown in New York, two of the agencies with whom the Press had agreements, certainly knew of the international pandemic, but could not be expected to be aware of the devastation to local publishing caused by Amphan. These agencies, and others, had to be informed about the reasons for delay in schedules and were requested for extended deadlines.

Work limped on as best it could, as myriad aspects of Press functioning which had been heretofore taken for granted were looked at anew. The recovery from Amphan was slow but steady, and gathered momentum over the months. Team members started coming into the office. Particularly those who could use bicycles, or walk from home, started keeping the Press open as long as they could, and schedules were worked out for a socially distanced office. Online order pick-ups started up again, and after the limbo, it felt like orders were pouring in.

Two books have been published during the pandemic so far. The first was the 50th publication of the Press, and uniquely tailored to global circumstances in 2020. Coming out of a project on utopia at Utrecht University, Urban Utopias is open access, and available free at jadunivpress.com. Desiring India, on how colonisers viewed the colonised, was complicated by illness in the families of team members. It became available on Google books in mid-October.

The pandemic changed things, so the Press needed to adapt. While some changes will take time to find grooves and routine, not all the adaptations were disheartening. A member of the team represented the JUP at the Frankfurt Book Fair online, and brought useful knowledge from that experience. This was important because attending that very important international publishing event in person would be far beyond the budget of the Press in pre-pandemic times.

What lies ahead

The work that continued unseen through the pandemic and lockdown is slated to become visible over the coming year and beyond. The Japan list is expanding, with a translation into Bengali of Yukio Mishima’s Kinkakuji, by Abhijit Mukherjee, our Japanese translator and Japan series editor. Also due is a Bengali translation of Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes, and a translation to Hindi of Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea.

A Bengali translation of Takeshi Nakajima’s Nakamuraya no Bose, translated by Kazuhiro Watanabe of the Bengali division at the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, is also due soon. This will bring the story of the later half of Rashbehari Bose’s life in Japan to the Bengali language. This book is a publishing milestone for the JUP, since it is a case in which one publication has led directly to another in the series.

The interest generated by Samudratate Kafka, the Bengali translation of Murakami, led to a member of the JUP team being invited to Japan. There, meetings with the translator, publisher, and rights agency started a chain of events which will lead, soon, to the publication of the Rashbehari Bose book.

A French-Bengali list under the series editorship of Shubha Chakraborty Dasgupta is being launched with the help of fellow Kolkata publisher, Seagull Books. Devoted to the Caribes and Island nations, this list will include translations of works by Aimé Césaire, Marys Condé, and Raphael Confiant. The publication of a hundred poems by Czelsaw Milosz from Polish to Bengali, and a Bengali translation of Hansda Sowevdra Sekhar’s The Adivasi will not Dance are due later this year. A Bengali translation of Jadavpur University alumni Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others is in progress, and should be ready by the second half of next year.

On the upcoming English list is Subaltern Squibs and Sentimental Rhymes: The Raj Reflected in Light Verse. Edited by Graham Shaw, this volume focuses on the white working-class colonial soldier, who did not have access to the privilege of officers, while being subject to the outrages of life in colonial. Their annoyed, frustrated, sad, and frequently satirical tending to outright funny writings, make this volume both historically important, and very readable. Translations to English contracted at this time include those of Manindra Gupta’s Nuri Bandor, and Atin Bandyopadhyay’s Neelkantha Pakhir Khonje.

Work on the graphic book Famine Tales from India and Britain continues. A collaboration with the University of Exeter, it is available for view at faminetales.exeter.ac.uk. The book of the project, planned to be an extensive volume comprising patas and comic-book responses to five instances of famine and food scarcity in India and Britain’s shared history, is going to the first of its kind.

Jadavpur University has a reputation for unique approaches to challenges and growth. The story of the Jadavpur University Press is an example of the type of institution-building that is possible when there is goodwill, support, commitment, work, will, and imagination in the relatively lower resource environment of a regional public university.

The pandemic continues even as the lockdown has drawn to a close, and no one knows what the future holds. At the Press, the team continues to prepare books for print, with the hope that the universe will allow the coming year to be more settled than this one, and that no more of those difficult emails asking for deadline extensions will need to be sent.

Devalina Mookerjee is Development Editor at the Jadavpur University Press.

This series of articles on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on publishing is curated by Kanishka Gupta.