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Journalism of Courage
Distributors demanding more books published every year, disproportionate publicity for already popular authors, and less shelf space in bookstores are some of the causes that will prohibit an independent and politically-aligned publisher like Kali from coming up today, according to co-founder and veteran publisher Ritu Menon.
“Ours is a political project, linked closely to the women’s movement and feminist perspective… There’s no shelf space in bookstores today. The volume of english-language books published today is 50 times that of when we started. There are a total of 3,000 bookstores in India that carry our books. We become invisible. We don’t get spacing in popular stores like Delhi’s Midland, which store us in the back. In the front are travel and self-help, Shashi Tharoor, Devdutt Pattanaik…” said Menon.
She was in conversation with co-founder Urvashi Butalia and publisher Sivapriya R on the 40th anniversary of Kali’s founding on day two of Jaipur Literature Festival 2024.
“So many Kali writers have gone on to mainstream success. We have constantly been creating the ground for new voices in a market not curious about new voices. That’s bolstered by the fact that the media has no space for a biblio-diverse universe. The media is only interested in the big guns. They get space over and over again and they don’t need it. Why don’t Kali or Seagull get review space? It’s really tough to work in a market where distribution cost is so high, and you can’t reach those price points because you can’t publish in volume. It’s really tough not to have any exposure,” said Butalia.
The duo recounted the beginnings of Kali in Menon’s garage and how a network of grants and contacts, gained from years in the publishing industry, helped launch the press when most contemporaries believed women to be a small reading and writing market.
“The mid-1980s was a very significant time for people like us. I don’t know anyone starting without family, funds or support who can do that in today’s environment. It was a big risk,” said Menon.
“I was active in the women’s rights movement. We were on the streets protesting dowry and rape. But many of us activists realised that while we instinctively knew there was injustice being perpetrated in the form of violence, we knew zero about the history of these things. There were no studies. My bosses thought women aren’t serious readers or writers. So I thought, they won’t do it, I’ll do it,” said Butalia.
This was a time when most book publishing in India was academic, and general books (fiction and non-fiction) were printed by companies like Oxford University Press, Blackie and Son, Orient Longman, and Pan Macmillian, partly or wholly owned by the British. Then, multinational companies entered the picture after the rupee’s devaluation, with the only independent publishers around being family-owned. One of the only distributors who aided Kali – neither corporate nor family-owned – was the venerated founder of Manohar Bookstore and Publishers, Ramesh Jain.
“Manohar, Seagull and East West distributed us. All our publishing colleagues were extremely supportive. But today, with the number of books we do, and a backlist of over 100 titles, very few trade distributors are willing to take us on. They say, ‘You only do 10 books a year. No one is interested in reprints.’ The fact that you have a steady backlist that continues to sell slowly, but continuously, over 40 years, doesn’t matter. You have to have volume in the current year,” said Menon.
“We had no money. Our office [in the garage] was free of rent. So we did what women generally do: this thing called jugaad. We decided that between us, we had several years of good editorial and production experience,” said Butalia, explaining how producing festive Indian books for foreign fairs and feminist presses allowed them to build contacts, leading to one of the first to-English translations, Truth Tales (1986), getting traction in India and Britain. Grants by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation also allowed them to tide over as they broke even.
The list that emerged defied conventional publishing wisdom by straddling academic and general books. “We published everything from pamphlets to PhDs. All our books for the first few years were commissioned. The skeptics were right, not many women were writing and we had to persuade them,” said Menon. Classics like Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988), Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s Recasting Women (1989), Radha Kumar’s The History of Doing (1993), and Romila Thapar’s Sakuntala (1999) all came from Kali and are still in print – first published without an advance.
Menon cited the women’s movement as pivotal to Kali’s success, with Butalia adding, “Today, it’s so wonderful to see that in publishing across India, in English and other languages, it’s women who dominate the editorial content and have broken that glass ceiling.”
