Gandhi, Guha

New Delhi, March 25: Contemporary history’s best-known ‘fakir’ has landed his latest biographer the fattest kitty in the annals of Indian publishing. Penguin India has offered an advance of Rs 1 crore to bag historian Ram Guha’s two-volume project on Mahatma Gandhi in a quiet but stunning recession-era deal that has wowed the competition and pitched Indian book industry into the global league.

It was Indian art that first broke the international class ceiling, Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura netting a record $1.6 million at a Christie’s sale. Since then, powered by professional auction houses, Indian art has gone through the roof and retained its high price shelf.

Now, the publishing rupee has pummelled through the pound barrier, boosted by multiple engines — Western agents who have brought to writers parity with stronger global currencies, and, in no mean measure, a thirsty and expanding market at home.

Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India sold in excess of 50,000 hardback copies in its first five months. Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian has grossed over a lakh volumes, Guha’s own India After Gandhi went beyond 50,000 and is still vanishing off the stands.

“Till 10 years ago,” said a publishing editor, “we would call a book that sold 5,000 copies a runaway bestseller. Now, suddenly, there is a quantum leap in numbers, which is feeding back into what publishers are ready to pay for good work.”

Indian writers and writing are no longer an adjunct to the Commonwealth pool, they make an empire of their own. The seeds were probably sown with Penguin opening shop locally; and Vikram Seth, who arrived here with a reputation already made in the West, forced the early pace for writers. Even so, big-ticket writers such as Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri and Sen were still approaching the Indian markets as part of international contract arrangements.

But of late, the trend — and it has proved sustainable and profitable — is to look at India as a separate contract territory.

Hard-nosed publishers are a little more bullish on the work of Guha, also The Telegraph’s columnist, than the writer himself would care to sound. They scrapped and scrambled over it, putting big bucks on the table irrespective of the global economic downturn.

Guha’s agent Gill Coleridge, who was in India to close the deal over the Holi week, eventually whittled publishing options down to three — HarperCollins, Random House India and Penguin India.

Penguin, industry sources said, won the day not because other bidders would not match it for money, but because the experience and resources it brings into play are far greater. “It wasn’t the money,” says Chiki Sarkar of Random House India. “I think every publisher put up pretty much the same amount. It’s a terrible loss to us but that happened essentially because we are a much smaller and younger company.”

The hefty advance, Sarkar argues, is “absolutely sustainable” even in a deflated economy because “Gandhi and Guha make a brilliant combination, they will absolutely make the top release of the year they publish in”.

Shruti Debi of Picador India, which published Guha’s India After Gandhi, more than agrees. “Ram Guha is now an extremely bankable author and the record of his last book underlines that. The Gandhi books will be huge, no wonder publishers are ready with such advances.”

The Gandhi volumes, the industry is convinced, will be even hotter property than Guha’s bestselling history. As Ravi Singh of Penguin said: “These decisions, particularly the financial aspects, are seldom recklessly made. There is the issue of the writer’s stature, the subject, there is a sense of what market the work might have. This is going to be a very substantial work, so the advance is barely an exaggeration.”

The even-toned Singh sought to play down the dizzy quantum of Guha’s signing amount saying it had to be seen in the context of a composite long-term arrangement. “We are talking about seven books in all to be published over the next six years,” he said. “This is a long-term investment and we hope a very good one.”

Other than the two-volume biography of Gandhi, Guha is also putting together two collections of essays on contemporary India and democracy. In addition, Penguin is to revive three titles from the Guha backlist including his acclaimed biography of Verrier Elwin.

But few in the trade are in doubt about what’s fetched that price-tag — the forthcoming Gandhi volumes. As one insider said: “There is no getting away from what the big cheque is being written out for — the Gandhi work, the rest is either frill or courtesy or both. Minus the Gandhi book, there would have been no crore to promise.” Another put it even more sharply: “It’s the honey you pay for, the pot comes with it. In this case, the Gandhi books are the honey.”

Guha himself was coy on the impending increment to his bank balance and would rather talk the books. “I’ve been working on this for nearly 25 years and I’m very excited about it,” he told The Telegraph. “It’s going to be a big book, I’ve begun writing it but it will take me another five to six years to finish.” The first Gandhi volume is slated for release in 2012, the second in 2015.

Guha isn’t the first one to experiment with Gandhi’s truth. Gandhi himself stands at the head of a long and illustrious line made by the likes of Eric H Eriksson, Louis Fischer, Primo Levi, Ved Mehta, B.R. Nanda, Stanley Wolpert and Rajmohan Gandhi.

But Guha is convinced his work — the first part set in South Africa, the second in India — will have novel things to say. “There is a lot of new and rich material,” he said. “But the work’s worth isn’t only about that. It is probably legitimate to ask why another book on Gandhi, but I will leave that to the work itself to answer, I cannot do that in a sound bite. I think I have some relevant things to say about Gandhi.”

Embedded in the new publishing bounties is probably a larger plot unravelling — the rediscovery of India by Indians. Propelled probably by the market and whetted by a new interest that has come redirected via the West, where India has enjoyed extended stay as flavour of the season, Indians are investing more and more in Indian.

A discernible trend within that trend is a reversal in genre preference — non-fiction work, as Guha and Nilekani (and the bestselling diet guide by Rujuta Diwekar, fitness consultant to Kareena Kapoor) illustrate — is getting far better bids — and market reception — than fiction. That may not essentially be a comment on the kind of fiction being written; it may have more to do with the nature of non-fiction work.

“One of the chief reasons it (non-fiction) is attracting greater prices,” says Shruti Debi, “is that there is a kind of certainty about what you are getting. Non-fiction does not depend on the vagaries of literary prizes or controversy for success or failure, you tend to know the worth of what you are buying into, just like we know with Guha’s Gandhi books.”

Or, just like we knew the worth of what that other Bangalorean dabbling in Gandhi was buying into — Vijay Mallya and the ‘fakir’s’ precious artefacts under the hammer at New York.