When a publisher is approached with a script by an author, if she likes the offering she makes two calculations: first, the likely return on investment if she puts editorial labour and marketing resources into the script; second, whether the author’s name will embellish her imprint in the long run. There is, however, the rare script and author that occasionally compels the publisher to see all question of material gain as utterly beside the point.
The first time this happened to me — the setting aside of all thought of pecuniary benefit — was with the very first script I was asked to edit. I was new to the job and all at sea with the unruly mass of material I had to tame into a book. Facing me was a monumental assemblage of quotations from Urdu and Hindi literature, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thoughts on a huge variety of the poets who had been quoted, the whole a jumble showing that Partition had assumed as much a cultural and linguistic shape as a political bifurcation. Its author was trying to reveal how a loosely single language, Hindustani, had been segregated by Persianist-Islamic and Sanskritist-Hindu chauvinists into modern Urdu and modern Hindi. Cleansing, he was saying, wasn’t only ethnic, it had also been linguistic. A whole vocabulary deriving from Sanskrit had been set aside in literary usage by writers of the Urdu script, and conversely words of Persian origin had not found favour among insular writers of Devnagari. The learning he had assembled on this argument was vast, chaotic, and looked like the multitudinous seas incarnadine. The effort of trying to turn this swirling ocean of knowledge into a clean-flowing narrative stream made me want to quit publishing within a week of joining the profession. But this was before I met the author.
His proportions, like his script, were epic. He was well over six foot and so devastatingly handsome that I wished I were a medieval maiden, for then I could have melted into a puddle and this knight in shining armour would have had to scoop me up. To make matters worse he was Amrit Rai, son of Dhanpat Rai — in other words, his father had been the late Premchand. It took me no time to work out what lay in store for me if I persisted in the lunacy of trying to play midwife to Premchand’s symbolic grandchild — a sticky end, and considerably stickier than the one that had stricken Macbeth. Was that a dagger I was trying hard not to see before me? Oh yes. And the man brandishing it resembled a well-known Hindi writer preparing to carve up the bigotry of the cow belt.
Given the circs, it could be said that my feelings when first confronting Son of Premchand were roughly those of the hostile He-Ape who has heard of Tarzan but never actually been positioned against him up close — until, that is, the dawning of the day when he is so positioned. In the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs which I had devoured in school the apes possessed a profound vocabulary and their favourite refrain was “Kreegah! Tarzan, Tarmangani, Bundolo, Bundolo”. This fine line, expressing the deepest feeling of which the Lesser He-Ape is capable, had shown me the contemptible banality of other lines I’d been brainwashed into thinking of as spectacular, such as “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and “My love is like a red red rose”. A rough and ready translation of the simian sublimity which had lodged in my editorial soul might be, “Shit, That’s Tarzan! Lemme Outa Here Double Quick.” In the depths of my inner being I knew that the Lesser He-Ape had arrived at a cleansed vocabulary superior to anything in Keats and Yeats, for the feelings of the above ape, though uttered deep in the jungles of Darkest Africa, expressed all that I in Darkest Daryaganj had ever wished to say about academic authors and their predilection for foul convolutions. The immediate problem remained, however, the difficulty of having to meet the eye of a specific gent of Tarzanic size who was sitting across my desk.
In fact, what followed dispelled all my apprehensions of an early exit from the world of academic publishing. Over the several editorial meetings that ensued it became apparent that Amrit Rai was every inch the great man his social-reformer father had been. He could have used his towering personality to intimidate me into submission, because he was famous as a scholar, as a Hindi writer, and as the biographer of his father, whereas I was an editorial non-entity unsure of what to do with my first script. He took not the least advantage of his position; he showed all the gentleness of the compassionate human being facing a quivering leaf. He assuaged my fears. He patiently answered my queries, cleared my confusions, and seemed happy to excise much that I was adamant in pointing to as an excessive display of scholarly zeal. At the end of our interactions I had begun seeing him as something of a mahatma. Perhaps in this I was mistaken, because I was so relieved by the turn of events that I was captivated by his extreme consideration for someone he may well have thought of as an unevolved chimp. All the same, one of the few books I would be happy to publish, regardless of financial gain, is Amrit Rai’s A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi.
I was relieved to read, in a review of the book in the mid-1980s by the acute British scholar of Hindi, Rupert Snell, that some of the things I’d instinctively felt about Amrit Rai’s script had not been far off the mark. The bulk of the book, says Snell, is an accumulation of the depositions of a multitude of writers and lengthy extracts from their works, and he wishes that the author had instead “ventured opinions more economically on his own considerable authority”. This is partly a criticism of my editing: my blue pencil hadn’t been wielded as savagely as it should have been. But the truth is that I was in awe of the author and could have done no more. Many others have done a lot more. Vasudha Dalmia’s work on reconfigurations of Hindi prose in Banaras, Christopher King’s on the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, and Francesca Orsini’s analysis of the emergence of the Hindi public sphere are three superlative monographs that carry forward Amrit Rai’s broad argument. Collectively, their scholarship shows that the gradual talibanization of Hindi by cow belt Hindus might by now make even Bharatendu and Bankim cringe in their graves.
Forty or so years after I met him, I recall Amrit Rai as the most magnetic and magnanimous author I ever encountered. Some of my recollection is probably heavily coloured by the fact that he understood the fix I was in and helped me overcome the trauma of editing my first academic book. All the same, I think of him now as incomparably nicer than a summer’s day, and look back on my few days with him with an affection redder than the reddest rose. Academics are almost never saints. Premchand’s son, in my eyes, was. Though I became well acquainted with some of his Allahabad neighbours, I never really wanted to find out if Amrit Rai was in fact saintly in his daily life. The only thing that mattered to me as a publisher was how he as an author had been with me: more or less a mahatma.
The author is editor and publisher, Permanent Black
