After an ignominious exit from Penguin, David Davidar is back on the Indian publishing scene. He has teamed up with Rupa's Kapish Mehra to reignite Indian literary fiction
In a certain city, there exist plans for all high-brow books that will be published in India in the next 10 years. These books can change lives, or at least shake up the Western literary canons. A new city lacks history and a commercial city the geography — blame the open sea — to keep these plans safe. In an old city, settled seven times and destroyed six times, lies the vault which holds the plans. The city’s labyrinthine bylanes, guarded by hustlers, knife throwers, spectrum scammers and titular heads, protect the plans.
The man who holds the keys to the vault can be anyone, but we will call him David. Actually, let us call him David Davidar after the giant of Indian publishing of the Eighties and early Nineties. The two men are the same, except that the one who guards the plans today is much older and wiser. You can’t step into the same river twice, said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. You can’t meet the same man again. No, Heraclitus didn’t say that, but never
David Davidar, the man who had published Vikram Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Shobhaa De, Shashi Tharoor, Kiran Desai and Suketu Mehta, was the go-to man in Indian literary publishing.
Between 1985 (when he was just 27) and 2004, Davidar, then at Penguin, ambushed the unsuspecting Indian readers into not only liking, but even paying good money to buy books by these authors. For the first time since the British published that subversive book, the Indian Railway time table, all educated Indians who could travel 3rd AC would end up buying a Penguin India book.
It looked like Davidar would take Manhattan, but he went to Canada instead. He published some books, but soon got involved in a sexual harassment case in 2010. The case was settled but it ended his chances of being the global head of Penguin. A lot of people in the publishing industry felt that he had a real shot at the job.
In 2010, the earlier Davidar was truly history — what remained was a book by him, called The Solitude of Emperors.
The Return of David Davidar
In June 2010, he returned to India. The country that he returned to was nothing like the one he had left in 2004. The year he left, a company known for publishing mass market books and sports books, Rupa & Company, decided to publish a young investment banker and now a very successful columnist, Chetan Bhagat. The world after Five Point Someone was published was a completely different one. Imagine Rome after the Visigoths, London Philharmonic shows after The Beatles and Hindi films after David Dhawan. The proletariat had ousted the bourgeoisie.
Davidar returned to this changed world and was wooed by at least eight publishing houses to come and work for them.
In February, he met an unlikely suitor at a hotel in New Delhi — Kapish Mehra of Rupa & Company. The irony was truly delicious. Davidar would have to work to reignite the fire in literary publishing in partnership with the man who had subverted the genre in the first place. Before Mehra published Bhagat, Indian publishing in English was symbolised by Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai (Midnight’s Children). Now it was Bhagat’s Ryan Oberoi (immortalised by Aamir Khan’s Phunsuk Wangdoo).
But if Davidar is looking for his second chance, his redemption and a shot to recreate the magic, he couldn’t have made a more rational choice. “The meeting lasted for around 45 minutes but we knew that both of us had a common vision and decided the initial plans for our venture,” Mehra recalls.
Davidar isn’t the waiting type.
He likes to seek out authors who have potential.
In August 1997, Granta, the British literary magazine, had published an anthology of Indian writers to mark the 50th year of India’s independence. The issue had some of the best Indian writing of that time. Suketu Mehta, then a little known writer, had an article on Mumbai which caught Davidar’s eye. He called up Mehta and gave him a book deal. The same article later turned into one of the best books on Mumbai, Maximum City, though it took seven years.
Mehta remembers those days with fondness. He feels that the book would not have been possible without Davidar. “[He] is an amazing editor and publisher. It was David who first read my essay on Mumbai in Granta and asked me to turn it into a book, and stayed with it over the next seven years until it came out between bound covers. I’m very happy he’s returned to India, where he can nurture a new generation of writers. He’s doing what he loves best, and readers will be the richer for it,” he says.
“One should never forget a basic underlying assumption: The book belongs to the writer. The editor is trying to improve it with the writer’s consent. Editors or publishers make suggestions to improve the book and if the writer doesn’t accept it then that is fine too,” he says.
(This story appears in the 17 June, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)