Media as Marketing Brahmins and Macaulay Smiles. 

You are looking good in your book launch pics, great in the journo’s talk show. Who all were at the launch? And sorry for forgetting, what’s the title of your book?

In some ironic ways 1998 was a sign of times to come. In Darbhanga, a sleepy town of North Bihar the legendary Hindi poet and novelist Nagarjun was waging a hopeless battle for life.

But fight he did, characteristic of the intrepid voice of the subaltern who dared Indira Gandhi with the iconic taunt – “Induji Ye Kya Hua Aapko.” On the fourth day of November that year, he died uncared, unsung and almost abandoned in poverty. The smug English media ignored his death, political leaders went through the motions paying perfunctory tributes.

A hint of why his death was a non-event or why he was an anachronistic figure for national media had come a year before his death. The million dollar baby of writing had arrived armed with that ticket to stardom – a Booker. In October 1997 Arundhati Roy got that ego massage for Indians writing in English. Aspirational writing in India had got a poster girl, interviews were splashed as cover stories and a new breed of wannabes was in awe. Not of the charm of the written word, but of media attention and lucrative advance deals.

Seven months later in May 1998. India, itself a wannabe in the globalising world sought global military recognition with nuclear tests abandoning Nehruvian humanism for nationalist frenzy. Interestingly, Arundhati criticised the nuclear tests in her polemical piece The End of Imagination – an early declaration of her alternative career plans as an activist-writer.

The Macaulyan Dichotomy: Writer Vs Lekhak, the death of the bilingual ‘reading elite’ in North India.

Have no doubt about it, the crowd at the book launch events and book reading sessions is merely a gathering of Macaulay putras and putris. A case in point is the English-centric book launch scene in the capital. The cosy crevices of Delhi which have hosted some newsmaking book launches in recent times are fiefdoms of English writers and the ambience is corporate. Most of the crowd gathered there cannot name even one contemporary Hindi writer. The lekhak does not figure in their world of letters. Why?

The reply to this is fraught with the danger of oversimplification. One of the possible explanations I briefly offer. Let us try to understand the death of bilingualism in the reading elite of a particular region, North India.

It can be explained with the concept of social distance which gets more pronounced in the North Indian elite as they climb the social ladder, what you may also call upward social mobility.

The moment the elite of North India start gaining social and economic capital, they seek cultural capital. Let’s face it though unfortunate, English has become the ultimate arbiter of cultural capital in this country. But what is more disturbing is the distance it produces with Non- English speaking masses in North India. With English as the triumphant badge and the anglo-gluten in mouth, the upwardly mobile class of the North seeks to shed every semblance of pre-Anglo existence. Speaking or writing in Hindi becomes a condescending favour they dole out to masses, or worse, for laughing among themselves. No wonder it does not figure in their pedagogical imagination beyond passing the state ordained compulsory examination.

The same does not hold equally true for regions with a strong sense of regional lingual identity as cultural capital, like some other parts of India.

Macaulay is a player but Lakshmi is the Matchmaker in Branding Sarswati. Media – the willing stage manager. 

Good Evening, I am celebrity anchor and this is Book at 9. On stands now. Outlook cover story. Excerpts from Vinod Mehta’s Lucknow Boy.

Publishing in India, the book launching type, shares its target group with English media – the urban middle class. If grabbing eyeballs is the prime concern of the idiot box channels, getting those eyeballs to lay their hands on books is on the publisher’s agenda. So how they do it?

As a sleek promotion strategy get some known faces of television news interview the writer, pass it as a talk show or get few more talking heads and pass it as a panel discussion. The anchor’s questions are as shallow as the audience and knows the new book only as much as the audience. The result. A dilettante’s triumph.

The Unintended Consequences and Disillusionment

Something that happened in the last week of October last year illustrates the unintended consequence of such media courtship for an author, with the publisher acting as the eager facilitator. The danger is, it sometimes turns the author into a talking hack. On October 25, 2010 Ramchandra Guha’s Makers of Modern India was released by Penguin at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. The book launch was followed by an introductory lecture by Guha, and a talk anchored by NDTV’s Barkha Dutt. The next day, the eminent historian, one of India’s better known public intellectuals, was heard again. He was delivering the lecture verbatim at Delhi University’s Convention Hall. The publishers made him to do the repeat act at a strategic point for promotion and a mini stall was set up selling only the new book. The author appeared a talking hack. Lakshmi had made Sarswati look ugly.

Disillusionment creeps in. One wants to retreat to the cliché – authors should be read, not seen. And yes, the great books of vernacular India were read, their words are imprinted in our minds, and their craftsmen are still invisible.

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