The oracle has spoken. The reader of English books in India is a rich, lonely, serious, young man. The images evoked by this sentence could make it the opening line of any of the romance novels that women, a small percentage of the readers of English language books in India, like to read. Let us also pause for a moment in memory of the trees that were felled, to make the paper that ended up as the pages of the issue that circulated the findings Tehelka Readership Survey 2010. A set of 15-16 questions asked of a little over one thousand one hundred people outside bookshops in nine cities in India would but necessarily lead to formulations that even in casual conversations would be dismissed as a trite. Especially as we live in a context that does not lend itself well to sweeping statements, as Joan Robinson had said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."
The world of books and ideas in India is a strange mix of contradictory currents and impulses. We have a large publishing industry active across 37 languages, bringing out more than one hundred thousand books of which only a third are in English. The survey deals only with reading in English and this exclusive focus itself distorts the findings. True even the thought of a readership survey across all languages is daunting—there are entire worlds of publishing in Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Gujarati—to completely ignore these worlds renders any attempt to understand readers meaningless.
Apart from some notable exceptions, the book industry is run by people with little understanding of books and reading. My favourite anecdote is of a conversation I had with a manager of a leading distribution house. I had gone to his office in the early morning to pick up my stock of the latest Harry Potter book for myself and to distribute to friends and family. He spoke of his foresight in managing to corner a large quantity of the limited stock available anticipating that the actual bookshop demand on the day of release would outstrip the advance orders he had received. He then very seriously wanted to understand the Harry Potter phenomena, he asked me why children read the book; did it make them intelligent? The readership survey ignores the boom witnessed in children's books. One of their questions (Do you read porn?) clearly indicates that they do not think children can be readers. Children's reading was indeed powered by J K Rowling creating a fantasy world that allowed all of us readers of her books to escape into, and return as stupid as ever.
.jpg)