A little over three decades ago I made my first, accidental, entry into the world of publishing in India. I was just finishing my Masters degree, and wanted to make a decisive move away from English literature to something more 'relevant' to my life in the thriving, bustling, politically alive city of Delhi. The university was a hotbed of furious political debate, the women's movement was just taking off – surely, I thought, there has to be more to life than Spenser and Milton (much though I loved them). At the time, a friend worked as a secretary in the Oxford University Press office in Delhi. Perhaps, she suggested, I should do some freelance work there and see how I liked it. I thought it was a brilliant idea.
At the time, a great deal of publishing activity in Delhi was concentrated along two roads. The longer one, Asaf Ali Road, lay just outside the wall of the old city, while a shorter strip, Ansari Road, lay just beyond. Ansari Road housed large and small publishers alike, and during the lunch hour many of them (almost all male) could be seen at the samosa and paan stalls, exchanging gossip and news, while small lorries and hand-drawn carts loaded with packets of books made their way to publishers' warehouses.
I remember walking into my first job in the Indian branch of the Oxford University Press (OUP), on Ansari Road, feeling a great sense of trepidation. At the time, OUP was adapting (they called it 'Indianising'), for Indian schools, a series of English textbooks called Active English, and I was employed in the inglorious role of a 'paster upper'. My task was to paste Indian names (at the time – our imaginations were a bit limited – we used the names Ram and Sita) over Western ones (John and Mary), while an artist named Dean Gasper coloured blond hair and blue eyes black, and chopped off the top halves of double-decker buses. That first experience with art pulls and rubber solution (things most people in publishing would probably not recognise today) was enough to make all fear vanish without a trace.
In those days, OUP was a special place to work. The remnants of British domination still existed in the shape of a few employees. A gentleman called Charles Lewis, for instance, ran the place, and two eccentric Englishmen – Adrian Bullock and Christopher Stocks (the latter routinely came to office wearing a dressing gown) – ran the production and editorial departments. A young Oxford-returned man who wore Indian kurtas and smoked beedis was the head of academic publishing. His name was Ravi Dayal, and he was slated to become the head of OUP, along with a Bengali gentleman called Santosh Mukherjee, as the British directors were on their way out. In the post-Independence scenario, publishing, like everything else, was required to 'Indianise', and expatriate employees had to leave. The companies themselves, meanwhile, reduced their shareholding to a maximum of 49 percent – though this did not apply to OUP, because it saw itself as a department of Oxford University, rather than the Indian branch of an overseas company. Still, over time, OUP lost the battle to convince the Indian government of this.