Book: ‘Travancore: The Footprints of Destiny’ – Autobiography: Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, the former king (as told to Uma Maheswari); Publisher: Konark Publishers; Price: Rs.2,000

In 1924, when Mahatma Gandhi asked young Chithira Tirunal, the 12-year-old prince of the erstwhile princely state of Travancore in Kerala, if he would remove untouchability and throw open the temples to all castes when he became king, the boy answered, ‘Of course’. And he lived up to his word.

The former princely state of Travancore in Kerala, a staunch Hindu bastion, has always stood apart from the rest of 19th century royal India for its progressive ideas and non-alignment which were way ahead of its time.

Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, 88, the last ruler of Travancore, gives many glimpses of life as it was then in the first-ever autobiography of a former ruler from the erstwhile princely state, in ‘Travancore: The Footprints of Destiny’.

When Chithira Tirunal met Mahatma Gandhi in 1924 at the Pattom Palace, the prince was accompanied by his regent mother Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi. As promised, on his 25th birthday, Nov 12, 1936, the prince issued the Temple Entry Proclamation, which was a landmark event in the history of India.

The momentous decision that allowed devotees cutting across caste lines to enter an upper caste Hindu shrine set a precedent in India.

The autobiography, which chronicles all the major events in India and in Kerala since the birth of the surviving former ‘Rajah’ throws rare insights into Kerala’s engagement with the rest of the country – and the 20th century world at large – during the British Raj and post- Independence.

It is also a testimony to Kerala’s rich cultural heritage through detailed descriptions of the state’s festivals, palace rites, religion and life inside the portals of the ornate palace.

Central to the book, however, is the spiritual driving force of the 12th century (former) royal state – a temple of Lord Padmanabha, an incarnation of Mahavishnu – the presiding deity of Travancore.

The book, which has a foreword by former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, is divided into 11 chapters that covers Travancore and its heritage, the Vishnu temples and its rituals, birth and childhood of the Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, the life of his parents, Travancore’s military tradition, the royal weddings and the power shift to democracy.

The short texts are accompanied by rare pictures from the royal archives and blurbs to highlight important events.

The book, dictated by the 88-year-old former king to Kerala-based journalist-writer Uma Maheshwari, will be released by Abdul Kalam Jan 5.

Maheshwari, whose forefathers migrated to Thiruvananthapuram centuries ago to serve the temple of Padmanabhaswami, says ‘humility was the hallmark of the erstwhile Travancore royalty’.

The former south Indian principality, one of the most ancient in India dating back to the Chera dynasty, was spread across 7,625 sq miles with a coastline 168 miles.

In a unique revolution in the publishing world, two Indian books have made their debut in the virtual world. Converted into the e-book format, both these books can now be downloaded on the e-book reader, Kindle.

Published by Indian publishing house Wisdom Tree, Mantras: The Sacred Chants by Swami Veda Bharati and Yogini: Unfolding the Goddess Within by Shambhavi Chopra can now be downloaded within minutes on the e-book reader.

The e-book versions, which have been uploaded on online retailer Amazon’s website, can only be downloaded on Kindle.

Talking about the response to the e-books since last week, Shobit Arya, publisher at Wisdom Tree, said: “The results in the first week itself are absolutely amazing. We sold the first Kindle version of Mantras within hours of it being available and sold eight copies within the first three days itself.”

Wisdom Tree has sent 15 of its books to be e-formatted on Kindle of which two have been done successfully while the rest are still in the pipeline, Arya added.

The only hitch in this is that Kindle is still not very popular in India unlike in the US. But according to Arya, it’s just a matter of time before the rage catches up here and these e-book reader gadgets are readily available here.

Puffin, an imprint of Penguin, the country’s leading English language publisher, has ventured into comic book publishing with its new offerings: comic book versions of two stories from Satyajit Ray’s famous Feluda mystery series and “Where’s Hanuman?”

“Comic book publishing is a fast-growing segment within the publishing industry. There are hardly any comic book versions of Indian characters in book stores therefore these books are unique. We are planning more comic books on Indian characters,” says Puffin’s editorial director Sudeshna Ghosh.

Now on sale, “A Bagful of Mystery” and “Beware in the Graveyard” are comic book versions of Satyajit Ray’s popular Feluda stories and are said to be full of thrills and excitement accentuated by a crisp storyline and dramatic illustrations. A well-known professional detective in popular fiction, Feluda uses his super-sharp brain and teams up with cousin Topshe and friend Lalmohan Ganguli to capture devious culprits and solve puzzling mysteries.

Priced at Rs.99 each, the Feluda comic books have text by seasoned writer Subhadra Sen Gupta and art by Tapas Guha. Slated for publication in 2010 are three more comic book versions from the Feluda series: “Murder by the Sea”, “The Killers of Kathmandu” and “Danger in Darjeeling”.

Scheduled for release later this month is “Where’s Hanuman?”, a picture activity book. It will offer the young reader the challenge of locating Hanuman and his friends from among dozens of other characters. The comic book will illustrate brilliant, memorable scenes from the Ramayana and also tickle the funny bone through humorous characters and amusing scenes.

Authored by Alister Taylor and illustrated by Christopher Woods and Ben McClintic, the book is priced at Rs.125.

The cover says, The Time Machine alright but it is hardly the version H.G. Wells intended. Much of the science has been expunged from the science fiction. Most of the social commentary too is gone. The Time Traveller’s opening lines on time have been pared to what a speech bubble can accommodate. You will miss out a lot but the 68-page ‘graphic novel’ still tells a tale that is recognizably H.G. Wells’ 1895 sci-fi classic.

Here’s another way of getting acquainted with classics: snazzy illustrations on glossy paper and an eruption of speech bubbles. With publishers finally warming to the form, a slew of graphic-novelled classics have entered bookstores.

Several series, including those illustrated by Indians, are available. Illustrated Classics series of 45 titles from Supernova and Saddleback, includes graphic-novel versions of A Tale of Two Cities, The War of the Worlds and 12 plays of Shakespeare. Puffin has published graphic novel versions of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series in English. “They’re like primers for children and help kindle interest in literature,” says Supernova’s Udayan Singh.

“Graphic novels enhance visual literacy in a way text-only books cannot and encourage young people to think creatively themselves,” observes Andrew Dodd of Campfire Publishing. They’ve put out 19 titles including Treasure Island and Moby Dick, since their first in December, 2008. Om Books International joined in with 12 – Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island included – in July 2009.

Prices are reasonable. Once rendered in ‘graphic’ form, they compete with other comics rather than originals. Each title from Supernova is priced at Rs. 95; a Campfire one at Rs. 150. A Euro Books Agatha Christie is Rs. 199. “Big chains have room to stock and display. Smaller stores stick to staples like Asterix. These are still not mass market books,” he adds. Ajay Mago and Mou Sen Chatterjee of Om Bookstore and Oxford Bookstore concur. “Graphic novels in bookstores is not even 1%,” says Mago.

Target readers are tweens and teens. But popular children’s fiction of the Hardy Boys-Nancy Drew variety too is available as comics. These and titles in Biggles and Agatha Christie’s novels, are published by Euro Books.
Labelling is tricky.

While for Singh the term ‘graphic novel’ dignifies an artform that was confiscated in schools even a few years ago, Orijit Sen, arguably India’s first graphic novelist, maintains it’s not the same as comics. The term helps “get past the negatives associated with comics,” he says. His River of Stories (1994), published with NGO funds, was certainly no Tinkle. While involving the same skills, ‘graphic novel’ was a label reserved for more serious and often lengthy, illustrated work. The Pulitzer-winning Maus by Art Spiegelman, for instance, is a graphic novel, a tragic one to boot. The re-branding has big publishers interested. Penguin published Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor in 2004 and more recently, Parismita Singh’s The Hotel at The End of the World.

Market performance has varied. Encouraged by sales, Eurobooks prints an average of 3,000-5,000 sets every year since they started three years ago. Supernova has sold about 52,000 copies of all its 45 titles over the last two and a half years. With better positioning by bookstores and competitive pricing, those numbers should soar in coming months.

Penguin Books-India Monday has launched its classic Hamish Hamilton imprint in the country with a collection of political essays, ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’ by Arundhati Roy and a novel, ‘The Wish Maker’ by Ali Sethi on contemporary Pakistan.

Hamish Hamilton will also publish Vikram Seth’s new novel ,’A Suitable Girl’, in 2013, a press statement issued by Penguin-Books India Monday said. The imprint, said the statement, is ‘one of the most prestigious in UK whose titles have won the Man Booker, Orange and the Whitbread awards in recent years’.

In India, Hamish Hamilton will publish a select list of literary fiction and non-fiction in hardback.

Some of the titles for 2009 include Sujit Saraf’s ‘The Confession of Sultana Daku’, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s ‘Way to Go’, Alain de Botton’s ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’, Rawi Hage’s ‘Cockroach’; John Updike’s ‘My Father’s Tears’, Noam Chomsky’s ‘Hopes and Prospects’, Zadie Smith’s ‘Changing My Mind’ and Paul Theroux’s ‘A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta’.

Hamish Hamilton was founded by the Scottish-American publisher Jamie Hamilton in London in 1931, in an era that saw a number of famous bookmakers like Jonathan Cape, Victor Gollancz and Michael Joseph set up publishing houses.

Hamilton used ‘Hamish’, the Celtic form of his first name James, to name his publishing house. Hamish Hamilton soon became one of Britain’s most distinguished literary houses publishing works by literary legends like Albert Camus, Raymond Chandler, Jean-Paul Sartre and R.K. Narayan.

Three of the most famous books of the 20th century, J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood,’ and Patrick Suskind’s crime thriller ‘Perfume’ were published by Hamish Hamilton.

Hamish Hamilton merged with the Penguin Group in 1986. In 2006, Hamish Hamilton authors won all the three major literary prizes in UK – Kiran Desai won the Man Booker while Zadie Smith bagged the Orange prize. Hilary Spurling, another Hamish Hamilton author, won the Whitbread literary prize.

Hamish Hamilton was launched in Canada in March 2009. India is the third foreign country after Canada and Australia to be able to publish titles under the imprint.

Orissa’s largest non-fiction work and first lexicon got a new lease of life with reprints appearing in the market for the first time in 70 years. Purnnachandra Ordia Bhashakosha, the monumental lexicon made up of seven volumes in 9,000-odd pages, has been republished by Orissa-based Lark Books and is priced at Rs 700.

Gopal Chandra Praharaj, a Cuttack lawyer and journalist, had spent more than 17 years from 1913 to compile the seven volumes with inputs from Pitambari Devi, Chandra Sekhar Mishra, Pandit Kulamani Dash, Kavya Tirtha and Pandit Rama Chandra Rath. The lexicon covered 1.85 lakh words with multi-lingual synonyms (Bengali, Hindi and English), explanatory notes and word history. Utkal Sahitya Press in Cuttack printed and published all seven volumes in September 1931, while the last volume appeared in 1940.

Considered an Oriya treasure trove, the original set of Purnnachandra Ordia Bhashakosha went into obscurity in subsequent years. While much of the printed copies were destroyed unbound and unsold the copies that survived were rare and not accessible for the public.

The fascinating stories of the Indian epic Mahabharata – including the rivalry between cousins Pandavas and Kauravas, Lord Krishna and his mischievous exploits as a lad, and the Kurukshetra battle – have been re-told for children in a new book with lots of colourful illustrations.

The Puffin Mahabharata authored by Namita Gokhale published by Penguin-Books India, has simplified the epic into 176 small anecdotes with colourful illustrations by artist and animation filmmaker Suddhasattwa Basu.

The book is based on the lores narrated by Suta, a traveller and story-teller, who had heard the tales of valour and sacrifice as a young boy from a sage Vaisampayana, a disciple of Vyasa, the seer who originally wrote the epic with the help of the lord Ganesha.

The book begins with an introductory tale on the genesis of Suta’s Mahabharata and goes on to narrate the lores of princess Ganga and king Santanu of Hastinapura, the tale of Satyawati, Amba, the birth of Kauravas and Pandavas, Karna, the arrival of Lord Krishna and the battle of Kurukshetra in small 500-word anecdotes.

Gokhale had in mind a target audience of young adults – “from 12 upwards who would understand the nuances.”

According to her, almost all children in India are familiar with Mahabharata.

“Everybody has heard of the story from their grandparents and television has played an important role in bringing the epic to Indian homes,” said the writer, who is currently working on an anthology of essays, In Search of Sita. Gokhale’s forte is historical novels.

Harper-Collins India has come out with a new toddlers’ series aimed at developing reading skills for children aged between one and five years. The “Big Cat Read at Home” series, published in June, is divided into four levels.

While level one – called “First Steps” – strings a few simple words and pictures together for children as young as one, level two, “Discover Reading”, teaches two-to-three-year olds to read short sentences with colourful visuals.

Level three, “Explore Reading”, links stories with speech and developed characters. Level Four, “Love Reading”, stretches the stories a little more so that they can be read independently.

“Children are not reading these days and parents are working. They do not have the time or the energy to read books to their children. The USP of the toddlers’ series is that one can go beyond the book. At the end of each book, there are notes for parents on how to use the series for various activities for kids,” Lipika Bhushan, marketing manager of Harper Collins-India, told IANS.

“The books have been prompted by the ‘Mom and I’ and ‘Dad and I’ workshops we have conducted to promote reading habits among children and help parents and their children bond better,” Bhushan said.

The marketing manager of Harper Collins said 2008-2009 has seen a spurt in the sale of children’s books with business growing by 10-12 percent despite the downturn.

The price of the books ranges between Rs.75 and Rs.495.

One of Bengal’s most popular writers, Mani Shankar Mukherjee, is waiting to see how English speaking urban India reacts to “The Middleman”, the translated avatar of his most famous Bengali novel “Jana Aranya”.

“I am looking forward to seeing how young and English-speaking India reacts to it,” Sankar, as he is known in millions of Bengali homes across the world, told IANS from Kolkata over telephone.

“There are two kinds of books in vernacular Indian literature – one which can be translated and one which cannot be. But my books are translatable.” “Jana Aranya” was famously made into a movie by the legendary Satyajit Ray in 1976.

“The Middleman”, the second in the series of translations of Sankar’s novels by Arunava Sinha, came out in June. The first, “Chowringhee”, was published in 2008.

Set in the Kolkata of the 1970s, “The Middleman” is the story of young man Somnath Banerjee’s search for a job when thousands of educated young men and women queued up at the employment bureau in search of jobs.

Unable to find one despite his education, Somnath decides to get into the order-supply business as a middleman. His ambition drives him to use an “innocent girl” as bait for a contract that will secure the future of Somnath Enterprises. As Somnath grows from an idealistic young man to a corrupt businessman, the book becomes a macabre portrait of the price the city extracts from its youth.

“Both ‘Chowringhee’ and ‘Jana Aranya’ (’The Middleman’) had a universality about them. They reflected the Indian situation as it was then and as it is now. Time has not been able to bite the reality. Probably, that’s the reason why both the books have been carried to the world,” Sankar said.

The book is autobiographical, culled from Sankar’s own experience as a “waste-paper basket seller” for a firm owned by a young man from Tamil Nadu.

Sankar, 76, who started off as a writer in the 1950s, shot to fame with “Chowringhee” and “The Middleman”. It was followed by a spate of books that spanned over two decades. Sankar is now working on two biographies – one on the seer Aurobindo and another on Swami Vivekananda.

The writer is excited. “My Bengali publishers in Kolkata will launch a commemorative edition of ‘The Middleman’ – a limited edition signed copy – to celebrate its success over the decades. ‘The Middleman’ is the highest selling Bengali novel of all time having crossed the quarter million mark,” he said.

The difference between “Chowringhee”, set in a plush hotel in Kolkata, and “The Middleman” is that the first is a fairy tale and the second is hard reality, says Sankar.

“Somnath, the protagonist, is like a tired bird from the sky who comes crashing down to earth,” says the novelist.

“‘The Middleman’ is the experience of those Bengalis who looked for jobs but couldn’t find any. The shift to becoming self-employed is difficult; full of culture clashes.

“Since independence, everything has changed for the worse – freedom brought the humiliation of partition, decadence, industrial slide and moral dilemmas. The weaker sections lost their ideals and began to look at success with suspicion. How can success be achieved through fair means?” he said, explaining the social relevance of the book.

“But I haven’t lost heart and I am still a great believer in relationships and extended families,” he said.

“The Middleman”, published by Penguin-Books India, will hit the market in the last week of June.

Sankar is glad that “Chowringhee” was received very well at the London Book Fair in April.

“The Independent, The Guardian and the Sunday Times devoted full pages to it. The book was billed as the surprise of the fair,” he said, adding it shows that Indian vernacular literature has come to the global stage.

Close your eyes and feel the butterfly, the cheesecake, the orange, the doormat and other tangible things we encounter in our daily life. In an attempt to reach out to visually-impaired young children, Karadi Tales has decided to launch a tactile picture book that would help them “feel” what they’re reading. For their first book, the publishers zeroed in on The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.

Karadi Tales director Shobha Viswanath, and the brain behind the book, says, “I realised that most of the textbooks for the visually-challenged only had Braille text and no pictures. What about people who had some residual vision and could partially see some colours and contours?” The question was answered in the form of different textures produced by different fabrics that Shobha personally selected or “felt” at garment shops.

Hence, hosiery’s cool, soft texture was chosen to represent a butterfly; prickly rug sack represents sun; velvet for cheesecake and white satin for the moon.

Each book takes eight hours to be completely handcrafted. The next two books in the series, ABC Touch and See and I Feel a Foot will be out soon. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is available at all major bookstores for Rs 1,450.