The book situation in India

UNESCO Courier, July, 1988 by Lokenath Bhattacharya

The book situation in India

INDIA, which publishes about 20,000 titles annually, is the eighth largest book producing country in the world. With a healthy climate for authorship, democratic policies and institutions, increasingly well-equipped printing plants, availability of locally produced paper, editorial expertise, a functioning network of distribution and a growing community of readers, the country also has the largest publishing infrastructure in the developing world.

According to a survey of the Indian book industry carried out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research, there are some 3,000 active publishers in India, including about 100 large firms bringing out a minimum of 50 titles per year. Educational publishing occupies the most prominent place. Although the great bulk of publishing is in private hands, about 450 agencies in the public sector are also active in this field. In fact, the central government has emerged as India's largest single publishing agency, and now accounts for about 20 per cent of the country's book production.

The problems of authorship and publishing in India should be seen against a background of enormous linguistic and ethnic diversity. Fifteen major languages are recognized by the Constitution as national languages. They are, alphabetically, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. All these are independent languages, not dialects or variations of another languages, and most of them have quite extensive literatures of their own. Each is spoken by millions of people.

In addition to the major languages and a few others such as Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Manipuri, Nepali and Rajasthani which, though not as important, are still spoken by large numbers of people, there are nearly 400 tribal mother tongues in India, most of them with no written literature at all. The problem of scripts, too, is almost as complex. The eleven major script systems, used in addition to the Perso-Arabic and Roman, are Nagari, Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati and Gurumukhi.

Then there is the oral tradition, the majestic presence of the spoken word, which even today is far from being superseded. "Talking" books, as opposed to written ones, are still a familiar sight. Wandering minstrels board a train or gather in village fairs, and keep an audience spellbound with what they recount or chant. Even to this day, busy marketplaces in cities like Calcutta undergo a magical transformation in the evening when groups of people assemble to listen to an episode of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.

The following figures give some idea of literary activities in the major Indian languages, as well as works written in English by Indian authors. In one recent year, India produced a total of 21,265 titles--77 in Assamese, 1,302 in Bengali, 10,438 in English, 972 in Gujarati, 2,633 in Hindi, 306 in Kannada, 595 in Malayalam, 1,514 in Marathi, 322 in Oriya, 597 in Punjabi, 177 in Sanskrit, 910 in Tamil, 817 in Telugu, 352 in Urdu and 253 in other languages. Around 33 per cent of the total were literary works (except in the case of English, in which creative writing is negligible in India). There is also the fact that less than 7 per cent of India's total population know an Indian language other than their own mother tongue although, since major language speakers are not solely confined to specific areas or towns, all the States and Union territories are multi-lingual.

Hindi, because of the numbers of people who speak it, has been declared the official language of the country and every effort is being made to promote its development and use at the national level. The yearly output of publishing in Hindi is second only to that in English.

Proficiency in English, instead of hindering the growth and richness of expression in all the major Indian languages, has significantly contributed to it. Today, India ranks as the world's third largest producer of books in English, after the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

The principal factors governing publishing activities in a country are its literacy rate, the size and nature of its educated population and--since textbooks and other allied supplementary reading material are the mainstay of the book trade, especially in a developing country--its educational policies and programmes. While literacy and reading habits are nowhere synonymous, literacy remains the first pre-requisite for the growth of a reading programme.

The last Indian census taken in 1981 shows the country's literacy rate to be about 37 per cent, registering an increase of nearly 7 per cent over the previous figures of 1971. This increase does not mean that there has been an appreciable fall in the number of illiterates in the country. On the contrary, due to a considerable expansion of population figures during the decade, India's illiterate population has increased by as many as 48 million.