The year 2007 is a very appropriate year to pause and take a look at book publishing—at least as far as publishing in Marathi is concerned. For we then get a span of two centuries to ponder over. It was exactly two hundred years ago—in 1807—that the first Marathi book was published. Not in Maharashtra, of course, where Maratha rule prevailed, but far away in Serampore, Bengal. The laborious groundwork of enlisting the number of characters forming a font, casting them in type-metal, composing the matter and printing it out— all was done by dedicated missionaries. After successfully accomplishing all these tasks, the first book (five stories from the Sanskrit Hitopadesha in translation), saw the light of day in 1807—exactly 200 years ago. For the first book to come out in Maharashtra itself, we had to wait till the rule of the Marathi-speaking Peshwas was brought to an end by the British East India Company. No Marathi book could come out till the Marathi-speaking rulers were ousted. It sounds ironic, but it is true all the same.
The earlier rulers too had a policy of encouraging learning. Some funds were earmarked for it, and were disbursed annually on a particular religious occasion. Of course, only Brahmins could participate in it. Anyone who could recite some Sanskrit couplet was handed a sumptuous cash gift of a couple of rupees and people traveled hundreds of miles on foot just for that. The new rulers decided to appropriate these funds for a better purpose: prizes were given to books published in Marathi. That is how it all started—just two hundred years ago, when people who could read or write were a miniscule minority.
But then schools began to sprout and the number of literates kept growing. So by the time the British left India, the literates had grown to a rather respectable 40 per cent, and keeping pace with this was a phenomenal growth in publishing activity: periodicals of every denomination and, of course, the books. They had long been without government patronage and made a mark on their own. The most enterprising among the publishers even ventured into school textbooks, which till then was turf reserved for British publishers; this provided a cushion to fall back on if the 'general trade books' failed to generate minimum returns. The textbooks helped them to keep going.
And then we reached yet another landmark: attainment of independence and the reorganization of states on a linguistic basis. Over a period of fifty to sixty years—again ironically—a great decline appears to have set in.
The number of schools initially increased by leaps and bounds and a government of-the-people-and-by-the-people descended on the greenest pasture—school textbooks—and took it over; thus removing the cushion for general trade books and making the business of publishing non-textbooks many times riskier than before. This was immediately reflected in the number of titles published in any given year. The number slipped by 30 to 40 per cent. It went up again only after the emergence of Dalit literature. At about the same time, by one of those quirks of history, Marathi-medium schools of long standing and proven merit started transforming themselves into English-medium schools.
Even Marathi departments in colleges started losing students. Somewhere in between computers made their appearance on the scene, and with plenty of jobs in the U.S. waiting to be had just for the asking, the English language consolidated its position. Guardians and their wards were not interested in wasting time and energy on Marathi any more. Almost two per cent of Indians preferred to leave the country for good and settle abroad. In the last twenty years things have come to such a pass that books have been brought out with weird titles like 'Marathi as a Second Language' -- a euphemism for 'Mother tongue as A Foreign Language'; obviously written for children of NRI parents.
The situation has been aggravated by the utter lack of competence on the technical front. In spite of computers being lionized by the printing industry and every Indian language newspaper bringing out its Web edition, it is still all really a one-way traffic.
No Indian language newspaper site is interactive. Everything is based on proprietary codes. The computer is used only as an input device—just like the manual typewriter—and the printer as a cyclostyling machine. The packages work only when the input and output are situated at one and the same place. The message cannot be sent around the world, except as an attachment. The Indian language computer is not yet an instrument of communication technology; it only plays its role as a reproduction technology without the hot metal.
An Indian language font costs four times the price of an English font, and the in-putting charges at the entry point are at least fifty per cent more than those for English. The ISCII put together by C-DAC and certified by the Bureau of Indian Standards is nowhere visible in the scores of software packages that rule the market. To date the code itself has been revised at least twice—an unheard of phenomenon in the field—and the C-DAC people are in the mood to revise it once again if the situation so demands. Since even a clear-cut definition of an alphabet has not been fed into the computer, the vernacular newspapers are compelled to lose between 5 to 10 per cent of space daily, because the auto-hyphenation program is not in place.
We have not yet been able to put together a viable OCR program for Indian languages, thus putting all the printed material from the pre-computer era out of reach for new readers. The list of shortcomings is almost endless. One is inclined to suspect that a conspiracy is being hatched to kill the Indian languages in the digital era. The State government of Maharashtra has virtually hit the last nail in the coffin of Marathi with its most recent decree that at the secondary school level all three languages—Hindi, English and Marathi—will be grouped together for the purpose of computing the result. And to think that this has come about fifty years after the bitterly fought war for the reorganization of the states along linguistic lines.
So where does all this leave the Marathi publishing industry? The publishing enterprise in Marathi has always been full of so-called ‘independent’ publishers—meaning publishers who carried on their business by sheer personal drive. There are very few publishing firms that have crossed the generation gap and passed on the baton to the next generation—and even there the personal character of the business persists. To this day there are no corporate publishing houses in Marathi. But given the overall scenario of decline scripted above, can we say that there is a future for publishing in Marathi? With this seminar the jury is in session and we await the verdict.
The above note was prepared by the author for a seminar organized by the National Book Trust in Delhi in October 2007. |
