T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Barbarians at the Gate

Books have become like fortnightly magazines where sales are based on the cover story

There are many mysteries that are difficult to resolve. Foremost amongst them is the urge that some people have to write someone else’s biography.

Autobiographies are understandable. After all, a person would like to tell his or her story.

It should be noted here, though, that more than women, it is men who think their story is worth telling. Their peacock aspect simply refuses to go away.

But biographies? Why, for heaven’s sake? True, there is an academic need to know about the lives of the Great People who died more than half a century ago. But why of those died only recently or even the living?

The other day a friend who works in the publishing world told me this was because there is a new trend in publishing. This was to commission the biographies of more-or-less anyone who had been in the news, preferably on TV. 

And, since journalists are being sacked by the truckload by newspapers, it had become easy to find writers. The lack of writers used to be a big problem in the past.

That’s not all: There is also the buyback clause in the agreement. This ensures commercial viability. That is what economists call the positive externality.

But there is a negative one as well. It is that the subject of the biography dictates the content.

The result is small flood of biographies of people you really don’t want to know about. Someone, for example, is writing the biography of man who is known to have been involved in a number of financial shenanigans recently.

The reason why

I called up someone who has retired from publishing to ask why this was happening. He said the structure of publishing had changed. 

Earlier a company brought out between 30 and 100 titles a year that sold slowly over three years. Now the game was to bring out quickies that had to sell in three months. 

Books, he said, have become like fortnightly magazines where sales are based on the cover story. In the case of books, he said, if you can put together a quick 200-250 pages for Rs 200-250 (or one rupee per page) well, as the British say, Bob’s your uncle. 

Sell a couple of thousand copies and move on.

As if this is not bad enough, unlike in the West, in India few large publishers are interested in serious biographies. Nor, indeed, are historians who should be writing them. 

There are the occasional ones, of course. But by and large our historians avoid biographies. It is infra dig, somehow. The result, to put it mildly, is very unsatisfactory for readers. 

The odd exceptions

Happily, this is not always so. From time to time we do get some decent biographies. One such recent one is of Feroze Gandhi by an 84-year-old Swedish journalist. His name is Bertil Falk. 

The book is published by Roli Books. It is properly researched and referenced. It is flat in its narration, which is a great attribute for a biography. And it doesn’t hold back on the unpleasant aspects like the relationship between Nehru, Feroze and Indira.

In short, it is an excellent piece of work on a man who was not very interesting except for the fact that he was Jawaharlal Nehru’s son-in-law, Indira Gandhi’s husband and Rajiv Gandhi’s father. 

Another recent and excellent biography, although not published in India, is of Karl Marx by Gareth Jones, a Cambridge professor of history. It isn’t what you would a riveting read or what you’d carry on a plane because it is 750 pages. But it is sufficiently detailed to make you want to spend more than just a couple of hours on it.

Another superb one was the biography of Genghis Khan – yes, the Great Khan – by Jack Weatherford. It challenges the common wisdom about the man, so much so that even Dr Manmohan Singh has endorsed it.

There are many others but very few, alas, that have been written by Indians about Indians that would meet the tests of genuine scholarship. Most of what is there is written by untrained persons.  

It is a sign of an immaturity in an industry that claims to cater to the intellect but produces mere comic books. This is what our publishers are doing when it comes to biographies.

The time has come, now for Indian publishers to get their focus right and start commissioning academic historians to write proper biographies of major Indian personalities.  They will not regret it.