Advance, India fair

As an India showcase, the Frankfurt Book Fair was a success, says Urvashi Butalia. As a business enterprise, it fell short.

In the central square at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, a Dastakari haat did brisk business, a yoga and ayurveda stand sold masala chai to long queues of people, and a large, brightly coloured poster showed Ganesh dancing, fleet of foot and heavy of girth, on a laptop keyboard: India in all 21, and more, centuries at once.

The only country to be invited as Guest of Honour twice (the first time in 1986) to the world's largest book fair (more than 7,000 exhibitors from 111 countries, and hundreds of trade visitors), India put on an impressive spectacle, showcasing art, theatre, popular culture, food, authors "" everything, in fact, except the real business of the fair, books and publishers.

More than a year in preparation, and with extensive initial consultations with different publishers, a Rs 20 crore budget, a number of pre-Frankfurt workshops "" all this augured well for what is essentially a trade event, a business opportunity for publishers to showcase their work, and their authors, to sell and buy rights, to discuss deals, to establish partnerships.

If some of this happened, it did so, in the words of one Indian publisher, "not so much because of the National Book Trust (the organising body), but despite it".

There's little doubt that the show put on at Frankfurt, and in other cities of Germany, was impressive, popular, colourful, varied, and it caught the attention of the media.

Seldom has a guest country received the kind of media attention in the German press that India did: special supplements in many papers, one-hour-long programmes on television, unprecedented crowds on the public days.

Everywhere you turned at the fair, you met an Indian academic, or author, or dancer, or playwright, or television personality. And yet, there was a constant rumble of discontent, principally among those who make books.

At a pre-Frankfurt workshop held in Delhi a month or so before the fair, this discontent was evident. Publishers complained that despite having booked stands and paid for them well in advance, they had not received their stand numbers "" essential information if you are to set up meetings, something that's usually done at least two months before the fair. Nor were they given any information about stand design: would there be more shelves, or more wall space, should they take books or posters?

In Frankfurt itself, even as large numbers of well-attended author readings took place, publishers grumbled that their stands looked tacky (and they did), that they were not even given waste paper baskets (and they were not), that the drinking water jar had run out (it had), that the "hostesses" (hired for their combination of German language skills and Indian genes) knew little and were unhelpful.

"We weren't even extended the courtesy," said several, "of being invited to the inauguration of the fair."

Somewhere, the priorities were clearly askew. As an event, a showcasing of India and its diversity, Frankfurt was a success. As a business enterprise, many felt it was an opportunity that was not made enough of.

No other industry, publishers felt, would get such short shrift: festivals of India, which are by now legion, have never had much to say about books. Why should the most major book festival in the world then repeat that?

To some extent, this is to be expected when the government is involved. Bureaucratic constraints can result in slanted priorities. Large numbers of representatives from different ministries found a place on the steering committee of the fair, very few publishers did. The selection of invited authors, while varied, could have been much more imaginative.

For example, without doubt the biggest literary sensation on the Indian publishing scene in the last year has been an unusual writer, a domestic worker.

Baby Halder's autobiography, A Life Less Ordinary, has sold rights in 16 Indian and foreign languages, it has earned considerable money, and it figured prominently in the German media. And had India invited and showcased this writer "" a poor, young, low caste woman who has become a major writer "" a different and perhaps more valuable message would have gone out about India and Indian democracy.

But Ganesh wasn't dancing entirely without reason: no matter that NBT and Sahitya Akademi had a spat and invited different sets of authors, or that stand design could have been much more innovative (several publishers asked why NBT had not invited young designers from the National Institute of Design), a large number of books by Indian writers were translated into European languages under NBT's subsidy programme set in place last year. And a lot of business got done: the exact figures will become clear later. But the general feeling was that things could have been much better.

On the last but one day of the fair, Ganesh's dance brought about a by-now familiar reaction: the book fair received an email from a Hindu organisation based, predictably, in the United States, demanding that the Ganesh poster be immediately removed.

"You are hurting our sentiments," they were told. The protest email was also sent to many of the participating Indian publishers. But money speaks its own language.

Because publishers and book fair organisers were engaged in doing business and signing deals, the email went largely ignored. Ganesh continued to dance, possibly tapping out a new book to be translated shortly into German from one of the Indian languages.