David Davidar is back in business. And this time, he’s making Delhi his home. Gargi Gupta speaks to him about his publishing plans.
David Davidar is the closest we have in India to a publishing star; the story about how he started Penguin India in 1985 while still in his twenties and grew the publisher to the very top with authors such as Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai and Suketu Mehta has been recounted often enough in the media. His fall from grace was equally dramatic — he left Penguin International, of which he was CEO, following allegations of sexual harassment by a colleague. Now, seven years after he left India to move to Toronto, and nine months after he exited his last job, Davidar is back in Delhi and in business, having started a new publishing company called Aleph in partnership with Rupa.
“Literary and quality non-fiction” is the area that Davidar is eyeing for Aleph’s publishing list, a very broad spectrum of themes which he narrows down, when pressed, to books such as The Perfect Storm (a 1997 bestseller about a fishing boat caught in a storm) or Into Thin Air (another personal-account-of-a-disaster book about an expedition to Mt Everest) or In Cold Blood (Truman Capote’s account of the murder of a Kansas family). These are books that, he says with some passion, “don’t exist in India”. But is there a market for literary novels? “There has always been a readership for literary novels, a very small percentage of literary novels maybe, but we want to be among the people who publish that small percentage,” says Davidar, brimming with confidence.
Davidar himself has another book coming up this September, his third novel, Ithaca [his first two were The House of Blue Mangoes (2002) and The Solitude of Emperors (2007)], published by HarperCollins. Set in the world of publishing, a world that he’s now been associated with for 25 years, all he’ll say about Ithaca is that it is about “the making and unmaking of a bestseller”, “a kind of thriller”, but “not autobiographical”.
Clearly, Davidar is ready to move on. “I am very happy to talk about it [referring to the allegations],” he says. “I made a point-by-point rebuttal of every allegation. At the time I made it, I had to seek the permission of my wife, close family and friends, and tell them that it was going to be uncomfortable, but there was no option... The matter’s been settled.” As for the rest — “Who knows? I don’t care!”
The Indian publishing industry, of course, was supportive all through the media glare on its poster boy. Davidar still speaks of being astonished by the many emails he got “from people we didn’t know”. Since his return in January, “I’ve had eight or nine approaches” by publishers “who offered a variety of options”. And the only reason he chose Rupa was because, after having worked for a multinational company for so many years, Davidar “was really keen to own the company I was part of” but “wanted to be supported by somebody who was really sound in the fundamentals”. Davidar holds a minority stake in Aleph, although exactly how much he will not reveal.
For Rupa, of course, trapped in its position as leader of the mass segment — the publisher developed the very successful on-the-go segment with inexpensive editions of easy-to-read novels by the likes of Chetan Bhagat and Anurag Mathur — Aleph signified “the next leap forward”, in the words of Rupa’s managing director, Kapish Mehra. As it surveyed its options and the people who could help it to move up the quality scale, “Davidar was on top of the list. It is a rarity to have the privilege to work with someone who is on top of the list,” says Mehra.
According to the arrangement, Aleph will have a separate acquisition team, but the sales and distribution functions will be handled by Rupa with Aleph piggybacking on the latter’s very strong retail linkages. Davidar, in turn, will be editorial consultant for Rupa. The plan intially is to do about 25 books a year. Will any of these be the marquee names he’s worked with previously? Davidar’s not telling. Naturally.
