Remembering
Ravi Dayal (1937–2006)
Rukun
Advani
Had he been alive, Ravi Dayal would have turned seventy on 6th
September 2007. Keeping in mind Mark Antony’s opinion—‘the evil that men do
lives after them, the good is oft interr’ed with their bones’—as well as the
fact that good books live a long time whereas their publishers are soon
forgotten, it seems worthwhile to briefly recall the most significant figure in
Indian publishing after Independence.
The first thing that struck anyone on meeting Dayal was how
articulate he was, and the polish with which he spoke. Dayal’s articulation and
polish were aspects of his charisma, and both were central to the
attractiveness of his aristocratic personality. When hearing him speak I felt
extremely envious, because his mind seemed a reservoir of perfectly formed
sentences that he could summon at will. This made his diffidence as a public
speaker seem quite odd, but I think the reason he disliked such occasions was
that, like the great editors of the old world, he was reluctant to be the focus
of attention. An essential element in his worldview, which made him different
from many editors in our time now, was that he wanted all the attention to fall
on his authors. In Dayal’s world, claiming credit for editorial work was a form
of bad manners, an appaling deficiency in publishing civility. The editor was,
in his view, a backstage person who made a book well structured and readable,
but also someone who took no credit for it, never mind if he had virtually
coauthored it.
In fact, because he possessed an unmatched level of
scholarship, Dayal coauthored and ghost-wrote more books than he edited, and he
may well have rewritten more books and authors than any editor in the history
of Indian publishing. This was in fact where his heart lay, and he was pretty
mulish about it, as he was about many things, such as never being driven to
office by a chauffeur. He never allowed his headship of OUP India to get in the
way of his editorial work. In this sense, as someone who did not revel in the
power of the top job but in the power of his pen, he was completely singular.
Some months back I met the head of the University of California Press, a woman
called Lynne Withey who, like Ravi Dayal, was earlier the history editor of her
press. I asked her if she still edited books, and she said of course she
didn’t, she had too much else on her plate heading the Berkeley press. It
struck me even more clearly then how different Ravi Dayal had been. Over all
the years that he was OUP India’s CEO, he never stopped being its chief editor.
He delegated finance and admin to the extent possible, managing a 300-people
company while also blue pencilling his way through each script he’d taken on.
He refused an airconditioner in his room because it would have made the
organization inegalitarian in a way he considered unacceptable. This was the
sort of Gandhian trait that earned him huge respect, and which made his
organization congenial and unhierarchical. It created a sort of ‘Dayal Bagh’ in
which everyone grumbled about low salaries but where everyone stuck it out
because the bidi-smoking boss at least looked like he was in the same boat as
the bidi-smoking chaprasis. No one
cultivated unglamorous socialist fellow feeling with as much perverseness as
Dayal. Most people who worked with him
secretly hoped he would one day see the light of capitalist hedonism. But he
never did.
Various other virtues place Ravi Dayal within a publishing
ethos that has passed. Editors today specialize. They either acquisition or
manage, and the actual editing of scripts is either farmed out or seen as a
low-end occupation to be handled by assistant editors. In Ravi Dayal’s
conception, these specializations were the product of a corporate ethos,
whereas he wanted
his publishing
house to be in many ways the antithesis of a corporation. The German
sociologist Tönnies’s distinction between a community of craftspeople and an
industrial corporation is relevant when remembering Dayal. The crafts community
is distinguished by a lack of specialization, by the ability in a worker to
turn his hand to every aspect of his trade, and by an ethos of trust rather
than contracts. The publishing house that Dayal created was like a
gharana, a community of people engaged
in a craft that they had to learn every aspect of, most specially copyediting
which, in his view, was the most difficult and vital part of any publisher’s
job.
By giving everyone a long rope and
encouraging them to outgrow their specializations, he created a rare sort of
commitment among personnel on low salaries. People stayed on in his
organization far longer than personnel on very high salaries do today. In this,
Dayal’s uncorporate management style was unusual and effective. It showed a
fundamental instinct for what attracts people to publishing, what makes them
stay there, and what makes a publishing organization tick.
 |
| Five employees of OUP India in the 1960s. Ravi Dayal second from left, Girish Karnad third from left. | |
Dayal’s world was a necktie-free zone. I’ve seen a picture
of Ravi Dayal in a necktie when he was fresh out of Oxford, but over the years
I knew him he was allergic to neckties. It was his way of keeping a distance
from his white bosses in the West, as well as a symbol of keeping his own work
ethos and personnel free of the restrictions of a corporation. His sartorial
preferences, like his fierce nationalism, were anti-modern and Nehruvian. Given
the size of Indian publishing, it may seem disproportionate to connect Dayal
with Nehru, but the analogy makes sense to people who were a part of publishing
in the 1970s and 1980s, when Dayal was the Colossus in that small world. Like Nehru, he was an
Oxbridge-trained aristocrat who spoke English with cultivation and polish, and
like Nehru he could out-aristocrat any of the Brit white sahibs who in those
days thought they were still masters of the universe. If Nehru was the last
Englishman to rule India and create a new country by distancing England, Dayal
was the last Englishman to rule Indian publishing by wresting a wholly new
autonomy and authority for desi
publishing. Not wholly perhaps, but in substantial measure, it was Dayal who
created Indian academic publishing by local academics in history, sociology,
politics, economics, and literature, as well as—in the words of Ashis
Nandy—being the man who gave Indian writers and authors, for the first time, a
self-respect and confidence in their own abilities that they had never before
possessed.
In publishing, the greatest privilege and the biggest
achievement is to be a listbuilder, to create an enduring list of authors and
books that come to be seen as seminal to an area of reading and research. For a
publishing list to be respected, it is vital that the list be a discriminating
one. The trend today is to publish virtually anything that will sell, and
attractive jacket designs alongside media massaging have made all sorts of
mediocre stuff look saleable. Succumbing to this form of publishing is argued
as being inescapable because it is driven by shareholders clamouring for annual
increases in turnover. But in the long run this practice is also responsible
for reputed imprints looking diluted.
Ravi Dayal’s achievement, in contrast, was to prove that there is an
optimum number of books to publish annually, and if you habitually exceed that
number your imprint will decline. Dayal managed this difficult balance of
healthy annual turnover increases with enhancing—and later maintaining—the
OUP’s brand value. I doubt that anyone else could have managed this so
skilfully. His strong personality, his authority, his persuasiveness, and his
enviable articulation skills added up to a charisma which made everyone,
including his Oxford superiors, accept what he was doing even when they
disagreed or had reservations. Through all his fifteen or so years as the first
Indian head of OUP India, he refused to publish anything less than first-rate,
regardless of its saleability. He was incorruptible and could not be
pressurized. He joked that he hated the India International Centre because it
was a den of rejected authors keen to stab him both back and front. But the
result was that he transformed a textbooks-centred imprint that looked
run-of-the-mill before he took charge into one that made his press the
undisputed leader in South Asian academic publishing.
Between the 1960s and 1980s India produced many intellectual
pioneers in the arts and social sciences, and Ravi Dayal deserves to be
remembered alongside his friends and contemporaries Sálim Ali, R.K. Narayan,
Girish Karnad, M.N. Srinivas, S. Gopal, Ashis Nandy, Amartya Sen, Romila
Thapar, Ranajit Guha, and Irfan Habib. We have historians of literature and
social science who provide us with cultural memory filled with such names. We
don’t have historians of publishing, so it is easy to forget Dayal’s
intellectual and cultural importance within the same scenario. But if a history
of modern Indian publishing were to be written, there would be consensus on the
fact that discrimination, adherence to high standards, and longevity of tenure
made Ravi Dayal the finest publisher of modern India.
Like Bjorn Borg, Dayal took early retirement while right on
top in the mid 1980s, giving up a safe income and immense prestige at a young
age. Borg went bust, but Dayal went on to pioneer high-class literary fiction
publishing. By setting up ‘Ravi Dayal Publisher’ in 1987 he anticipated the
arrival of Penguin India, Picador India, Random House. But once these highly
capitalized firms had arrived with their heavy marketing artillery to publish
fiction and general books in India, it became virtually impossible for a
one-man venture such as Dayal’s to remain the dominant force His venture became
a delicatessen in the middle of publishing supermarkets: he continued
publishing a handful of books annually, usually by authors who valued
intelligent feedback and high editorial skills above slick packaging and
glamorous marketing.
I’ll conclude on a personal note because, certainly in Ravi
Dayal’s case, the personal life of likes and dislikes and feelings was
inseparable from his professional activities; to understand some of the
affections that made him what he was is an oblique route to understanding the
kind of publishing ethos he believed in.
Dayal didn’t have a dog of his own, but he loved dogs. A
man’s response to animals often tells you more about him than his response to
people, and Dayal’s response to dogs said a great deal about him. Every time he
met my dog Biscoot, he would greet her like a long lost friend, he would call
her ‘Bitia’ and make a great fuss over her. Only when her tail had ceased
wagging would he bother to greet me. To anyone who has ever had a dog, this
makes complete sense. It made me connect with Ravi Dayal the person. His
disinterested and genuine affection for dogs suggested something that, deep
down, was not in the least different from his feeling for books and authors
because it showed he never lost sight of small things—the importance of
positioning a comma correctly, the necessity of petting a dog sufficiently.
Two other oddly endearing things about him come to mind. The
first is that late in life he became addicted to saas-bahu serials. I put this addiction down to the fact that after
a lifetime with the sociology of M.N. Srinivas, he was seeking relief in the
sociology of Ekta Kapoor. The second was his refusal to drink imported whisky.
For some unfathomable reason, he felt it was a betrayal of India to drink what
Khushwant Singh has unofficially demonstrated is India’s national drink,
Scotch. Ravi Dayal must have been the
only man ever to have lived in Sujan Singh Park who only drank Royal Stag
himself, while bestowing Black Label upon his guests as a form of punishment,
letting them know all the while that they were traitors to the country. I
sometimes wondered if Dayal’s antipathy to Scotch was his form of rebelling
against his father-in-law, Khushwant Singh.
My fondest memory of Ravi Dayal is of a small-built man with
a large heart whose affections filled his vast mansion in Ranikhet. Here you
could hear him sometimes whistling tunefully, sometimes playing the mouth
organ. He could play almost any tune you asked him to, from memory. But he was
quite snooty about what he played. Once, my wife, tired of his renderings of
‘Carmen’ and the ‘Tannhäuser Overture’ and
other lofty stuff, asked him to play ‘Hey Jude’. At this Ravi Dayal raised an
eyebrow and said scornfully, ‘What, that beetle?’, and flatly refused to play
the song.
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