Book contents
6 - Publishers' Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
Summary
See patient Wilkins to the World unfold
What'ver discovered Sanskrit relics hold
But he performed a yet more noble part
He gave to Asia typographic art
(in Kesavan, 1985:264)Various segments, from many social levels, justify through their reception, the intellectual and cultural cost of a literary product and ‘explain’ its proliferation. The preceding chapters have shown how a ‘literary’ product, in this case an Indian text in English translation, is neither confined to, nor exclusively dependent on literary factors alone. Among institutions that canonize works of art, the publishing industry plays a very crucial role. Situated at a point of intersection between culture and commerce, print capitalism ‘determines’, to an extent, the production and consumption of literature. Publishing choices stem from both cultural and market-driven forces. When it comes to literature, we do not, on the whole, think of market forces as decisive in the generation, availability and reading of books. Of course, books are products of negotiations between publishing agencies and socio-cultural trends. In the complex interplay of demand and supply, readers' desires are both created and addressed, making the role of publishing and disseminating too important to ignore. This part of the study is based on the premise that the proliferation of books in English translation in the recent decades and the dynamism of English-language publishing in India are interconnected. As in the earlier chapters, the main focus of this chapter is the period of the mideighties. What follows here, therefore, is a discussion of the preceding period.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Translating India , pp. 58 - 68Publisher: Foundation BooksPrint publication year: 2005