Without P. Lal and his Writers Workshop, some of the best Indian writers in English would not have found their voice
In 1981, Vikram Seth was a 29-year-old collector of rejection slips, his first book of verses having cut no ice with publishers. That was till he walked up to a house in Lake Gardens, Kolkata. “A very weary and disillusioned Vikram came to me that summer. He had been rejected by almost a dozen publishers. I went through it and told him that he was at least a decade ahead of his times,” says 79-year-old Professor Puroshottam Lal, the man behind Writers Workshop, the iconic literary publishing house which turns fifty this year. Mappings, a slim volume of Seth’s poetry, bound in an orange saree, was published that year.

Lal, who saw stirrings of greatness in the elegantly crafted poems, is somewhat of a legend in literary circles—that rare lover of literature who can spot beauty before glowing blurbs have been written about it, that rare publisher who doesn’t shudder at the thought of poetry. In the last five decades, he has published the first books of many authors—several of them poets—who went on to win fame—Asif Currimbhoy, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Ruskin Bond, Pritish Nandy, Chandrakant Bakshi and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. “I have met all of them in this very room. They were seated on the chair you are sitting,” says Lal.
It’s a room that looks like it has seen a lot. Stacks of books line the wall and documents are strewn all over. It’s a room which saw the birth of Writers Workshop. “It was in 1958. We were a group of writers who desperately wanted to write our kind of stuff. We would meet here and exchange ideas. We wanted to write about our everyday experiences in English. We wanted to creatively express ourselves in English, which in those days was not the thing to do. You didn’t creatively express yourself in English in a just independent India. The intellectuals of the country were all too ready to write this foreign language off,” he says.

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