Dina Nath Malhotra has no patience for that old canard—people don’t read. His life and legacy are proof enough that they do. If publishers today thrive on the belief that there is a book inside each one of us, Malhotra, as a publisher in the 1950s, struck out in the belief that there were thousands of readers waiting to be discovered.

So he did the unthinkable: in a country where 70 per cent of the population was illiterate, he chose popular classics, translated them into Hindi, priced them at Re 1 each and sold them. “People will read if books are affordable,” he says firmly when we meet him at his Jorbagh residence. Like Allan Lane in 1930s Britain, Malhotra had picked up the idea whose time had come, the paperback. The publishing house he founded in 1958, Hind Pocket Books, became a legend. “We first published a set of 10 books, all paperbacks, which included a translation of Tagore’s Gitanjali. The first print run was 6,000 copies. And we sold out in three weeks,” he says.

At 86, Malhotra is a weathered old man. But he has the puckish charm of a dog-eared book and several stories to share. Like how a trip to Europe in 1956 opened his eyes to the great democratisation of reading in the world. Or of a meeting with Allan Lane, the founder of Penguin, who warned him of how tough the Indian market could be to crack. Or how, as a young publisher, he travelled across the country, striking up friendships with newspaper hawkers and vendors and convincing them to sell the new books. “I had tea with them, chatted them up. I gave them small wire racks for free so that they could display the books. These relationships I forged were the secret of my success,” he says. In a few years, Hind Pocket Books had got an enviable list of authors like Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Mulk Raj Anand, Chatur Sen, Gulshan Nanda and Sahir Ludhianvi. Translations of classics from all parts of the country formed a considerable chunk of their titles. “Those books were read by everyone—from the taxi-driver and the mali to judges and housewives. Print runs of some books went up to a lakh,” he says. Later, he started a publication house for Indian literature in English, Orient, which published authors like R.K. Narayan, Kamala Markandeya and Khushwant Singh.

... contd.