Ravi Dayal, who gave space to new Indian writing, is no more

In the 1990s, after he set up his independent publishing house, he published the Indian editions of all of Amitav Ghosh’s books, starting with his second (The Shadow Lines) and gave a platform to new writers of fiction, especially with Civil Lines, his occasional journal of new writing.

In all of this, Dayal was very much an editor/publisher alert to the possibilities and limitations of his profession. OUP, when Dayal came to it in the early sixties, did not require its editors to be overly concerned with the financial returns on their selections.

“He was not so much a publisher with an eye on the business side of things,” says fellow publisher and old friend Ravi Vyas. “He was an editor who looked at new manuscripts in detail. He was that good editor, to recall a famous formulation, who knows not what to put in but what you can no longer take out.

For academic publishing in an India still learning to know itself from within that was an enabling filter.

Vyas says Dayal’s complementary skill was to gather a good team. A team member, Rukun Advani, recently wrote about his early induction in that team. Advani, fresh from the lofty classics of university, expressed disinclination to handle “subaltern studies” as his first assignment.

As he later remembered it: “Dayal said frostily that he himself had edited the first volume of Subaltern Studies and that it had been an education. With the iciness of a native who was actually an upper-class Bloomsbury Brit disguised in Gandhian khadi, he said he hoped that the subsequent volume, which he was pleased to hand over now, would confer a similar benefit upon me. He suggested that I might like to first read the first volume. I had learnt, in Britain, that such suggestions are somewhat more emphatic than the Ten Commandments. A pedigreed Englishman never does anything as vulgar as command. He suggests.”

Decades later — now with his own publishing house Permanent Black, which has produced books sharing Dayal’s imprint — Advani is still publishing subaltern historians.

But OUP, too, slowly began looking at the bottomline. The trend would show in the book lists in the mid-nineties, but by the end of the previous decade Dayal had perhaps already seen the straws in the wind and took premature retirement.

He retreated to his Sujan Singh Park apartment. A new time was beginning in Indian publishing in English. Fiction and trade books were filling the bookshops. Dayal caught it with just about the first book he published in this new avatar, he the sole employee of Ravi Dayal Publishers: Shadow Lines, by Amitav Ghosh. It was the Indian edition of a friend’s novel, yes, but it associated Dayal’s imprint with high standards in a market suddenly dominated by titles coming off launch parties.

That standard gave a platform for new writers like Mukul Kesavan and Shyama Futehally to announce their fiction. And with the launch of Civil Lines, stated to be published as soon as enough new writing was gathered, that platform was expanded.

Later, gaps between issues would get longer and longer, and eventually Dayal would bequeath the journal to another. Perhaps its time is still to come.