It is a busy time for poet and translator Neelabh Ashk. The son of noted Hindi litterateur Upendranath Ashk, he has just finished translating Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence into Hindi, but his work is far from over. There are Namita Devidayal’s The Music Room, VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, three books by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, all of which have been commissioned by leading publishing houses to be translated into Hindi. “I think publishing in Indian languages is coming into its own,” says the 65-year-old freelancer, who has also translated Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

“In a country where the primary spoken language is not English, it is lopsided not to publish in Indian languages,” says Minakshi Thakur, editor of Harper Hindi that came into being last year. What began with 11 books now has 40 titles a year. But regional-language market is tough to crack. As Thakur says, “The Hindi market is highly price-sensitive. It’s a market where hardbacks are available for Rs 100-150 and paperbacks for Rs 30-50. We cannot match those prices but can manage to come close. We will give the readers better-produced titles and value for their money.” Vaishali Mathur, senior commissioning editor, Penguin, agrees, “Also, the distribution across a varied cross-section of readership offers its own challenges.”

Harper Hindi is banking on best-selling books of Paulo Coelho, “mass-market fiction” like Mukul Deva’s Lashkar and contemporary Hindi writing by Sara Rai, Teji Grover and Indu Jain. The difficulties in pricing and distribution notwithstanding, they are “planning to graduate to Bengali in a year”. Penguin too has an extensive list in place. The Hindi translation of Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India called Ubharte Bharat ki Tasveer had a first print run of 2,000 copies and went into reprint within a few days of its release. The English title is priced at Rs 699, but the Hindi comes for just 295. There are also the Hindi and Marathi translations of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Shashi Deshpande’s Go Kiss The World.

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