I came to know about Advani for the first time about 25 years back when I took a month-long course in publishing. On the first day, we were given two books on publishing. One was Butcher’s Copy-editing by Judith Butcher et al, and the other was Editors on Editing, with six eminent editors contributing two essays each on their editorial experience and tradecraft. One of the editors in the book was Advani, who was then Oxford University Press‘ managing editor.
After he resigned from OUP, Advani started his scholarly imprint Permanent Black with his partner Anuradha Roy, which would become a byword for editorial excellence. Many OUP authors signed up with Advani. Guha provides a fascinating account on the namkaran of the house, which also gives us a glimpse of Advani’s politically incorrect Stephanian wit. ‘He joked to me that he had wanted actually to call it Kaloo for Men [since there was already a feminist publishing firm called Kali for Women]’.
The initial few years were filled with despair and doubt. In an essay on this time, Advani writes, ‘At the start of the venture [Permanent Black]… we sometimes wondered, when viewing with dismay the expression of gloom and doom on the face of our accountant, if we shouldn’t have called ourselves Permanent Red.’
The ‘making of books’ for editor and author is a life-changing experience. Guha writes, ‘In an author’s life, the person next in importance to his or her romantic partner is his or her editor.’ There is some truth in the statement. More so for a first-time author. While the book is being made, the editor holds an inordinate amount of power over the author, both emotional and intellectual.
For many writers, writing a book can be physically debilitating. They keep falling ill as the book demands more and more of their vitality. This happens mostly to novelists. Even your physical appearance changes. While the toll is there even if you write a bad novel, if you write a good one, it alters you for the ages. Even editors are not immune to this emotional atyachaar, and quite a few end up marrying their authors. One of the great success stories of post-independence India is the superlative quality of its English language publishing. Especially when it came to scholarly books on South Asia. In many ways, contribution of historians and social scientists like TN Madan, Romila Thapar, Ranajit Guha, Meenakshi Mukherjee, DN Jha, MN Srinivas and Mushirul Hasan towards delineating our national consciousness is no less than that of the ‘Rocket Boys’, Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. And the fact that they had world-class editors and publishers like Samuel Israel, Sujit Mukherjee, Ramesh Jain, Urvashi Butalia, Tejeshwar Singh, Ritu Menon and Rukun Advani, would go a long way in the making of those books and scholars.
Guha and Advani, author and editor, are the perfect odd couple. While one is exuberant and self-aware, the other is reticent. While one has written or edited nearly 20 scholarly books, the other (Advani) has written two. While one is India’s foremost public intellectual, the other is somewhat reclusive and lives in the Himalayas.
Perhaps it is for this reason they make such a wonderful pair. Like Melville and Delon. Like Avedon and Twiggy. Like Wenner and Thompson.
Joe Hagan, in Sticky Fingers, his excellent biography of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine, calls the collaboration between Wenner and his star writer Hunter S Thompson ‘cosmically preordained.’ Wenner explains, ‘We sparked as we saw each other as kindred spirits.’ And yet, sometimes the adoration between writers and editors can be one-sided, as Cheever realises, much to his dismay.
The writer is author of Ritwik & Hriday: Tales From the City, Tales From the Town
