# The Contribution of Writers Workshop

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/the-contribution-of-ww/
- Published: 2015-07-07T18:14:25+00:00
- Author: admin

**Ananda Lal and Rubana Huq**

 

In 1987, the Institute of Book Publishing in New Delhi established the Indian Publishing
Hall of Fame, “to acknowledge, acclaim and honour those who have made outstanding
contributions to the promotion of publishing and the cause of book culture in India.”
[[i]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn1) The inaugural list of inductees comprised,
posthumously, Jawaharlal Nehru, K. M. Munshi (founder of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan),
D. R. Mankekar (who authored many books of political journalism), and M. N. Rao (
promoter of the Home Library Plan, among other initiatives, in Andhra Pradesh); 
and Dev Raj Chawla (of UBS Publishers’ Distributors), the Sahitya Pravarthaka Cooperative
Society (in Kerala), and P. Lal (of Writers Workshop). The citation for Professor
Lal read: “Writers Workshop has grown into a movement with an ethos of its own. 
It has succeeded in furthering the cause of Indian poetry in English despite its
limited resources: a tribute to Lal’s devotion and energy. No one has been able 
to create and sustain a similar effort.” Yet in 2008, when the planning started 
for an anthology marking fifty years of Writers Workshop, Lal shared with a researcher,“
Fifty isn’t enough for anyone to evaluate the Workshop. One needs to stand sufficiently
distanced from history to assess.”[[ii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn2)
Notwithstanding both the earlier encomium and his later warning, we attempt here
to quantify Writers Workshop’s contribution to Indian poetry in English, beyond 
the self-evident fact that in those fifty years it launched over 1000 titles, most
of them poetry in English by Indians, surpassing all other publishers in that genre
put together.

 

**The beginnings till the 1960s**

P. Lal (born in 1929) made his first significant appearance in print as a college
student in the third issue of the ninth volume of _St Xavier’s Magazine_ in July
1947, containing his essay “In Defence of Modern English Poetry” along with a six-
page poetry section edited by him. Soon after, he started reviewing books and publishing
poems in _The Illustrated Weekly of India_ (the nationally-circulated magazine from
Bombay edited by C. R. Mandy, one of the few patrons of Indo-Anglian literature,
as it was then called, who also printed Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes), and writing
a regular column for _Thought_ (between 1954 and 1957) while co-editing the_ Orient
Review and Literary Digest_.[[iii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn3) By 
1952, Lal had reviewed Ezekiel’s _A Time to Change_, brought out by Fortune Press
in England, for _Thought_. Two points here need explanation: why would Lal have 
had to “defend” English poetry, and why Ezekiel’s first book was published abroad.
In the decade after Independence, many Indians were pitching for the _Angrezi_ _hatao_(“
remove English”) movement in a knee-jerk reaction to newfound national pride. Even
educated Indians considered the English language colonial baggage and Indian poetry
in English as a passé and unworthy hybrid of British cultural tyranny. They regarded
those using the language as an unpatriotic lot.[[iv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn4)
Years later, Lal would title a book of his essays on Indian writing in English _Alien
Insiders_.

Thus, local publishing platforms were almost non-existent, and foreign exposure 
and endorsement mattered. Lal, at that time a young and popular teacher of English
literature in St Xavier’s College, dreamed beyond conservatism and believed that
English was an Indian language. A chance encounter with K. Raghavendra Rao, a professor
of English in Madras Christian College and later of Political Science at Gauhati
University, led to their joint editing of the historic _Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry_(
1957),[[v]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn5) which, in Rao’s words, “became
a virtual manifesto for a new kind of poetry in which the English language would
be twisted and tortured to become a fit medium for poetry that could represent faithfully
an Indian sensibility. It angered old-timers …”.[[vi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn6)
They had become the pioneering anthologizers of modern Indian English poetry.

The next year, Writers Workshop began its journey, when Lal decided to set up a 
publishing house for Indo-Anglian writing. “When no one would publish our work, 
we had to do it ourselves.”[[vii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn7) He mobilized
a group of seven young, like-minded, cosmopolitan Calcutta writers, tired of not
being printed or noticed, to change the status quo. He referred to this group later
as the “magical circle”[[viii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn8): Anita 
Desai, Jai Ratan, Pradip Sen, Deb Kumar Das, Kewlian Sio, Sasthibrata Chakravarti(
who soon emigrated to Britain, where he became better known as Sasthi Brata) and
William Hull (an American professor in India on a Fulbright fellowship). They nominated
him as Secretary, charged a subscription fee for membership, and published themselves,
trailblazing the path followed in the future by similar presses like Clearing House.
The first issue of their journal, the _Writers Workshop Miscellany _(which opened
with Desai’s short story “Grandmother”), and the first batch of six books appeared
in 1960, two of them short-story collections, by Jai Ratan and Kewlian Sio.

In order to provide maximum encouragement to themselves, Writers Workshop turned
into a tight literary club where one composed verse, another wrote the introduction,
and a third reviewed the book. The insular nature of the undertaking was understandable
considering the conditions they found themselves in, even though their numbers rapidly
increased. So, Lal introduced volumes by Das, Sen, Ezekiel, Lawrence Bantleman and
R. de L. Furtado; Raghavendra Rao wrote a preface for Lal, Ezekiel wrote one for
Monika Varma, and Sen wrote one for Ira De; David McCutchion, a professor of Comparative
Literature at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, prefaced Lila Ray’s _Entrance_. To 
get William Carlos Williams to contribute the preface to N. K. Sethi’s _The Word
is Split_ in 1961 came as a major achievement. The Workshop (a word chosen at a 
time when it had not become as commonplace as it is now, to designate collaborative
and cooperative processes) pointed out their writers’ excellence, mercilessly criticized
one another’s work in the weekly Sunday-morning meetings,[[ix]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn9)
and swore by a detailed thousand-word constitution, better known as the “credo”,
which evolved over the decades and in its most recent incarnation from 2010, the
year Lal passed away, appears as the last page of every Workshop book.

In 1962, the Workshop published the 22-year-old Adil Jussawalla’s debut, _Land’s
End_, and in 1965, A. K. Ramanujan’s _Fifteen Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology_,
long before Ramanujan became a name to reckon with. Additionally, this volume marked
the Workshop’s move into English translations of Indian literature, which eventually
turned into one of its key domains. 1965 also brought Ezekiel’s second collection
for the Workshop (after _The Unfinished Man_ in 1960), _The Exact Name_. The list
of the chosen expanded to include Kamala Das’s second book, _The Descendants_, and
the sixteen-year-old Pritish Nandy’s first, _Of Gods and Olives_, both in 1967. 
Both lived in Calcutta at that time. Nandy produced two more volumes of verse with
the Workshop before establishing his own imprint. Lal discovered others from across
India: Suniti Namjoshi (_Poems_, 1967), Shankar Mokashi-Punekar (_The Pretender_,
1967), G. S. Sharat Chandra (_Bharata Natyam Dancer_, 1968), and the 26-year-old
Gauri Deshpande (_Between Births_, 1968). Namjoshi later became famous as a feminist
author, and Deshpande for her bold and untraditional themes in Marathi fiction. 
All four stayed with the Workshop for their subsequent volumes of poetry.

Meanwhile, the _Writers Workshop Miscellany_, later simply _The Miscellany_, continued
under Lal’s editorship to compile and disseminate the creative work of poets who
did not yet have enough material for individual volumes, thereby encouraging them
to carry on writing. Early contributors to the journal in this decade included Arun
Kolatkar and Gieve Patel, both from Bombay – a fact requiring emphasis because of
the myth, which we shall dispel through greater detail later, that the Bombay poets
had nothing to do with the Workshop. The _Miscellany_ appeared regularly six times
a year against subscriptions of Rs. 6, three dollars or one pound, postage free.
It also served as a chronicle of literary happenings, recording authors’ visits 
to and events hosted by Writers Workshop, while printing appreciations and criticism
of other Indo-Anglian writings of that period.

 

**_Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo_**** (1969)**

The challenge facing Writers Workshop grew with the Bengali intellectuals who formed
the majority in Calcutta’s literary scene deciding that the days of English literature
had gone with the British Empire. A strong wave of criticism buffeted the young 
poets. Buddhadeva Bose, one of the foremost Bengali poets and scholars of the time,
a senior personality and founder-Head of the Comparative Literature department at
Jadavpur University, tore into the nascent movement with passion. Rao recalls, “
Bose was unleashing a vicious and vigorous onslaught on Indian writers in English.
I remember having a violent quarrel with him when he visited Gauhati in the fifties
to carry on his anti-English campaign.”[[x]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn10)
In _The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry_, Bose wrote
that only Indians in the nineteenth century came nearest to “speaking, thinking 
and dreaming in English” and quoted from Yeats: “no man can think or write with 
music and vigour except in his mother tongue.”[[xi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn11)
He famously concluded, “’Indo-Anglian’ poetry is a blind alley, lined with curio
shops, leading nowhere.” These lines prompted Lal, who viewed Bose’s statement as
both negative and damaging, to confront Bose through a questionnaire sent out to
over a hundred writers along with a cyclostyled copy of Bose’s article, requesting
them to respond to his charges on the Indo-Anglian literary context, on the lack
of a real public in India, and on the extent of flexibility among the writers to
change and recreate English. Seventy-six replies arrived, for inclusion in what 
Meenakshi Mukherjee called “probably the first major compilation of Indian poems
in English,” containing selections from 132 poets and titled _Modern Indian Poetry
in English: An Anthology and a Credo_, a 600-page riposte to Bose.[[xii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn12)

Lal’s fundamental query rested on a core issue: “Can an Indian poetry in English
discharge the function of changing and re-creating [the language]?”[[xiii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn13)
Many of the respondents upheld the poet’s “right” to do so while only a few stated
that a poet had no such right. Some thought that Indo-Anglian writing would be more
relevant in India than in the UK, as producing a modern, post-Orientalist Indian
poetry in English would mean looking at the world through Indian eyes and not anyone
else’s. While some believed that they just happened to write in English, some also
thought that the poets who wrote in English did not have a choice in the matter.
Gieve Patel felt that any discussion of even minimal complexity at home called for
the use of English.[[xiv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn14) Jussawalla 
had a simpler response: “The main circumstance was that I didn’t know poetry in 
any other language.”[[xv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn15) Gopal Honnalgere
just found writing in English easy and thought that in order to evolve, Kannada 
still needed English, and Indo-English poetry was “a happy catalyst.”[[xvi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn16)
Kewlian Sio, born to Chinese-Sikkimese parents, wrote that even those who spoke 
regional Indian languages often fell back on English words; for instance, they said“
typewriter” rather than _taptapayantar_.[[xvii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn17)
Most of the poets had a bilingual mental world, their habits and thoughts rooted
in things Indian, but with a greater facility of expression in English. Their knowledge
of English did not imply the loss of a mother tongue, but the gain of an other tongue,
which by being an effective part of Indian life for more than a century, had become
a useful vehicle of creative expression. There were also poets responding to the
questionnaire who did not subscribe to the “mother-tongue myth” at all.

None of these poets wrote for either the effect or the audience. Of course it was
essential to be read but it was equally difficult to get poems published in India,
as the poetry-reading public itself was small and even smaller when it came to English.
But according to Ezekiel there still existed a cross-section of Indian readership
that formed their audience. Nevertheless, he rued the “lack of a real public” for
his writing not only in India but everywhere else as well,[[xviii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn18)
though he was also quick to share that good writing had often been done in the worst
possible cultural conditions. Saleem Peeradina thought that “Until one can give 
a satisfactory performance one cannot expect an ‘audience’, leave alone curtain-
calls.”[[xix]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn19) Thus, beset by a siege 
mentality that we must understand because, fifty years on, it no longer obtains,
the contributors placed their convictions in print and rallied round a literary 
tradition that, defiant or otherwise, represented the natural flow of their creativity.
Bose’s accusation of un-Indianness about a language that had stayed in India for
nearly two hundred years and looked set to stay for many more was proved irrelevant.
The anthology, extensively reviewed in the national press and journals, led the 
Workshop to formulate its influential manifesto on the role of Indian writing in
English.

**1970-1989**

In 2000, Jai Ratan, the oldest founding member and an award-winning translator from
Hindi to English, observed that Writers Workshop had become a “springboard to literary
fame,”[[xx]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn20) as it had promoted many new
writers who were dominating the literary roadmap. The Workshop’s journey had a sole
goal, as Lal said, to make names known rather than print well-known names. Unpublished,
unknown poets turned to Writers Workshop; this was its core value to the literary
scene. For such purposes, funding clearly posed a problem. By 1970 Lal had become
the de-facto sole proprietor, as most of the original circle gradually left Calcutta
for career reasons. Confronted by the realistic possibility of having to close down
the Workshop since he could not bear the expenses on his meager professor’s salary,
he devised alternative means. In 1962, William Hull had facilitated a one-year “
Special Professor” position for Lal at Hofstra University, New York. From 1968, 
invitations came from other American universities too, and Lal realized that he 
could capitalize on the favorable foreign-exchange rate to bring home his dollar
earnings to subvent the Workshop. He paid an emotional price, by having to leave
his wife and two schoolgoing children in Calcutta over regular periods of about 
one semester almost every year during the 1970s. But this enabled the Workshop to
function for two decades. Whenever he was in the US (and later, Australia), he delegated
its day-to-day activities to Prabir Aditya, his neighbor and owner of the manually-
operated letterpress named Lake Gardens Press in the converted garage next door,
which Lal chose as his dedicated press to print all books from the late 1960s. Lal’s
wife and son attended to urgent correspondence and proofreading in his absence.

An aesthetic decision taken at roughly the same time had a permanent impact on the
look of Workshop publications. In the first few years, their binding had been done
in the conventional way by Tulamiah Mohiuddin, a professional binder working from
the old Sealdah publishing district of Calcutta, whom Lal had patronized. As was
his creative wont, Lal had another of his brainwaves, which he passed by Tulamiah,
who readily complied: “Instead of glossily hiding mediocre mass-manufactured binding–
the common 20th-century practice – the Workshop reveals the beauty of the hand-binder’s
art by using only a slim jacket-slip” on handloom “sari-bound gold-embossed” volumes.
[[xxi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn21) A more contemporary Indian approach
to book binding would be hard to imagine. The fabric that normally went into the
hardback bookends covered up by paper jackets, now proudly appeared on the surface;
but instead of ordinary cloth Lal replaced it with colorful sari material, originally
sourced from Puri, Odisha, his favorite vacation spot. A “slim jacket-slip” of paper,
printed with the title and author’s name, folded over it laterally and in turn was
protected and kept in place by a clear vinyl dustjacket. When the dangers of plastic
became established at the turn of the century, it was summarily dropped, the paper
slips removed, and the title and author’s name gold-embossed in Lal’s calligraphy
on the cloth cover itself. The sari’s contrasting border ran down the right edge
of the front cover. This innovative design won first prize in the National Printing
and Binding Awards in 1970, which Tulamiah received in New Delhi. Ever since, it
has remained Writers Workshop’s visually distinctive USP, and though P. K. Aditya
sold his house and left Lake Gardens in the 1980s, and Tulamiah died, his family
in a village near Diamond Harbour, 50 km from Kolkata, continues to bind the books
in the same fashion.

Many people believed, and still do, that the Workshop had an office buzzing with
activity where all aspects of publication were attended to by several competent 
hands during usual working hours. The prodigious output of titles would have justified
such conjectures. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Lal did everything
single-handed, except the printing and binding. Because he was a college professor
during the day, he could only spend early mornings and evenings on Workshop matters.
It had no office other than his own study at home, lined along every wall from floor
to ceiling with bookshelves that held his huge library. He read manuscripts, designed
layout, corrected proofs and wrote letters – and of course his own books, increasingly
of translations – at either one of two desks in this room. All papers and correspondence
were filed away systematically in a four-drawer cabinet that still contains those
holdings inscribed by so many now-household names. And Sunday mornings, everybody
knew, was reserved for Workshop members who dropped in, and doubled up as open house.

Developing this model of alternative, independent and noncommercial publishing as
the years rolled by, Lal decided that submissions had to meet one of three criteria
to be accepted. First, the poems had to be so good as to be way ahead of their time,
which by definition mainstream presses would never risk investing in. Second, the
material should reveal promise and talent, and be in need of the encouragement of
immediate publication, without which the despairing author might possibly abandon
writing. Third, it had to appeal to Lal’s personal taste, so that he would enjoy
printing it and introducing it to friends, whatever their private doubts on the 
matter. Lal referred to the virgin poets who became successful, after being published
by the Workshop, as his “10% syndrome.”[[xxii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn22)
He often said that discovering those ten would not have been possible had he not
published the other 90%.

Let us simply list without comment some of the most notable discoveries and first
books of poetry in the Workshop’s second phase: Shiv Kumar’s _Articulate Silences_(
1970); Keki Daruwalla’s _Under Orion_ (1970) and _Apparition in April_ (1971); Mamta
Kalia’s _ Tribute to Papa_ (1970) and _Poems ’78_ (1978); Jayanta Mahapatra’s  _Svayamvara_(
1971); Gopal Honnalgere’s _A __Wad of Poems_ (1971) and _A Gesture of Fleshless_
_Sound_ (1972); Agha Shahid Ali’s _Bone-Sculpture_ (1972) and _In Memory of Begum
Akhtar_ (1979); Ruskin Bond’s _It Isn’t Time That’s Passing_ (1972) and _Lone Fox
Dancing_ (1975); Lakshmi Kannan’s _Impressions_ (1974) and _The Glow and the Grey_(
1976); Meena Alexander’s _The Bird’s Bright Ring_ (1976) and _Without Place_ (1978);
Santan Rodrigues’s _I Exist_ (1976); Malathi Rao’s _Khajuraho_ (1976); Ketaki Kushari
Dyson’s _Sap-Wood_ (1978); Vikram Seth’s _Mappings_ (1981); Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s
_Dark Like the River_ (1987); Temsula Ao’s _Songs That Tell_ (1988); Robin Ngangom’s
_Words and the Silence_ (1988). The experience of Vikram Seth seems to have been
fairly typical. In 1981 Seth was a 29-year-old collector of rejection slips, and
had made an appointment to meet Lal, who is quoted in a newspaper interview to have
said, “A very weary and disillusioned Vikram came to me that summer. He had been
rejected by almost a dozen publishers. I went through it [his manuscript of _Mappings_]
and told him that he was at least a decade ahead of his times.”[[xxiii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn23)

**1990-2010**

In 1989, Lal suffered a near-death experience during a lecture tour of North America.
His recovery – possible only because the sudden trauma happened in the US where,
despite being uninsured, he received the finest medical treatment over three months
at a Catholic hospital that subsequently wrote off a large part of the bill to charity–
took several more months, and he never traveled abroad after his return to Kolkata
because his health did not allow it. Writers Workshop again faced a crisis in financial
management. Lal overcame this by formulating an agreement (he refused to call it
a contract) between every author and himself as publisher, whereby the former agreed
to make an advance purchase of 100 copies of the book. This system enabled it to
break even. Unkind critics have derided this as self-publishing, without remembering
the time-honored precedents of this method all over the world, or that even academic
presses routinely ask for and accept subsidies from various agencies for publications.

The Workshop continued to act as a welcoming point of entry for many young writers;
although the maturing English-language publishing industry now offered other options
as well, it still tended to decline experimental or unfashionable poetry. Lal accepted
Hoshang Merchant’s book, _Stone to Fruit _(1989), the first of more than twenty,
and Merchant, billing himself as “India’s first openly gay poet,” stays with the
Workshop today, choosing it for his ongoing _Collected Works_, in three volumes 
presently. The novelist Indrajit Hazra and the dramatist Poile Sengupta had their
first books of poetry published in 1990 (_Twenty-four Poems_) and 1991 (_A Woman
Speaks_) respectively. Others include Vihang Naik (_City Times_, 1993), Mukta Sambrani(
_The Woman in This Poem Isn’t Lonely_, 1997), and Bashabi Fraser (_With Best Wishes
from Edinburgh_, 2001). But if one sought the most significant Workshop trend during
this period, it would have to be the debuts of several poets from many of India’s
neglected far eastern – somewhat erroneously called northeastern – states. The movement
had begun with Ao and Ngangom in 1988, but gathered momentum with Ao’s _Songs That
Try to Say_ (1992), K. S. Nongkynrih’s _The Sieve_ and _Moment_s (both 1992), Mamang
Dai’s _River Poems_ (2004), and Esther Syiem’s _Oral Scriptings_ (2005). More have
followed.[[xxiv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn24)

One must not overlook the Workshop’s achievement in promoting English translations
from Indian languages since its earliest days, much before the field became acceptable
to regular publishers. Satyajit Ray’s translation of Sukumar Ray’s nonsense rhymes
from Bengali, A. K. Ramanujan’s of Adiga from Kannada, Sitakant Mahapatra’s from
Odiya as well as Munda, Oraon, Kondh and Paraja folksongs, Namjoshi’s of Govindagraj
from Marathi, Prema Nandakumar’s of Nammalvar from Tamil, and Ghalib from Urdu, 
Mahadevi Varma from Hindi, Subramania Bharati from Tamil, Vinda Karandikar from 
Marathi, D. Balagangadhara Tilak from Telugu, Rammohun Roy, Tagore, Jibanananda 
Das, Bishnu Dey and Samar Sen from Bengali, number among the best known of them.
The Workshop’s classical list contains not only Lal’s own “transcreations” of the
_Mahabharata_, _Bhagavad Gita_, various _Upanishad_s, the _Dhammapada_ and the _Jap-
ji_, but also others’ of Kalidasa, Jayadeva, Tulsidas, Kabir and Mirabai. Only the
Sahitya Akademi has published more English translations of poetry from Indian languages.

**Comparison with contemporary publishers and periodicals**

The first major critical account of post-Independence English poetry was written
by Bruce King, who made some highly injudicious statements that many accepted unquestioningly
and echoed in their own pronouncements. One of them was his reference to a growing
tension between the Workshop sensibility, under Lal, and those poets associated 
with Ezekiel. King went so far as to identify a schism between what he called the
Calcutta and Bombay schools, and he quite partisanly sided with the latter because
he considered it more “modern,” read, following Western ideas of modernism prioritizing
irony and cynicism. As we observed in a review of his book, “publication by the 
Workshop often seems to be, in King’s eyes, a disqualification. … Yet, curiously
enough, of the nearly 200 titles of poetry volumes in the ‘Chronology of Significant
Publications’ appended to the book, the Workshop accounts for 90.”[[xxv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn25)
Disregarding all the facts, however, the stigma stuck; the recent _Illustrated History
of Indian Literature in English_ dismissed the Workshop in just one sentence that
rather inscrutably ended with “the significance of the enterprise [is] greatly in
excess of its worth.”[[xxvi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn26)

A careful study reveals that King’s theory holds no ground whatsoever. While it 
is true that some poets had differences of opinion with Lal, and that several never
submitted anything to the Workshop for publication – this would be only natural 
in any artistic movement anywhere, and the Workshop certainly did not own a monopoly–
we have already seen that many in King’s so-called Bombay circle did indeed have
quite a few Workshop publications to their name. In fact, a mutuality ran through
all the publishing entities of the time. A substantial amount of correspondence 
from the Bombay poets addressed to Lal between 1958 and 1980 reflects their intent
in being published, reviewed and patronized by Writers Workshop.[[xxvii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_edn27)

We may look at the other publishing enterprises, mostly located in Bombay and a 
couple in Allahabad, by way of comparison. Of course, Ezekiel had started off first.
He published himself in the early years and distributed his second and third collections,_
Sixty Poems_ (1953) and _The Third_ (1959), through Strand Bookshop in Bombay. His
fourth and fifth books appeared from Writers Workshop. He had also assisted in editing
the newsletter of the Indian chapter of PEN, edited _Quest_ between 1955 and 1957,
managed _Design_ magazine in 1961, become literary and reviews editor of _Imprint_,
which ceased by 1967, and briefly edited _Poetry India_. During the 1960s, Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra, formerly of Bombay and then moving to Allahabad, began Ezra-Fakir
Editions from which appeared, among other things, his long poem _bharatmata: a prayer_(
1966) and his magazines titled _damn you_ and _ezra_. Mehrotra responded to Lal’s
questionnaire and contributed poems to Lal’s _Modern Indian Poetry in English_.

Pritish Nandy, already a Workshop poet, ran _Dialogue-Calcutta_ between 1968 and
1970, bringing out nineteen issues, each hosting one poet. After its bankruptcy 
in 1971, he started Dialogue Publications, and between 1972 and 1975, _Dialogue-
India_. In 1974, Kersi Katrak and Gauri Deshpande (also Workshop poets, based in
Bombay) started the short-lived _Opinion Literary Quarterly_, which had connections
with Lal and Nandy, but only published four issues. It sold out in 1982 and the 
new owners started _Kaiser-e-Hind_ from 1984 in Bombay, which also published some
poetry.

In the early 1970s, Mehrotra, Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar (all
of whom had featured in Lal’s _Modern Indian Poetry in English_) had their own manuscripts
but no publishers, so they started Clearing House in Bombay in 1976. As a cooperative
venture, Clearing House was successful, in part because their books were cheap and
attractively designed. They made a pre-publication offer of Rs 25 for the first 
four titles: Kolatkar’s _Jejuri_, Mehrotra’s _Nine Enclosures_, Jussawalla’s _Missing
Person_, and Patel’s _How Do You Withstand, Body_. Eight years later, H. O. Nazareth’s
_Lobo_ (1984) was the imprint’s last title. In the late 1980s, Jussawalla ran Praxis
single-handedly, publishing three books of poetry. Meanwhile, Oxford University 
Press under R. Parthasarathy, who had contributed poems to Lal’s _Modern Indian 
Poetry in English_, began the “New Poetry in India” series.

The other Bombay-based poetry-publishing collective that appeared almost simultaneously
had an even shorter life: Newground, under the Bombay poets Santan Rodrigues (again,
an already published Workshop poet), Melanie Silgardo and Raul D’Gama Rose, commenced
in 1978 and released four books – launching with _3 Poets,_ named after the three
founders – before fading out. Other brief ventures included the Hack Writers’ Cooperative
started by Rajiv Rao and Rafique Baghdadi, who published their joint collection 
_45RPM_ in 1983. Baghdadi ran the Jaico bookshop in Bombay, which had a special 
corner for poetry, and had links with the magazine _Kavi India_. Several other Bombay
magazines that no one remembers today (besides those of general interest like the
_Illustrated Weekly_) flitted past: _Bombay Duck, Dionysius, Blunt, Indian Writing
Today, Tornado, Volume, Keynote, The Bombay Literary Review_.

None of all these literary periodicals boasted the longevity of the Workshop’s _Miscellany_,
and none of these endeavours developed into institutions. Indeed, for the most part,
the poets seemed to have come together only to publish themselves and their friends,
there was little professionalism, if any, and no one seemed to know much about how
publishing actually worked. Like Writers Workshop, everyone pitched in, personal
funds were usually involved, and there was no clear differentiation between editorial
and administrative responsibilities. The difference lies in the Workshop’s staying
power and sustainability, ultimately under Lal’s solo initiative, and in its spread
as it reached out all over the country to create a national movement. In comparison,
even the big commercial publishers shied away from poetry, the combined output of
Rupa, Viking and Disha (Orient Longman) sparse and fluctuating. In 2010, Lal passed
away. But Writers Workshop continues, and in the four years since, has published
about 80 new titles. Virtually the cottage industry of Indian English literature,
especially poetry, it has outlived all other publishing attempts of its time.

 

~ From _A History of Indian Poetry in English_, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri

 

[[i]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref1)                  Booklet, in the
Writers Workshop archives, Kolkata.

[[ii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref2)    P. Lal, interviewed by Rubana
Huq, 25 February 2008.

[[iii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref3)  The general-interest weekly
_Thought_, published from Delhi, included “regular features on literature and the
arts”. The monthly journal _Orient Review and Literary Digest_, published from Calcutta,“
concentrates … on the background and cultural and philosophical contributions of
the ‘East.’” Quoted from the respective periodicals.

[[iv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref4)   For substantiation of these
claims, see K. Raghavendra Rao, “Friend P. Lal: A prose portrait in lieu of a poem,”
in _Be Vocal in Times of Beauty: Tributes to P. Lal at Seventy_, ed. C. Venugopal(
Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 2000), 182-83.

[[v]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref5)    P. Lal and K. Raghavendra Rao,
ed.,  _Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry _(Delhi: Kavita, 1957).

[[vi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref6)   Rao, “Friend P. Lal,” 184.

[[vii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref7) Interviewed by Meenakshi Mukherjee,“
Writers Workshop@fifty,” _The Hindu_, 1 March 2009, Literary Review.

[[viii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref8) P. Lal, interviewed by Rubana
Huq, 28 January 2008.

[[ix]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref9)   For an entertaining description
of these free-wheeling meetings, see P. Lal, “Writers Workshop: How It Functions,”[
1961] quoted in the _Writers Workshop Checklist 2004_, p. 98.

[[x]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref10)    Rao, “Friend P. Lal,” 183.

[[xi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref11)            B. Bo., “Indian Poetry
in English,” in _The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry_,
ed. Stephen Spender and Donald Hall (London: Hutchinson, 1963), 178. The quotation
from Yeats comes from “A General Introduction for My Work” (published 1961), in 
_The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume V: Later Essays_, edited by William 
H. O’Donnell (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 211.

[[xii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref12)            Mukherjee, “Writers
Workshop@fifty,” _The Hindu_, 1 March 2009, Literary Review. The quotations that
follow come from the second edition, 1971, of P. Lal, ed., _Modern Indian Poetry
in English: An Anthology and a Credo_ (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1969), which 
had 734 pages, adding a supplement of 39 more poets. It may be relevant here to 
point out that this anthology has not received the scholarly attention it deserved,
since Bruce King’s adverse reaction to it in his identically titled _Modern Indian
Poetry in English _(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), the first and to date
only major critical survey of the field. But King’s book is deeply flawed, containing
innumerable errors of fact and perception on just about everything. For a full discussion,
see Ananda Lal’s review of it in _The Journal of Indian Writing in English_ 18 (
January 1990): 44-49.

[[xiii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref13) Lal, _Modern Indian Poetry
in English_, 7.

[[xiv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref14) Lal, _Modern Indian Poetry 
in English_, 391.

[[xv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref15)  Lal, _Modern Indian Poetry 
in English_, 228.

[[xvi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref16) Lal, _Modern Indian Poetry 
in English_, 210.

[[xvii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref17)        Lal, _Modern Indian
Poetry in English_, 546.

[[xviii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref18)       Lal, _Modern Indian
Poetry in English_, 169.

[[xix]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref19) Lal, _Modern Indian Poetry 
in English_, 398.

[[xx]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref20)  In Venugopal, ed., _Be Vocal
in Times of Beauty_, 190.

[[xxi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref21)_ Writers Workshop Checklist
2004_, p. 1.

[[xxii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref22)        P. Lal, interviewed
by Rubana Huq, 28 January 2008.

[[xxiii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref23)       Premankur Biswas, “
Book Wise,” _The Indian Express_, 3 August 2008.

[[xxiv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref24)       For an account of the
Workshop in this phase, see Jed Bickman, _A Literal Journey in India: Encountering
Writers Workshop_ (Kolkata: Writers Workshop, 2009), 22-40.

[[xxv]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref25)        Ananda Lal, review of
_Modern Indian Poetry in English _by Bruce King, 48.

[[xxvi]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref26)       Rajeev Patke, “Poetry
Since Independence,” in _An_ _Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English_,
ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 246.

[[xxvii]](https://writersworkshopindia.com/#_ednref27)      Writers Workshop archives,
Kolkata.