“To take from the air a live tradition…” That, said Professor P. Lal, was what he had wanted to do with his anthology of Mahabharata-inspired poems and fiction by modern Indian writers. But that desire to present to readers a living tradition as beautifully as possible went beyond one book — it was clearly his mission in life.

Prof. Purushottam Lal, 81, died last week. For over half-a-century he had nurtured Indian writing in English and cradled new voices. Writers Workshop, his alternative publishing house, started with a group of friends in 1958, served as an incubator for Indian literature in English. Barely a decade after Independence, “Indo-Anglian writing” was sniffed at by the majority in the hot-blooded new nation that saw writing in the coloniser’s tongue as a betrayal of roots. Prof. Lal swam against that tide of linguistic nationalism, determined to claim English as an Indian language.
And succeeded. With the flourish of the audacious youngster, Writers Workshop (WW) books declared that “English has proved its ability, as a language, to play a creative role in Indian literature, through original writing and through transcreations”. His dogged efforts for more than half-a-century helped establish English as one of India’s many literary languages. He nurtured free literary expression, cultural diversity and literary excellence.
Because of WW’s chosen language, Prof. Lal created a space for new writing that transcended regional boundaries. And he dared to do what ordinary publishers would shrink from — he focused on poetry, usually of unknown youngsters, putting creativity before profitability. In the process he discovered writers who would go on to conquer the world, like Vikram Seth. Over the years, WW had showcased writing by new writers and promising poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Anita Desai, A.K. Ramanujan, Adil Jussawalla, Keki Daruwalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Agha Shahid Ali, Dom Moraes, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, Pritish Nandy, Shasthi Brata, Suniti Namjoshi and Meena Alexander, to name a few. Till today, WW remains a valid launching pad for young writers in English.
“I still remember how fastidiously he published my first book of poems, in a small flatbed treadle in the garage next door”, wrote Pritish Nandy. “How he published so many others, who would have never appeared in print but for Lal’s fierce dedication to making available the work of Indian writers in English.”
Prof. Lal was as fastidious as they come. He had a meticulous eye for detail as he did everything from accepting manuscripts to proofing to creating the design and the cover with his splendid calligraphy on hand-woven cloth that gave the hand-stitched, hand-printed and hand-bound books a boutique look. Each book was “printed on an Indian-make hand-operated machine” declared the copyright page of WW books. “This book is entirely hand set, letter by letter, as a result minor printer’s gremlins are regrettably unavoidable.” It also said, with some variations over time: “Layout and lettering by P. Lal with a Sheaffer calligraphy pen. Gold-embossed, hand-stitched, hand-pasted and hand-bound by Tulamiah Mohiuddin with handloom sari cloth woven and designed in India, to provide visual beauty and the intimate texture of book-feel. WW bindings are not concealed behind ephemeral jackets. Each WW publication is a hand-crafted artefact”.
This passionate love for books and literature was the fuel that WW ran on. His was a cottage industry, Prof. Lal said, because “small is not only beautiful but viable as well”. Today, WW has more than 3,000 titles in print, and has averaged about a 100 books a year since 1995. A visionary with great imagination and pragmatic sense, Prof. Lal had chosen to ignore the commercial logic of publishing houses. “WW is not a professional publishing house”, he wrote. “It does not print well-known names; it makes names known and well-known, and then leaves them in the loving clutches of the so-called ‘free’ market.”
So when booming publishing houses steered clear of poetry and unknown writers, WW published new poets — lately with a partial buy-back guarantee from the poets themselves. “It is not sad, it is obnoxious, to plead, as publishers do, ‘I will not publish poetry because it does not sell’”, he wrote. In 1960, he had co-edited with Raghavendra Rao Modern Anglo-Indian Poetry, the first anthology of contemporary Indian poetry in English.
But Prof. Lal was not just a cornerstone of Indian writing in English, he was an early evangelist of translation that has now become so fashionable. He called it “transcreation” because he believed it was not possible to translate Indian language literatures into English, too often there were no corresponding words. From classics by Kalidas, Kabir, Jaidev, Meerabai or Ghalib, to modern classics like Satyajit Ray’s translation of his father Sukumar Roy’s Abol Tabol, Prof. Lal attempted to offer a flavour of Indian literature in English.
Of all his transcreations, though, the most impressive is his English rendering of the Mahabharata, verse for verse. Named simply The Mahabharata of Vyasa, this enormous, multi-volume tome that he had worked on for decades will remain one of the biggest and most sincere renditions in the history of literary translation. He toiled meticulously over each word so as not to miss in English any connotation present in the Sanskrit version. His passion for the grand epic was more than academic. “The epic’s the thing”, he wrote, “cutting to size commoner and king”.
In keeping with his belief that English was an Indian language, Prof. Lal’s transcreations were targeted at Indians. “My version (of the Mahabharata) is for the educated, English-knowing Indian”, he said. “Non-Indians can eavesdrop and overhear.” Of the 18 books of the epic, 17 are out. One — Anushasana Parva — remains. Hopefully some day some translator will dare to step into the formidable shoes of Prof. Lal and complete his magnificent work.
Prof. P. Lal will be remembered as a poet, publisher, translator and academic. But he will remain in India’s literary pantheon a nurturer of Indian literature. As he wished, he took from the air a live tradition — of linguistic diversity, of new literary thought, of ancient cultural moorings — and nurtured it against all odds.
“We were, of course, almost uniformly ungrateful to him”, says Pritish Nandy about writers discovered by Prof. Lal. “For we never respect those who give us a leg up. It embarrasses us.” Today, every Indian writer in English, every Indian publisher making profits on Indian writing or translations in English, may wish to doff their cap to the memory of a tall, passionate man in a book-lined study in Kolkata who built, brick by brick, an unshakeable foundation for Indian literary publishing in English.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com