This December, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal, France’s top cultural honour, was pinned on Aditi Maheshwari. To a hall full of diplomats at the French embassy, fellow travellers from the publishing industry, family and friends, the 37-year-old CEO of the 60-year-old Vani Prakashan Group, said her thank yous but her opening line seemed to come from memories of hustle in rooms quite different from this one.
“Now this feels like something,” she said, almost to herself. On the second floor of her office in Daryaganj, where old and new Delhi size each other up and live separate lives, she repeats this sentence a few days later and details a few scenes of her journey.
In 2013, with a big bundle of popular books produced by the House of Vani, and two runners, a determined Maheshwari, then in her twenties, landed up at some of the biggest bookshops in town. What she got was plenty of respect but no display space at their windows for her books.
It was the first decade of the millennium and with social media on the horizon, readers were moving away from Hindi books. “It was not considered cool to be reading Hindi books at the airport…. I’d just come home in 2013 from Scotland and I wanted to change things. I had a budget for producing more books that I took to my father. He said first attempt to sell just 500 books.
I thought that was a cakewalk. Connaught Place, Mukherjee Nagar, Khan Market, which were nearby, were deep book markets,” she says. “What I found was that some didn’t even have shelf space for Hindi books, leave alone a space by the window.” From then to now, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, therefore, does feel like something.
She acknowledges the helping hands, the first breakthroughs. At a meeting with entrepreneur Priti Paul, Paul said she would open the Oxford Bookstore to an experiment, provided Maheshwari got the audience and curated the store list. “Pitaji said take every Hindi publisher’s book, not just Vani’s. ‘Now you are representing the industry’,” she says.
Within two years, with the help of Priti, she got going a Hindi Mahotsav, one that is still held at Oxford every year. “So right in the heart of Connaught Place, we had a place for Hindi…. It has had a ripple effect with corporates like Google and HCL holding Hindi book exhibitions where Hindi and Urdu authors are invited. It means a lot to us,” she says.
A FAMILY BUSINESS
Maheshwari’s grandfather Prem Chand Mahesh, a government school teacher and a writer of children’s books, started the publishing house in the fifties. Aditi’s sister Damini is its financial backbone; father Arun Maheshwari is the managing director. Both her parents are involved in day-totoday decisions, big and small. Maheshwari describes her job as being hands-on about everything.
“From seeing to the office phenyl to making sure an author gets his copy in California”, in the manner of most family-run businesses running on passion and without the deep pockets of conglomerates. “It’s the stuff of magic realism that from the by-lanes of Daryaganj we should get a bigleague Paris recognition. It makes me believe that what we do has shaped generations of readers.
To be recognised for your language, and for the work you have done in it, it feels the hard work of generations has been validated,” she says, as we sit in a meeting room around a round table close to a placard from where Simone de Beauvoir famously semi-smiles. Vani is releasing the French author’s seminal work The Second Sex at the World Book Fair in February.
The house’s French list is strong—from classics such as Baudelaire to critically acclaimed contemporary authors such as Franck Bouysse. In 2021, along with her editorial team, she translated and published Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s bestselling coming-ofage- in-Iran-and-France graphic novel, into Hindi. That the politics of the book is got right, and that 10-year-old Marjane’s cheery manifesto in a school essay, ‘I want to be God’ becomes in Hindi, ‘Mein ek pegambar houngi’, among other gems, is very much to Maheshwari’s credit and that of her editorial team.
GROWING AUTHORS
In a span of 12 years at the Vani Prakashan Group, Maheswari has published over 500 books and has taken care of the entire chain of the book ecosystem. But there is a Vani method to it, explains Maheshwari. A discourse-oriented house, Vani consistently includes new conversations in global and Indian literature in its attempt to be ahead of the curve.
“We were the first to bring out a guide, Satrangi Bhasha, published in collaboration with Avian We and Rainbow Lit Fest, that explains how the LGBTQ community uses pronouns in Hindi. Our selection of fiction also comes with a twist. We like books with a sense of history, of society, of politicisaton in society, fragility of human existence – these matter for us and we go after this list,” she says.
There is also the matter of growing the writer, especially in a frenetic digital age. “From 2018-2019, things changed. We publish 400 books a year, many with a print-run, on an average, between 3,000 and 10,000 books. Ten years ago, we would publish 150-200 books with a print run of 100-250,” she says as art critic Vinod Bhardwaj walks in.
Vani has published his big book on art, Brihat Adunik Kala Kosh, and has also just translated his pulp fiction, Ek Sex Mareez Ka Rognamcha (The Diary of a Sex Addict). “Bhardwajji has been a writer with us for two-and-ahalf decades. You have to stay with a writer, that’s how a writer grows,” she says. To make Vani future-proof, Maheshwari has now been exploring what AI could mean for the publishing industry and the tricky issue of credit.
She is back to the classroom, this time to learn AI. “AI is a huge social, legal and political question before us. I want to understand its genesis in order to understand how it will unfold in the future. Of course, the main characteristic of technology is that it spreads and makes lives simpler. But, in the creative field, an AI tool will transform the way we create and give credit to the artist.
This is my concern. Who has the copyright, who will decide what is original? AI uses the pre-existing works available on the cloud as raw material. Is upcycling and recycling the only way to create in the future? Are we going to ever see an ‘original’ piece of work that doesn’t use anyone else’s work for itself ?” Given the way Maheshwari has gone about her business, there’s every chance she will figure this one out. Or at least get a Vani title out of it.