Conversations Issue 5 — November 2024
Everything is Accidental — A Conversation with Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books
By Mursalin Mosaddeque
My friend and fellow editor of the magazine, Minhaz Muhammad always seems to be in awe of his email conversations with Naveen Kishore, the much revered and celebrated founder of Seagull Books, an independent publishing house based in Calcutta. He had first reached out to him years ago, even before we started this magazine, when he was living the dream of working at a small independent bookstore whose owners had brought a consignment of books from Seagull not because they thought it would guarantee them a profit but something in their heart had compelled them, that they owed it to their city to introduce these fabulous books. It is not that his correspondences with Naveen Kishore have been quite frequent, or that he was dazzled like a fan but perhaps he could sense that he was interacting with someone who was eager to engage with enthusiasm not only with people but also with the world.
It is rare that you encounter people whose tastes you can admire, whose approach to the world and its ideas align quite a bit with yours. Our friendship arose perhaps out of a particular context: despite realizing the centrality of literature or reading in general to our lives, we both were, to some extent, disillusioned by the state of literary culture around us before we met in the bookstore. Finding books from Seagull was probably one of the few things that had given us hope. But then again we were just in our early twenties—life always swung on the pendulum of hope to its both extremes.
Naveen Kishore was a few years older than we are today when he first started Seagull Books. Rather than reiterating the daily ritual of abject cynicism about the dismal state of literature and culture today, I might as well speak to someone whose relentless efforts have turned a small publishing house into one of the bests that the world has to offer.
My conversation with Naveen Kishore took place this past October. He was back in Calcutta after a short stint in the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, and I was in Dhaka, tirelessly working to put this issue of the magazine together. It was late afternoon when we got on a call, but our brief meeting was frequently interrupted by poor internet connection, instigated by the looming cyclone Dana in the Bay of Bengal.
Born and bred in Calcutta, Naveen started his career in theater-lighting and his artistic practice has since expanded many folds. Besides being the publisher of Seagull Books, he lately moonlights as a poet and photographer. But if there is one overarching metaphor that ties his life and art together—it’s light. With light as his muse, he exposes hidden stories, regardless of the medium, like a masterful technician in a darkroom.
Naveen is easy to interview. He’s affable, chatty, quick, thoughtful and introspective, and free with an anecdote or an example, often including his interlocutors (Mursalin, Minhaz in this case) by name to make them feel included. He likes to sprinkle his conversations with the words “you know”, subtly attributing his remarkable ability to perceive and remember details to his listeners. Talking with him, one gets the impression that he is a man of extraordinary resolve. Yet, he is cautious and almost reluctant to take the credit for his accomplishments which include the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature and Goethe Medal in 2013.
Our conversation was a delight. It has been slightly edited and abridged for clarity.
Mursalin
I am tempted to begin our conversation by recalling the day I first encountered a book published by Seagull. It was almost a decade ago in a narrow alley of my middle-class neighborhood in Dhaka where I came across a small bookstore on the ground floor of an old three-storied building. In one corner, there were a few books which stood apart in stark contrast from the rest. I still remember that moment when I came across the cover of the Phobic and the Erotic. English language books in Dhaka, then and even now, mostly were either classics, the Jane Austens and the Dickens, or the Dan Browns, the mega bestsellers. It was refreshing to see books of this quality. That day was the beginning of a journey or a love affair with Seagull. After more than four decades since its inception, Seagull has published authors from all around the world. But perhaps what sets Seagull apart is not just the diversity or the quantity, but a certain sensibility in its ethos. I want to know how this sensibility, if I may use the term, began and how it has evolved over the years.
Naveen
In our lives, particularly in mine, everything is accidental. And so I became an accidental theater-lighting designer.What began as a hobby, eventually turned into my livelihood which happens often in India. My father had lost his job. I had to bring food to the table and I earned doing theater-lighting that I quite enjoyed. That’s what I started to do. And being part of a theater group allowed this freedom to newcomers to plunge into the deep end. So, you worked as an apprentice at one play, and you were the lighting person in the next or as a set designer in another one. So, the theater plays, first of all, a very important role in our aesthetics. This is not only behind the style of our book covers, but it also plays a role in that literary sensitivity or sensibility which comes from theater. It allows us a sense of humor. In a theater production, you’re dealing with many literary genres simultaneously. They are dynamic but fleeting since they are being produced for live audiences. So, in the early years when I was doing a lot of theater to survive, the books began out of a desire to document a certain activity. There was no publisher who focused on something as niche as theater, and our founding editor at that time, was Samik Bandyopadhyay. He was my mentor and a theater and cinema critic. He always felt that bigger publishers did not have the time and money for focusing on theater or cinema. The way they saw the picture is that they had four hundred mouths to feed at Oxford University Press. So, theater was not something they would focus on. When he was working with them for six or seven years, he was given as little as two books, a new Drama-in-India kind of list to keep him happy. Everybody was busy selling other kinds of books. That’s cool. But he said, what if there was a two or three person operation that only focused on the arts and media and made a living off that. And that’s how it started. The important thing here is that I didn’t have a sense of scale. I just had a sense of joy and pleasure. I thought everything was possible.
Sensibility to me is made up of both aesthetics and sensitivity to nuances of things happening around me which also includes political consciousness whether it’s through art or culture. It’s not just one thing. Of course, reading—one grew up reading translated literature in those days. In the seventies, the Americans started publishing French, German, Italian—all kinds of wonderful books before their accountants took over and said hello!
There’s no defining moment, but it kind of started there. And of course you have some intuition which guides you. As a theater lighting person who walks into an empty space, just using light to create something —melancholy of sorts or something happy—these are also true for books
Mursalin
What were the early days like?
Naveen
We were doing letterpress, and we were lucky that I fell into the hands of a master printer, Probad Kumar Bose, and he ran Eastern Printers. In fact, he was a printer-editor. If you went to him and said, “Sir, we want you to print this history of India.” Then he would say, “Leave it behind. Let me read it first.” and add “I am 10 Rupees a page. I am more expensive than everybody else, so why would you want me etc.” So he would do his best to discourage people but I was lucky that when I met him, something clicked. I would say, “I don’t want customers. I don’t want to go to anybody else. I just want you to do this.” And he would read it. If he approved the book in his first reading, he had already done a semi copy-edit and style sheet—that kind of stuff, and then he proofread them. Then he would discuss things with the author. Once in the middle of the night at about 11 o’clock, he rang me up and screamed at me. He had come in—his house was very close to the printing press—to see the print quality of the inking while they were printing this book, and his eye suddenly caught a line on these pages. He stopped the printing as he thought it was a waste of time, money and everything. He found that there was a mistake in the historian’s date. The incident this historian was describing was not possible because India was not yet independent.
Right enough, the historian went down on his knees and said, thank you for saving my reputation. Probad Kumar Bose was that sort of a person. So all this was feeding into me when I was just a young person. Everything was possible because from day one, I spent on the best paper, four colors, design and block printing. He used to marvel at that fact and said you can do that a little less. I said no, I want the best of everything. I remember when we were working on a Mrinal Sen book, there were 32 pages of pictures in an art paper cluster. I discovered a spelling error of a name just before binding. We jumped in and reprinted it.
Mursalin
So your relationship with Probad Kumar Bose was evolving in a way.
Naveen
Yes, so what was happening was that he and I were getting into a relationship or became acolytes and mastered a certain kind of way where I was learning at the same time, the balance of acolyte and master was shifting where he was treating himself as an acolyte because he was learning for the first time—a different way of publishing where quality counted, not money. It’s so important. We fed off each other. And this will happen with relationships. If you and I get into a conversation, it’s not just about me talking all the time. It’s all about your personality too because that brings out something in me. That is what forms sensibility if you allow yourself.
Mursalin
Why did you feel the need to set up a London office for Seagull?
Naveen
If you jump to 2005, when as a political discussion, we set a position. We said what if our location shifts? What if we are Seagull Books London? The English and the West were telling us, you buy only for your subcontinent—India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan and SriLanka and we will cherry pick your Satyajit Rays and Mrinal Sens for the rest of the world. I said why? You guys have said that this is a globalized world. If I have good looking stuff, then why can’t I set up a company over there, but the main work would happen in Calcutta. Most British publishers, in any case, were type-setting in Pondicherry and Delhi. We would be an independent tax paying entity there. That was also a very conscious decision which nobody quite understood. And then suddenly everybody in London wanted to distribute you because you had good looking books. Everybody was willing to sell you world rights because you had distribution with the University of Chicago to rest.
Mursalin
Seagull has an impressive list of books that it has published over the years. This it seems to me is a reflection of this nurtured sensibility.
Naveen
The way you use the word sensibility has also to do with curating a list. Curating for most publishing lists in today’s world is to want every book to be a profit maker. Everything becomes a measure of profit or loss.
If you have Minhaz as your fiction editor and you, as the CEO, tell Minhaz, bhai the books you’re pitching to me: give me an estimate of how profitable they will be. Now, how can you say that about someone’s work who hasn’t been published before? You can perhaps do it with known authors. On the other hand, not consciously, but intuitively, because of the love of reading and literature, we curated a wishlist. A wishlist is simply something that affects the three of us in three different parts of the globe, where your grief for your mother rings a bell to someone in Germany or wherever they are in small town Murshidabad, or Chittagong, or Dhaka in the same way because we all grieve in the same way. So the human condition—it’s where the resonance is. Somebody asked me what is your criteria? I said, my criteria is anything that affects the human condition—and it’s quite intuitive. We also told ourselves that we wanted to bring back translated literature which now has succeeded. Not because of our efforts alone of course. But when I was in 2005 buying world rights from the French, the Germans, the Italians, why did I go to Europe? I went to Europe because I grew up reading European translations in English. So, I was familiar with the archives of Éditions Gallimard and I went to them because it was the centenary celebration of Sartre. They couldn’t understand why I wanted three big volumes of Jean-Paul Sartre for Calcutta. I said, no, no, it’s not for Calcutta, it’s for the world. I had to explain. Once the books came out, they loved it. The estate loved its quality.
What I’m trying to suggest to you—I don’t have any specific answer for this—It’s always about intent. Content cannot be dictated by your monetary needs. You first need to have the intention for the book. Bring out a certain kind of book then find ways of selling it.
Mursalin
That’s a great mantra. The intent and the content. I want to linger on this ‘sensibility’ of yours a bit more—I think there is a bit of fluidity in it: how theater lighting, your work as a photographer, as a poet, as a publisher have all transmuted into one thing, and they have all informed one another. How do you see that?
Naveen
I see myself made up of not just literary influences but influences of the people around me. It has always been the case and I think I would put it down to my beginnings as a freelancer—where your advertising agency wants me to write a jingle on your favorite team. I can’t write and I can’t sing. But I go to Minhaz and say, boss, you write very well, write me a jingle. Then I come back to Mursalin and I say boss, you have a recording studio, find a voice to record this for me. So I became what you call an event manager. I was lucky that there were my colleagues, for example, the unique aesthetic you described, the designs, the covers—this is all Sunandini Banerjee who twenty four years ago, exactly to the day, walked in from university for a job, and discovered the joys of Apple computers. Till then I used to design, photograph, do my own type-setting. Then one day I found that she had an aesthetic. She was fooling around with my photographs and doing much more wonderful things than I was doing. What could I do? I could as her boss feel threatened, I would say no Minhaz, Sunanidini or Mursalin have a certain sensitivity. If I let them do this, I can be free to do something else, right? So now, after all these years, at almost 900 covers that she’s designed and the insides of books, she’s also the chief editor.
It’s not all about revenue. The problem happens when you, as a serious publisher, tell yourself—okay, so seventy percent of my stuff has to be a commercial publication, so that I could do thirty percent of what I really want to do. We never get to doing that thirty percent because that commercially successful sixty percent soon grows to eighty or ninety, and because by then you have replicated success so well, who wants to do serious stuff anymore, you know?
So it’s a tricky choice. We are also lucky because we have kept ourselves small. Five people who do fifty books a year. There are fourteen people who manage a bookstore, do the publishing, the History for Peace and Seagull School of Publishing and art and photography. So, all I’m trying to say is that we are just lucky that we want to do so many things and we get to do them.
We are also very good at letting go if something’s not working—we used to run, for example, the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Center. Over four thousand films for fifty rupees—you could sit for eight hours and watch great classics. You could read about arts, theater, lights. But then, reading habits have changed with computers, OTT, and subscriptions, so we reinvented that into Seagull School of Publishing three months a year—passing on the knowledge.
The problem with institutions is that they freeze themselves. They don’t want to let go, and they have an imagined sense of legacy. Minhaz, founder-editor of something—dead, gone, sorry Minhaz—is suddenly remembered by his loved colleagues. You don’t know he’s dead and scattered to the world. Gone, forget it. You have to take the value system but do it through your own filters, and evolve. You need to be not much of a frozen institution and that doesn’t happen enough.
Mursalin
So I have fondly read this legend of how Seagull came into being many, many times now. Almost forty years ago, you had organized Shikor, a theater festival and there you were watching a young person who was feverishly drawing, sketching a performance. You had recognized how that moment was fleeting—the performer on the stage was enacting a scene and delivering his lines, and he would have moved away before the sketch was done. The cultural scene, particularly around theater, was being played out but no one was there to sketch, document or archive it. At that moment, I believe, you had felt a necessity, right?
Naveen
I had actually felt nothing but excitement. It was also sad that these moments would disappear. I have mentioned this earlier, the idea of publishing began with Samik Bandyopadhyay—Samik da. We decided to be a niche publisher who focused on theater and cinema. So, it did come from this desire to keep something going and to document it in book form. Because the theater I did was ephemeral. It ended with the opening lights and the lights dim and you feel melancholic. But the books remain, there’s a posterity about the written word. There was something tangible when the first book came out. So one learned from Samik da, and he had articulated the original vision.
Mursalin
How has Seagull adapted and evolved throughout its four decade long journey?
Naveen
The evolution is as I’ve outlined in the story—we started as a publisher which focused on theater. Then in 2005, we were responding to the political situation with regards to publishing in the Western world. And now we have over five hundred books of our own, where we’ve got the world rights. So we have become not a localized entity, we publish globally as well.
We went to the Frankfurt Book Fair this time which is an important place for us. And we discovered that—the European literature I had turned to in 2005, and I admired for qualities of seriousness and literary value, has slowly undergone a change and become more commercial, more popular and all of that. And these European publishers are feeling embarrassed because they see me displaying this glorious, very serious list. So they are now saying we wish we could do these sorts of books which is kind of a very weird moment.
Mursalin
Even politically, that’s very interesting. Seagull is an independent publishing house from the global South and they have now become the tastemakers, which is in very sharp contrast from what used to be the norm. Publishing houses in New York or London used to be the centers; but for Seagull that no longer seems to be the case. Similarly, literature in translation has also transformed over the years and many universities in India even, for example, Ashoka University offer translation in their creative writing courses. The number of books that are being translated from Indian languages in recent years have increased significantly. But do you think this rise in quantity has come with a compromise in quality?
Naveen
There are two-three things here that I can think of randomly, which is, first of all, yes, there’s a huge amount of recognition, acceptance and desire to read and learn about cultures, which is ironic. Because at the same time, there are many wars. There are many conflicts and all the rest of it. So as you know, you want to learn about Bangladesh or Pakistan or about Slovakia or Latvia. But you also notice that everyone is more aggressive and more suspicious of each other at the same time. One would have thought that the more we learnt about each other, we would be coming together more. And the desire to learn more about each other could only increase. So, translated literature is meant precisely to do that, which across cultures, across borders, creates a certain sense of understanding which is not a formal ambassadorial role that countries can formally have among each other. But it’s a kind of borderlessness that allows words and literature and emotion to travel through books, which is what Frankfurt Book Fair is about, this exchange of language rights and so on.
But having said that, what has been happening is that all of us are facing survival issues. Particularly post-covid, all of us are finding distribution to be a problem. So some of us choose to come up with ways. For example, when I mentioned that a certain large publishing house is looking more at commercial fiction and less at other things, the independent publishing houses are still holding on to the serious end of things because they are trying to keep their overheads low. This is a troublesome situation. We are in 2024 but it’s happened before though in different forms. That’s always going to be the case, the bigger ones will grow bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And their struggles are different: to stay bigger, you know? So, nobody’s constantly at a state of peace. So, the evolution here is a good kind, but as far as translated literature goes, I think it’s a wonderful thing. It’s here to stay. We are also discovering something else. But even in literature in translation, one notices a different kind of politics at play which is not easily recognizable—the English are translating the Germans and the Germans are translating the French. And the Italians are translating the French and the Germans are translating the English. But when you move to, or when you talk to them and say what about literature from Latvia, former Czechoslovakia or even Hungary? They’re doing little bits and bobs.
How far are you willing to go to find translators in Hindi, Malayalam or Urdu sitting in Germany or France? They won’t make the effort because you need to have that intent. But I have no problems finding translators for my Slovak list or my Czech list. Because I have the intention and resolve that I want to solve this problem. If you want you can always find a way and the world is a network where you can ask people around and find out who can do this. But for larger publishing houses, sometimes that’s all monetized so they don’t have that kind of time to spend.
So therefore when they talk of Indian writing, they would prefer Indian writing in English. But the real work is happening in the vernacular. But they’re not able to recognize that. Translation is also facing this kind of situation where it’s not just countries like ours that appear to be ignored. It’s also within Europe, there are hierarchies of who gets more translated. There are these problems that do exist but it’s part of the ecosystem. It’s not like anything desperately unique but it’s part of what we call evolution.
Mursalin
We’ve been talking about publishing translations. Before someone becomes a writer, critic, book seller or even a publisher, they are a reader. That’s how we all begin. So I want to know when and how your journey as a reader began and how it has evolved till today.
Naveen
I had an elder sister who was five and a half years older than me. So, I was lucky that when I was reading my books I was also reading hers. If she was reading Tolstoy at an age when I should not have been reading Tolstoy—it was still around. So I would read it. Because of my father’s work, he was interested in westerns, crime fiction and thrillers of a certain kind—Mickey Spillane, Perry Mason or James Hadley Chase. In those days, it was thought that you were lucky if you were reading. It didn’t matter what you were reading. Even today when people tell me that the young are not reading, I tell them it’s not true. They’re all reading. They may be reading less or more but they’re reading on their devices. Writing will not stop. Publishing will not stop. As I’ve often said, perhaps the surfaces will change for your great grandchildren, paper and textile may disappear. But reading and writing will always happen. Content is changing for a lot of people, but many are also coming back. A lot of a certain kind of boutique publishing is much more popular now. I get a lot of young people coming for our books and I find that marvelous, but then there’s also a certain young person who doesn’t necessarily read.
I think my reading began then and it just stayed. You also read beyond your so-called educational thing you got into. You were lucky that you were surrounded by world culture bodies like the Germans or the French, or the Americans, and the British. And we read in the libraries. All of us have shared that experience. I don’t think there’s any formula to this. So, the reading evolved even further when we started to publish literature from languages around the world. So my literary life, as it were, went from, you know, Satyajit Ray, Badal Sircar, Mahasweta Devi, Habib Tanvir to Yves Bonnefoys, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Alexander Kluge. I’ve started to publish authors that I grew up reading which was wonderful, you know, and had personal relationships with them.
The happiest moment, to me, is when somebody picks up something and they don’t know you or your philosophy, but they guess it with that one thing. And the Seagull catalog, which is a very special document, does purely that. It’s not a marketing tool, it’s a philosophical, ideological, ambassadorial thing that appeals to the right sensitive person.
Mursalin
Thank you Naveen for your time. It has been a pleasure speaking with you.
