The Tasks before Publishing Houses
Sudhanva Deshpande
“IT cannot be business as usual,” said M A Baby while kick-starting a discussion among publishers associated with the Party. “The Party Congress has identified neo-fascism as a serious threat. We cannot take this threat lightly. We have to confront it frontally.” This was part of a one-day meeting held in Chennai on October 30, 2025. It was attended by 19 representatives of 11 publishing houses from different parts of India. The meeting was chaired by Prakash Karat.
The printing press, periodicals including newspapers, and publishing houses have all been important and essential instruments for sharpening class struggle and bringing about social change. Lenin, in What is to be Done?, characterised the revolutionary newspaper as a “collective propagandist, collective agitator, and collective organiser”. Expanding on this idea, Baby said, “The work of publishing is not to be seen as a peripheral activity but part and parcel of the Party’s organisational work itself.” The challenges facing the left as a whole have become manifold with the ascendancy of the right. This is not just an Indian phenomenon, but is seen in many parts of the world.
The oldest among the publishing houses represented was National Book Agency, established in West Bengal in 1939, which makes it over 85 years old. Three of the publishing houses are around 50 years old: Chintha Publishers (Kerala, 1973), Prajasakthi Book House (Andhra Pradesh, 1977) and Kriya Prakashana (Karnataka, 1979). Three -- LeftWord Books (New Delhi, 1998), Lokjatan Publications (Madhya Pradesh, 2000), and Bharathi Puthakalayam (Tamil Nadu, 2002) -- are around 25, while the rest were set up more recently.
In terms of scale of operations too, there is a wide range. Some, such as Chintha and Bharathi, bring out a few hundred titles per year, while some others publish about half a dozen titles in a year. Some publishing houses make a profit every year, while others struggle to make ends meet, or even need to be subsidised by the Party. Some have their own printing presses, others don’t. Most run their own retail outlets, some even have multiple branches, while others have no property of their own.
In their interventions, the representatives of the publishing houses shared candidly their challenges. Some spoke about the decline of the reading habit among the youth; some spoke about the shrinking space for progressive ideas in society at large, which is also reflected in the publishing industry. Some publishing houses face severe attacks from our opponents, while some spoke about the inefficacy of the old political vocabulary which no longer appeals to the youth. Most of the publishing houses face the challenge of getting books by prominent authors, who generally want to go with the larger commercial presses. Some emphasised the need to train and develop a new leadership to take over the publishing work in the future. Many of the publishing houses shared a summary of their financial position, and the strategies they use to keep the bottom line black.
It’s not all gloom and doom, though. Many publishing houses have evolved strategies that have helped them expand their market. Many have, over the years, built a loyal customer base and are confident of expanding this base further. While hardly anyone has the financial cushion to be able to advertise their books commercially, all use social media and messaging services extensively to reach information about their books to readers. Many participants made positive and concrete suggestions to improve our work, and particularly improve coordination among the publishers. A suggestion for an annual award was also made.
Responding to the discussion, Baby accepted many of the suggestions, and offered some of his own:
• We need to improve communication and coordination among us. For this, we need groups for both messaging service and email.
• All publishing houses must strive to build up a collection that will include two copies of every book published by them.
• We need to translate more of each other’s books. For this, everybody needs to share details of their books in a format that other languages can also follow.
• Red Books Day (21 February) should be celebrated with more gusto, and it should become a secular festival which is not limited to the left only.
• The suggestion to have one book a year, jointly published by all the publishers, is a good idea and should be explored further.
• We should attempt to publish books for children.
• Indian Society of Left Publishers, a loose network, is to be revived urgently.
In his concluding remarks, Prakash Karat observed that the publishing houses present were at different levels of development. Some were essentially only responding to the Party’s immediate needs, bringing out booklets and documents. The others were professional publishing houses, but here too there was a range, with some being more professional in their setup and ways of working than others.
Karat said the publishing houses need to prioritise three tasks. One, address the needs of Marxist theory and ideology by bringing out books that deal with these. These should include the classics, of course, but also works that popularise Marxism for the younger generations, who have not grown up surrounded by Marxist ideas. Making Marxist theory available is thus a core task. Two, works that apply Marxist theory to the study of history, society, the economy, literature, culture, etc. Such works include both those that look at India as a whole, and those that look at these aspects in the context of linguistic nationalities. Three, books that analyse and intervene in the questions of the day from a left perspective.
Publishing houses should not confine themselves to the Party’s agitational needs alone, Karat said. They need to see themselves as publishing houses catering to the entire constituency of the left. In response to a question about works by Marxists that we may not fully agree with, Karat said that Marxist theory cannot be straitjacketed to a Party line. No party can be the sole repository of ‘correct’ Marxist theory. “We cannot be dogmatic on theoretical matters,” he said. Marxist theory has advanced by debate and discussion, and we should encourage that. In analysing history or society, different Marxist scholars and thinkers can have different approaches, and we should be open to them and in fact give space to them in our publishing programmes.
An urgent need of the moment is to identify and nurture younger Marxist scholars. An entire generation that was reared in Marxist thought and ideas is passing on. Younger scholars have grown up in a very different world, where Marxist ideas haven’t been as pervasive as previously. We need to find and encourage newer scholars.
The ideological influence of Hindutva is rapidly becoming all-pervasive. Left publishing houses have to play an important role in countering Hindutva intellectually and ideologically. Rising to this challenge is crucial to the future of our movement, and the country as a whole. (END)
