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South Asian Literature and Global Publishing

In what follows I highlight developments in publishing that challenge existing understandings of the relationship between South Asian literature and globalisation. In a 2006 statement, cited above, Sir Tony O’Reilly encapsulates these changes while justifying his ‘language-indifferent’ and ‘locationindifferent’ interest in expansion into vernacular Indian markets (Robinson). His firm, the Independent News & Media Group, had purchased a twenty-six per cent stake in the company behind the Hindi-language paper Dainik Jagran. This put it at the vanguard of those opening offices to produce materials in vernacular languages instead of in the global English often perceived as one of the bogeymen of global capitalism (Robinson). A correlate to this vernacularising project is publishers’ new commitment to accessing niche markets of minority readerships in the West. Another is their interest in outsourcing publishing tasks. Under ultra-liberal trade mandates a growing number of export process zones are cropping up in South Asia, and publishing functions are being annexed to these areas in accord with a larger Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) trend. Key transnational firms are cutting costs by shipping things like book design and editing to South Asian companies or, more often, to other transnational firms that are headquartered in the West but have mostly South Asian offices and personnel. In this way the whole book production system is being globalised, and key South Asian cities are poised to become nodes in a reformulated global-scope communications circuit. Within this circuit things ‘indigenous’ to South Asia may include languages, content for representation, audiences and now culture industry workers employed within the production system. Still, there is no sense in which this necessarily signals the viability of any local marketplace, as what continues to be exported is much of the capital generated within the overarching system of transnational media concentration.