Visiting Professor P. Lal

But some dreamt of a lovelier payback scheme. Purushuttoma Lal (P. Lal to everybody) 48 years ago began 'Writers Workshop' to encourage creative writing in English. Himself a poet, he has eight volumes of poetry to his credit. He has done extensive translations from Sanskrit with his repertoire covering the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and the Vedas. Professor Lal received the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship Award for transcreating two Upanishads in 1970, and the Padma Shri in 1971. Ever since 1958, Writers Workshop, a small publishing house has been steadily publishing mostly "first-ers", new writers who need a platform to begin their journey. For many, Writers Workshop has been a "springboard to literary fame", as termed by Professor Jai Ratan, a founder member of Writers Workshop and winner of the Sahitya Akademy Award for translation.

My interest in small presses and their contribution to a poet's creative space led me to 162/92 Lake Gardens, Kolkata 700045. The night before I met Professor Lal, all I had with me was a measly piece of paper from a woman who had drawn the directions to the Nook for me. The only helpful tip was that Professor Lal's home cum WW was near the State Bank, Khelaghar Branch. I showed the gibberish on the paper to the cab driver and convinced him to take me there in my most broken Hindi. And he did - to the tiny bookshop, the 'Book Nook', which was started by P. Lal in 1998, 40 years later than the inception of the Workshop. The Nook was the book shop I pleasantly spent my next four hours in, touching hand-bound books, covered with cotton handloom sari cloth, woven and designed in India. Every such book published by Writers Workshop is hand-set in Times Roman typeface printed on an Indian-make hand-operated machine, on offset paper made in India, with layout and lettering done by P. Lal.

I picked one book after the other from the shelves and settled down quietly in a corner, without being interrupted or disturbed. Then I gathered all my courage and wrote a note to Professor Lal asking for an appointment to see him at his home which lay adjacent to the outlet.

P. Lal met me, an absolute stranger, on his doorstep with careful warmth and curiosity. The handsome 76-year-old intrigued me more and more as our conversation assumed different shapes every fifteen minutes. It had started with the Mahabharata and Arjun having chosen Swadharma, self preservation, in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Lal reminisced about his poetry being rejected by Longman Greene, Oxford University Press, and even the tiny Signette Press at 10/2 Elgin road (he actually quoted the address from memory). Disappointments led him to form the Writers Workshop. It was designed to breed the new of generation poets, the new voices of the 60's belonging to Lal and his other friends who otherwise were confined to publishing in The Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1960, Professor Lal began 'Miscellany', a bi-monthly journal that encouraged creative writing in English. The first anthology was the massive 'Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo,' which included more than a hundred poets. Later on Parthasarathy, Daruwalla, Peeradina , all Indian English poets, edited more selective anthology publications from WW. However, Professor Lal was included in only one of them and was treated "severely", as Raja Rao put it. It was clear that Professor Lal was positioned to be more of a publisher than a poet.

For all that has come his way, Lal remains a very grateful man, thankful to the Sahibs for leaving behind a language for Indians to curse, pamper and detoxify. He acknowledges his debt to the magical group who gathered at his home every Sunday in late 50s just to form the Workshop. And lastly and mostly he remains grateful to Kisha Lal, his Shumongoli Bodhu* for the last 51 years of marital bliss.

I have been meeting this 76-year-old man regularly for the last two months and I have been having the best time of my life! He feeds me sandwiches and refuses to tell me what it is other than the 'Thousand Island Dressing' that he has put in there. He provides the special crumbly shandesh without specifying the source and when asked, he has 'I'm the only one who knows' look on his face. He speaks of the once-upon-a-time Pan Global English and moves on to Pan Indian English of 50 years ago. Then pauses for a second and shares with me his disappointment of that the miniaturized, local flavors seeping in to Literature now. As per him, now there's North-east, a South- west, a North-north one and so on and so forth. He's clearly disappointed with a special brand of Indian Diasporic writers who write for the sahibs. He curses the Irony of the West and opposes the English language that sledge hammers us with 'irony'. "What is Irony in Bangla?" he asks. I grope for a lexical equivalence of 'irony' in Bangla and find none. Lal continues: "What do they mean by 'jolly good'...Why can't they just say it's bad? It's the tyranny of irony, you see, and if you want to use the language well, strip it of irony and disinfect it." He goes on for an hour or so, plainly planning a crusade against Irony. At one point, he asks "Are you bored, young woman?" I answer in the negative and assure him that my dictionary has no such word. He jumps up in excitement and realizes that he had made his point. He's absolutely right. There's no irony in any of the canons. The Bible has no irony. The Quran none. The Mahabharata is the simplest story so far. "So, where IS the irony, my dear?"

In no time, I have learnt that this man is a loner and he himself endorses it by saying that he has taken the road "less traveled by". For the likes of Deb Kumar Das, another founding member of WW, the road has been different. West has "prosperised" Das, he says. But it failed with Lal, who in spite of traveling with 150 tickets during his lecture tours all over the continents refused to get rooted to an alien land and chose his impecunious mother, India, over a prosperous stepmother, the West. But he admits that Literature still remains a mansion with many rooms. It has space for the interstitial diaspora and it has space enough to accommodate entire New York, which as per Professor Lal , is the latest battlefield of Kurukshetra. He speaks of old friends and memories, of Pradip Sen, Jai Ratan, Anita Desai, Raghavendra Rao, William Hull, Kawlian Sio, the founder members with absolute fondness. He's a man who doesn't let go....of anything for that matter. Unsold books remain in his store for years together and he refuses to burn them. He tells me that he can't tolerate papers going up in flames.

When I go through the archive, I am able to handpick good poetry after 1995. I sense fire in Mamang Dai, Mani Rao, Kapil Kachru and a very young student named Tuhin Sanyal. They too have been published by WW for the first time in their lives, just as Vikram Seth was, twenty six years back when his 'Mappings' was unable to find any publisher and had found its way to P. Lal's Lake Gardens. I also see a lot of greeting card poetry with large dedications to P. Lal and feel disappointed. I ask him why he indiscriminately publishes poets and takes the blame? He sharply reminds me that movement is made of many miscellaneous poets and not by one particular type. P. Lal's defence is the "10% syndrome, that 10 out of his 100 will add color to Indo Anglian literature, while the rest 90 will write badly but still manage to find a P. Lal in their lives somewhere down the line.

For P. Lal, life is 'Maha-brilliant.' His Maha-army is Literature and his Maha-elephants are none other than the writers he chooses to publish. Indian English has continued to find its voice through P. Lal and let's hope, in spite of a few home truths, he will still manage to remain the Maha publisher, choosing self- subsidization and non-profitability. Having averaged some 3500 titles so far and 100 titles every year since 1995, the Writers Workshop still functions from his own home with his "secretary...a three-tiered Godrej filing cabinet." What Professor P. Lal means is simply put in his credo at the back of most of his books: 'Good Samaritan generosities, not market forces, are at the root of civilized and significant publishing the world over.' As long as P. Lal breathes, he will believe in raga, bhava, tala and above all in Vak, the Goddess of Speech. As long as his breath will allow, he will continue publishing new writers hoping to discover the pot of genius that every publisher dreams of at the end of the literary rainbow.

Except in his case, Passion and Publishing walk hand in hand and never tire of each other...with or without that pot.

Rubana Ahmed is a poet currently doing Phd work at Jadavpur University.