On the Book of Central India – Part III: The Dust

Foreword by C. R. Bijoy

Dust evokes so many feelings. It settles on things – including memories – or everything turns to it. I may not be the only one to romanticise dust as it settles. This book that I reflect upon one last time in a long time, starts with me looking back as dust is settling upon it. It began with dusting off the leather-bound cover of a book written 150 years ago. Opening Forsyth’s posthumous publication – he died at the age of 31 due to an illness – was a doorway to a different world as much as it was a travel back in time. While I critique his and his contemporaries’ outlook not merely from a modern lens of ethics and wisdom but through the lens on the people of past and present, I was in awe of his extensive travel of central India, something I couldn’t match by a long shot. Personally, I wanted to match him, to present central India’s history from a modern lens. It took me much longer than him, and as I gather words in presenting a personal account of the writing journey, I think this needed to be said.

A book of history is without any element of fiction. In a way, what I present diverges from the mainstream sense of history to aid the narrator in piecing past and present together – by trying to put myself and the reader in the past and the present at the same time. As a creative nature writer, I cannot think of anything more befitting than magical realism, at least a hint of it. I took the liberty to take this route, and in doing this I slashed my prospects of finding a publisher by more than half. Indeed, a typical publisher is looking for work that is either absolutely creative or critically realistic. The middle region is where both combine – to the extreme right are books like The Early Indians and The Burning Forest, and to the left are books like The Lord of the Rings. Closer to the right are books like Ishmael, and closer to the left are books like Midnight’s Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude in a postmodern narrative. The middle space is hazy, in fact, there is no specific line that divides the two. My book lies closer to the right, dipped in magical realism to keep it together as a story. Some may find the facts intriguing, some may find the fictional elements. What this means for a publisher is that this book is neither here nor there, and that complicates things for a writer.

My tryst with finding a publisher after having written a book – which I wrote about in the second part – is full of learnings. Frankly, there is no book that can’t be published today. It all depends on one’s wherewithal to do it, but ideally, one should know of this before starting to write, but that’s not how things flow. For me, writing this story was more important, and way more personal, than convincing a publisher or a grantor that this story needs to be told. While this doesn’t work most of the times in terms of finances, this was the route I took. One thing I did do was set a timeline and keep a tab on it, and I was able to track, to my chagrin, how much I lagged – by a whole year. The publisher-hunting started soon after my poorly edited draft was ready to go at four hundred thousand words, and late.

Google told me what some of the authors told me, there were two approaches: write to the publishing house or to an agent. Writing to a publisher is pretty straightforward, it is like sending an application to an organization, in most cases there is no individual you are writing to. Writing to an agent – an individual at the other end – is more personal. While the pitch needs to be robust for both, an agent opens more doors while the publisher is a one stop shop. That year was about writing book proposals, unending editing, and making the map. Every proposal needed to be tailormade for the publisher/agent based on their genre of preference, history of publications, and author representations. I wrote to 21 entities; eight agents, eleven publishers, and two self-publishers.

The agents represented a few genre that my manuscript fit in, and three of them responded, out of which I had a discussion with two, with one ghosting me (which is normal), one politely rejecting it because it’s too long – we did have a long and interesting conversation about book lengths, the economics and the readership, and one going on a long series of questions without seeing the proposal that was submitted. That’s how it is, it is a cut-throat field, more-so the non-fiction genre of books – some take time out to explain the process, some to understand the manuscript, and some ghost. The publishing houses had two models of publishing. In traditional publishing, the publisher assumes the financial risks. In partnered publishing, the costs are shared between the publisher and the writer. And in self-publishing, the writer uses services to design and print and the writer covers all the costs and the distribution. I was also in touch with two non-profit publishers, who specialized in the subjects the manuscript fit into – these publishers are rare to please, and was something I wanted to pursue, but one was not accepting proposals – and they sent out quite a nice email, and the other fell through the cracks only for the conversation to be initiated again when the book was published, a whole year later.

Patience is key. The year of pitching manuscript felt the longest, and then, after exhausting my resources I continued the search for job and publisher both together. I was aware that the length of the book was a dealbreaker for most. As a writer, I could barely scratch the surface, so I sent a lookout notice for editors. I was not prepared to find responses charging Rs. 2 to Rs. 10 per word. For a book of about five hundred thousand words, I couldn’t afford it. This is when I would learn that writing proposal before a book is written is probably better than after, but that’s something I will still hesitatingly pursue for being an impulsive writer. Considering how difficult it was to hire a professional editor to do the job, I decided to do another round of it myself, cutting down a hundred thousand words. This is when I decided that partnered publishing was the only way to go about.

I contact the would-be publisher who published books under both models, and we decided to go with partnered publishing. I covered some costs – not a small amount – while the publisher looked after the publishing and marketing side of biz. I was given two options, to cut down heavily on the book or to publish it in two volumes. This narrative was written as one whole story, not as a series of books, and we decided to cut it further by two hundred thousand words. It was the most difficult month of the writing of this book.

I went for inhouse editing due to resource crunch – I simply couldn’t afford an editor, and that is clearly seen in the book – with both the format editor and I doing as much as possible. I was fortunate to get in touch with Rameshwar Dhurwey, a specialist in Gond Art, from Dindori district where the Baiga Chak lies, to design the book cover. He symbolized the book with his intricate artwork. One of my conundrums was to find someone to write the foreword: I didn’t want an academic to write one. Nor did I want a professional in the field of ecology and anthropology. I wanted someone with the voice for people and nature, who belonged outside of the sphere of the likes of me. Fortunately, that voice answered my email, and helped me further edit and correct sections of the book.

It has been a year since the book was released. It took me a year of reading and finding more typos like smears in the book – my own silly mistakes, but mistakes that I secretly feel make it personal and human. And while I remain unsure of its readership due to its cost and size, I am aware by the fact that readership is declining globally even as book publishing has gained momentum. In this paradox of reduced readers and more books, the size and cost of a book are limiting factors. Bringing such a piece into one book added to the costs of printing – a reason why this book stands at Rs. 1,500 as a softcover.

While I want as many as possible to read the book – read a people’s story without the glamour and fanfare the way Central India’s wilderness is shown and written about today – I am fully aware that it is just a book among books. Above all, it is a gift of gratitude and respect to the land and the people who helped me grow.

The title was adopted from an irate villager who said something on the lines of, ‘our roots are as strong as that of the banyan tree’ – he thought we were plotting to resettle their village. And while I regret that he would not read this book, I hope the younger generation of his village – a village still as beautiful as it was when I visited a decade ago – find their way to it.

Yet, this book, written in English, doesn’t quite make a gift. Whether I get the book translated in Hindi, which is my dear wish to do this year, depends entirely on securing funds. Translation takes way more resources, but this is the only way for it to touch the wild heart of Central India.

The book is available on the publisher’s website: https://thealcovepublishers.com/product/our-roots-run-wild/

It is available on Amazon India as softcover and e-book: https://amzn.in/d/7FZNOEs