When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, historian Ramachandra Guha found himself unable make his quarterly trips to the archives that nourished and punctuated his writing. Stranded, he “took recourse” to his personal archive, specifically, his correspondence with Rukun Advani, his editor of long standing at Oxford University Press who went on to found the imprint Permanent Black. The result: a writer’s memoir of his relationship with his editor, The Cooking of Books (Juggernaut, ₹699). In an interview over email, Guha spoke to Mini Kapoor about the book. Edited excerpts:
You write that as far as you know, this is the first full-length book on the relationship between an author and his/her editor, with the qualification “at least not in English-language publishing”. You did know Rukun Advani in passing at Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College, but later in the course of four decades as he played a vital role in your development as “successively, a historian, a biographer, a cricket writer, and an essayist”, you became friends. From this personal history, what can you identify the hallmarks of a great (not just good or competent) editor?
The epigraph to the book quotes Norman Podhoretz as saying that good editors uniquely combine arrogance with selflessness. Rukun began his career in publishing with impeccable intellectual credentials — two first-class degrees from India’s finest university followed by a Ph.D. from Cambridge. That gave him the confidence, early on, to reshape the prose and arguments of sometimes very famous scholars. Yet because he is by temperament so shy and reserved, he never remotely wanted to claim any public credit for his work. He thus met, and meets, these twin criteria better than any other editor I have known or worked with.
Rukun also has an extraordinary range of intellectual and literary interests. This is partly innate, and partly a result of working over the decades with different authors working in different academic disciplines. He is steeped in novels, poetry, plays, and travelogues out of personal interest, and in biographical, historical, and sociological studies out of professional compulsion. In these respects he can, or should be, a model for young editors starting out. He himself believes that his keenest interest, which is in the music of Beethoven, has made him sensitive to the rhythms and cadences of prose. He thinks it necessary to “listen” to the flow of sentences and paragraphs during the process of editing.
Are these qualities completely overlapping for editors of academic and trade books?
No. Trade editors need to be more interested in marketing and publicity than Rukun is or can be. They have to be willing to lobby with editors to have books by their authors reviewed, with organisers of literary festivals to have their authors invited to speak, etc. Rukun dislikes this side of publishing, which is why he has for many years been based in the remote Himalayan town of Ranikhet.
Now, in the age of Facebook, X, and Instagram, and with (at last count) more than 400 literary festivals in India alone, marketing and publicity have assumed even more importance than ever before. The danger now is that editors may forget their first and primary duty, which is to polish the prose and refine the arguments of manuscripts before they are published, in favour of promoting their authors after their books are published.
Like every writer, I want my books to be bought and read. So I shall not disparage the business of selling. Nonetheless, I am grateful that at the formative stage of my career, I worked with an editor like Rukun Advani.
Editors get into the minds of their writers. You have, in time, come to mentor/encourage writers — currently, for instance, for a series of biographies called Indian Lives. Talk through the fascinating start and evolution of your biography of Verrier Elwin, and Advani’s vital role in it. And in time, in what ways has that informed how you went on to write your biography of Mahatma Gandhi, and how you are overseeing the Indian Lives Series?
I think I might have just become a historian and cricket writer without Rukun Advani, even if a less skilled one. But I could never have become any sort of biographer had I not had him as my editor. A biography may be the most difficult of literary forms. In writing on Verrier Elwin I had to shed the residues of my academic training as a sociologist, and learn to write about human relationships of intensity and complexity. I had to situate my subject’s life against the backdrop of the times he lived in, and pay equal attention to Elwin the friend, lover, husband, and father as to Elwin the scholar, writer, and public intellectual.
My book on Elwin went through more drafts than any book I had previously written. Rukun was at hand to improve every draft, in terms of structure, flow, argument, and language. Had I not written on Elwin under his guidance, I could never have written the biographical studies that have followed.
As for the series I am editing called Indian Lives, this draws on my own trajectory as a biographer, of course. But it also owes something to my experience with the New India Foundation. The NIF has published more than thirty books, a majority by first-time authors. I have had the privilege of working closely with them all. You might say that this is in some ways my giving back to others what Rukun Advani gave to me.
This memoir is also, as you write, a record of a vanished world in publishing — in what ways?
One can think of it as a memoir of publishing before the age of Facebook, X, Instagram, and a literary festival every week. More significantly, it records the sort of relationship a writer and editor are unlikely to ever have again—one which endures for so long, and across different genres. Writers change editors as often as they change their smartphone nowadays. On the other hand, I had Rukun Advani as my principal editor for almost two decades, and, even after I began publishing with presses other than the ones he worked with, he has remained my principal literary confidant. Finally, this relationship has been deepened not through boozy lunches or holidays taken together, but by correspondence. Except for a few years when we both lived in Delhi, we have been two thousand miles apart, the distance bridged and the conversations conducted not by phone or Zoom calls or even by WhatsApp messages, but through letters.
The point now increasingly forgotten about epistolary relationships, since they hardly exist any more, is that long letters exchanged by people of a literary bent contain things that the internet and WhatsApp have decimated — the considered expression of sentiment and feeling, the sense of empathetic communication between two people bonded by an old friendship that both strongly valued, the feeling that the letter-writers were crafting or at least carefully putting together sentences that they had the time to carefully think through. The old world of long letters contained varieties of affection, sentiment, sympathy, and knowledge that only long letters can contain. Correspondence of that kind showed a world in which everyone had not become a New Yorker — people always in a rush with no time left for thoughtful communication between just two people. I see this book as also a homage to the life of epistolary communication that the new generation has probably lost.
‘The Cooking of Books’ is at another level also your memoir as a writer. What advice would you give young writers today, in this altered publishing landscape?
I would advise them always to follow their own instincts, to write the sort of book their heart or mind tells them to write, not the sort of book they think will make them famous or rich. And I would further advise them not to associate themselves publicly with politicians or political parties. Writers are nowadays increasingly tempted to have themselves photographed with powerful and influential men, partly out of personal ambition, and partly because their publisher — thinking of how many copies a selfie with an “influencer” will sell — advises them to do so. They should not succumb to the temptation. Independence of thought, and integrity of vision, will in the long run bring far greater rewards than those constituted by money or fame.
The book closes very poignantly, with your visit in 2019 to Rukun Advani in his Ranikhet home, a retreat that is not just geographic but also a personal reclusiveness. It is, by this point, a record of a unique friendship. The book appears to make the case for the examined life, but this last vignette also implies red lines in the telling of another’s life history. Did you interact with him in the writing of this book, in terms of getting feedback, information, stipulations, etc.?
As I say in my preface: “Although the printed book appears in my name alone, Rukun Advani is entirely complicit in its contents, arguments, evocations, and evasions.” It is a work of collaboration, since I quote so many letters by him. But above all, it is a record of an intellectual and personal friendship, between two individuals of radically opposed temperaments.
One last point. No book of mine, not even the Elwin biography, has gone through so many drafts. (Thirteen people other than Rukun Advani are thanked in the acknowledgements for their help and advice.) This is at once the most personal book I have written, and the shortest. I hope the reader will be grateful for the latter if not the former!
The Cooking of Books; Ramachandra Guha, Juggernaut, ₹699.
The reviewer is a Delhi-based journalist and critic.
