Why Gujarati publishing now is a story of tragic realism in the time of the pandemic
The big firms have survived, but no one wants to move to e-books, even if the second wave of the pandemic demands it. The owners of RR Sheth, one of the largest Gujarati publishers.
In 2020, as India began to unlock after four phases of nationwide lockdown, I sent a copy of my Gujarati translation of Arun Kolatkar’s
Kala Ghoda Poems to a bibliophile friend and waited for three days, after the courier service confirmed the delivery, to hear from him. That long silence of someone whom I had known to be a voracious reader, one who would stay up all night to finish a book, clearly intrigued me, so much so that I could not help enquiring with him on phone.