It is unlikely too many people in Sri Lanka would know today who P.S. Jayasinghe was. But it is more than likely that academics in my generation and those older in India will know who he was and what he did. But even so, his is a waning memory overtaken by more recent events and individuals’ histories that have more forcefully entered the public domain since his time. But what he achieved in his lifetime is worth reflecting about as it has much to tell us about the politics and poetics of publishing scholarly texts. He is the man who established the well-known Asia Publishing House (APH) in Bombay in 1943 and remained as India’s premier scholarly publisher for over two decades.
Establishing Asia Publishing House
Jayasinghe was a rice merchant. But being in Bombay and keen on publishing, he identified a major lapse in the publishing enterprise of the Oxford University Press’s India operation which was also based in Bombay. At the time, OUP was India’s premier publisher of scholarly material. Headed by R.E. Hawkins, OUP’s bread and butter publications were republishing textbooks and dictionaries initially published in England.
Hawkins diversified this marginally by adding a line of original books on popular anthropology and natural history. But these were essentially books written by people like himself, ‘Indianised’ Englishmen that included Jim Corbett and Verrier Elwin, and also adequately ‘anglicized’ Indians such as Salim Ali. But Hawkins was not interested in or was not able to look for authors beyond this predictable comfort zone.
The lapse in this scheme of publishing was obvious. That is, though there was already an established university system in India staffed by well-trained local academics, they hardly had an outlet for their research to be published. Jayasinghe was quick to grasp the fact that there needed to be a space for works on sociology, anthropology and history produced in India by Indians.
In this scheme of things, Jayasinghe was keen to publish the works of local scholars based in major universities at the time such as Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Baroda, Aligarh, Lucknow, Poona and so on. With the winds of Indian independence from colonial rule already in the atmosphere, it was to publish the works of these scholars that Jayasinghe self-consciously established the Asia Publishing House.
A 1970 essay in the journal, ‘Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America,’ referring to the premises on which the press was established notes, that its goal was to offer an “an authentic view of India – past and present to the rest of the world.” Authentic here meant a local view of things. In this context, Jayasinghe was very keen to ‘correct’ the views presented by mostly foreign writers on India by “by publishing books by outstanding Indian scholars dealing with history, sociology, politics, law and other disciplines”.
Besides setting up a business, Jayasinghe had an ideological project in mind notwithstanding his Ceylonese roots. This was the time that nationalisms were not as concrete and regressive as we know them today. What Ashish Nandy calls the ‘garrison states’ of South Asia had not yet emerged. This was closer to the time that Radio Ceylon could establish a highly popular Hindi service in Colombo for the entire South Asia region just as much as Jayasinghe could establish a reputable publishing venture in Bombay far away from his home country.
Jayasinghe’s main partner in this operation was Samuel Israel whom he recruited as his Chief Editor. This became an intriguing combination that brought together a Sinhala businessman from Ceylon and a Bombay-based local Jew to set up India’s most important publishing venture at the time. Ramachandra Guha, writing in 2020 notes, “what ensued was possible only in the Bombay of the 1950s – a Sinhala and a Jew, publishing works by the best scholars from across India.”
Publication Profile of Asia Publishing House
It did not take much time for Asia Publishing House to make its presence felt throughout India’s scholarly landscape. One of the first books to be published by Asia Publishing House was Irawati Karve’s seminal work, ‘Kinship Organisation in India,’ which remains an important turning point in the sociology of India. She was also the first woman in India to receive a PhD in anthropology. Soon after this, APH published a co-written introductory textbook on social anthropology by D.N. Majumdar and T.N. Madan both of whom went on to become well-known scholars in their field in India. Interestingly, this was a book that was rejected by Oxford University Press earlier.
Later, Majumdar published ‘Himalayan Polyandry’ and Madan ‘Family and Kinship’ via Asia Publishing House, both of which essentially helped entrench these scholars’ careers as well as clearly establish APH’s publishing profile as a serious venture. Irfan Habib’s ‘Agrarian System of Mughal India’ was another OUP reject that was published by APH and remains a text that clearly impacted the way medieval history was studied in India. M.N. Srinivas’s classic ‘Caste in Modern India and Other Essays’ that was also published by APH still remains a historically important text when it comes to the study of caste in India.
Perhaps Asia Publishing House’s best-known author was the then serving Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru when it published his book ‘A Bunch of Old Letters’ in 1958. The book consisted of a number of personal and political letters Nehru had written to some of his contemporaries and what he had received from them, the latter constituting the bulk of what the book had to offer.
These letters were by people such as Mahatma Gandhi, Rajendra Prasad, Annie Besant, CF Andrews, Maulana Azad, Bertrand Russell, Sarojini Naidu, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Rabindranath Tagore, and others. Interestingly, Nehru wanted APH and no one else to publish his book, indicating the stature and reputation the publishing house had achieved by that time.
Relevance of APH for Contemporary Academic Publishing
Even though Asia Publishing House and P.S. Jayasinghe’s fortunes had ended by the 1960s due to both the economic conditions prevailing in India at the time as well as Jayasinghe’s lavish lifestyle, its successes have many things to say about publishing then as well as now. Jayasinghe and Israel were smart enough to quickly identify a serious gap in scholarly publishing in India at the time and exploit it well, both as a matter of business and as a matter of ideology. Moreover, they were capable of searching for, and carefully identifying authors with promise to publish. It is entirely possible that the social sciences in India might not have evolved historically as they have done had Asia Publishing House not existed.
It seems to me this ‘smartness’ in making choices continues to be practiced by international presses currently based in India as well as better established larger and small local publishing houses that currently operate in India. But needless to say, there are plenty of examples to show where these entities have also erred. However, this is more an exception rather than the norm.
But can we be equally contended this is the case when it comes to academic publishing in Sri Lanka? For one thing, we do not have dedicated academic publishing houses in this country in the first place. Neither do local presses have formal long-term publishing relationships with more established regional or global publishers. Today, the University of Colombo and the University of Visual and Performing arts claim to have their own presses.
University presses world over are not supposed to be light-hearted efforts. But publicly available documents on the running of these two university presses -- including the way people have been appointed to run these operations and what has been so far published by the University of Colombo Press -- do not indicate that any degrees of seriousness or reflection or a study of publishing history and dynamics of Sri Lanka or the region had ever gone into their planning.
It is unfortunate that the vision and smartness that P.S. Jayasinghe exhibited when he conceptualized and established Asia Publishing House in 1943 cannot be replicated in the country of his birth even 78 years later.