This paper begins with a provocation about the framing of Indian literature in the transnational marketplace, and then turns to a discussion of Ravi Dayal and the Hindi publishers of Ansari Road. I frame my interviews with literary publishers as an intellectual history of the present in order to ask: How did Hindi and English language publishers position themselves in the decades immediately after Independence? And, what might that tell us about the ways in which the two languages have been vying for national legitimacy ever since? The paper will juxtapose these transnational (London-New York) and local (Delhi) narratives of how to make "good books" in order to spark a larger discussion about how literature is produced, texts are interpreted and audiences cultivated.

Rashmi Sadana received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 and, from 2003 till 2007, was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Anthropology at Columbia University. She is now based in Delhi, completing a book manuscript about the intersection of language politics and Indian literary production and is co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture.