The Survival of the Friendliest: Contemporary Indian Publishing in English at the Frankfurt Book Fair

Abstract

This article examines the practice of Indian publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF). Fieldwork conducted at the FBF in 2012 suggests that friendliness is a disposition that is sometimes mobilised as a strategy by Indian publishers who are enabled yet constrained by the structural factors of the post-millennial Indian literary field. I argue that Indian publishers, as newcomers or outsiders, negotiate their positions at the FBF through strategies of friendliness mobilised in various ways: through friendly-consolidation and friendly-venturing by those in power in order to create new relations and to maintain and build on existing relations, as well through friendly-resistance by those in dominated positions to create new positions in the field. By thinking in friendliness, the strategies mobilised by Indian publishers provide a counterpoint to the Bourdieusian envisioning of the engagement between the establishment and newcomers as discontinuity and rupture.