Agency Profile: Renuka Chatterjee- Osians Literary Agency

Osians Literary Agency is representing great books and making history all at the same time; launched in May 2007, Osians is India’s first professional literary industry. I spoke to senior vice president Renuka Chatterjee about the impact her agency is making in the world of publishing.

Q: I see that your company launched in May 2007. Who launched the company, and how did it all start?

A: Osians was started in 2000 by founder and chairman Neville Tuli, as India’s first professional art-auction house. Osians now has six to eight auctions of Indian art in Delhi and Mumbai. Our goal for the near future is to hold auctions in London and other major European cities. In 2004, Osians acquired Cinefan, a festival of Asian and Arab films, and Cinemaya; a magazine on cinema. In May 2007, Neville Tuli launched the literary agency. I came to the agency after fifteen years in publishing, working for imprints like Penguin and HarperCollins. Seeing the remarkable growth in the publishing industry in India and the growing body of Indian writers who are making their mark internationally, I felt the time had come for writers like myself of Indian decent to have our own literary agents to represent our writers, instead of being wholly dependent on agents in the West. When we launched last May, we had five writers; today, we have seventeen. We are looking to represent writers of Indian origin, as well as writers from other Asian countries, which is our special focus. Among our current submissions is a New York-based writer named Karan Bajaj. Karen is a second-generation Indian-American, whose hilarious first novel, Keep Off the Grass, describes what happens to a successful Wall Street investment banker of Indian origin when he decides to explore his roots by enrolling in a business school in India. The novel will be published in India by HarperCollins in May 2008, and will soon be on submission to publishers in America.

Q: How do writers from India and Asian countries, which are who you represent, differ from American writers? How are the books alike?

A: It is difficult to pinpoint how writers differ. Obviously, there is a different quality, or ‘feel’ to writing from India or the Philippines compared to America. Essentially, every writer is conditioned by, and writes about, the milieu in which he lives or has lived. If writers from India write about issues of caste, inter-religious conflict, joint families, the expansion of call centers and instant communication or their experiences as a second or third generation American or Britain, than equally, American writers should write about racial and religious immigrant experiences from their perspective. If there is a difference that one can put a finger on (and this is a generalization,) it would be that Indians and Asians tend to write ‘big books’ that encompass a lot of issues with a historical, political or social perspective, rather than confine it to the story of an individual or set of individuals. Writers in the West don’t have the same pressing need to encompass huge themes or make a commentary; they are more concerned with individual lives and stories. As I said, this is a generalization, and it also has to do with the fact that the Indian writers who get published in the West are usually those who write these kinds of big books.

Q: As a new literary agency, what are your goals for the next five years? What do you set out to do that other literary agencies haven’t done yet?

A: We would like to build up a list of 50-60 authors over the next five years. We have three main goals. One: To find more authors from other Asian countries, not just India, and present them to the Western world. After reading the work of two Philippine authors we have, Jose Dalisay and Charlson Ong, we are convinced that there is a wealth of talent in these countries that never gets noticed, until it happens to get short-listed for some literary prize (it was the 2007 Man Asian that led us to Jose, and it would be hugely satisfying if we could help more writers like Jose be internationally recognized.) Two: We would like to break some of the stereotypes that exist in the Western publishing mind, as to what an “Indian novel” should be, and open their minds to some really good writing which doesn’t fit into the mold. Three: We would like to get Indian publishers to take locally published Indian writers more seriously, with better advances, better promotion, and more professionalism. There is a big difference in the kind of advances and attention Indian writers who are published abroad get and what happens with writers who are only published in India, and it has nothing to do with the quality of their writing.

How are we different? For one, because we are one of the first professional literary agencies in India, and we’re trying to do things the other way around; instead of agents in London and New York selling Indian writers to Indian publishers, we are trying to sell Indian writers to publishers in London and New York. We would eventually like to be recognized as the first agency to focus on Asian writing, and certainly we would like to be the first Indian agency to be taken at par with the top international agencies in the world.