It is always the weighted average of your guess and my guess and our next door neighbour’s guess, but, according to one set of statistics, there are at present nearly five hundred poetry magazines and fifteen thousand practising poets in West Bengal. Determining the current number of poetry magazines can be a matter of semantic exercise. For some of these may appear only once in five years, or appear just once and fade into oblivion. A whole lot of others are supposed to be monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly publications, but their periodicity varies with the financial straits of the managing editor at any given moment. There is that other specimen, representing a genre of passion which is a cross between love of poetry and love of entertainment, for example, the daily poetry magazines which usually assert their existence every year during the week or fortnight when Calcutta celebrates Tagore’s birth anniversary. In one or two stray years, one has also heard of hourly poetry bulletins. The births, deaths and periodicities of these magazines are afflicted by an acute stochasticity, and bands of budding mathematician economists, if they are so interested, can have a whale of a time trying to fit a simulated Markov process or some such thing to the phenomenon.
But even when frustrated by the random nature of the data concerning the number of Bengali poetry magazines, one is perhaps on much firmer ground while estimating the number of practising poets. There is a definitional problem here too, but the problem can be got over by adopting the point of view that a practising poet is one who has at least a dozen poems published in journals or magazines around the year. Alternatively, he could be one who, while appearing in journals only rarely, still manages to publish at least one volume of poetry every two years or thereabouts. Since an average issue of a poetry magazine carries poems by fifty poets—give or take a few—even allowing for overlapping and multiple appearances, there is a kind of coherence between the estimated number of poetry magazines and that of practising poets.
In the room serious people come and go, talking of Keynes, Marx or Pareto. But, meanwhile, what does one do with this furious rash of poetry, what does one do with West Bengal’s reserve army of poets? Is it at all impossible to convert this obsession with poetry into an economic proposition? Even in a society violently gone over to the pursuit of economic growth, it would be worse than philistinism to question the role of poetry. Poetry enlarges the stock of imagination for a nation: investment in poetry, therefore, along with investment in other branches of literature and philosophy, ought to pay off by enlarging this stock. It is this stock of imagination which helps a country to produce brilliant engineers, brilliant technologists or brilliant planners. One can thus make a perfectly economic case of the State taking an increasingly positive role for expanding the availability of poetry in society. And if it could be shown that, given organisation and goodwill, the publication of poetry is viable even on narrow financial terms, to vote for the poets would become respectable even without recourse to shadow prices and social rates of discount.
Assume that roughly half of the fifteen thousand practising poets would have a volume ready for publication every year. That is to say, if finance were not the stumbling block, as against the current average of three to four hundred, seven thousand five hundred volumes of poetry could have been published in West Bengal. Even if demand is assumed to stay put at the estimated current level, it should be possible to sell six hundred copies of each volume. Since about one hundred extra copies are to be kept for complimentary distribution, a print order of seven hundred copies would be called for. Given the estimated costs on the basis of accepted specifications, including specifications pertaining to the quality of paper, layout and get-up and the average length of a volume, an expenditure of approximately one thousand rupees would be necessary to print this number of copies. For seven thousand five hundred volumes, therefore, the cost would come to around Rs 75 lakhs. If the average price is fixed at Rs 2.50 sales should net Rs 1.25 crores. If the Government or the banks help the authors with marketing outlets, the cost of distribution could be drastically pruned from what it is at present. Even were a fifteen per cent margin allowed for distribution, one should be able to end up with a rate of return of around thirty per cent or more from this venture into organised publishing of poetry. If this return is now evenly spread between the poets and those who would finance them, the latter would still end up with a rate of return of fifteen per cent, which should be able to meet the test of nearly all the dogmas—including the corniest one among them—with respect to project evaluation.
A tongue-in-the-cheek exercise? Leading the good-intentioned ones up the slippery path of lyrical vacuity? One can straightaway list the difficulties in the way of pushing such a project through.
For instance, it would be said that if seven thousand five hundred volumes of poems are to be published each year, even the impossible Bengalis would reach the point of surfeit; diminishing returns would fast set in; beyond the third or fourth year, the number of copies which could be sold would register a sharp decline. This would be a fear without basis. There is no end of poetry in the world, particularly in this part of the world. There is, similarly, no end to generations of poetry-lovers; they follow close upon the heels of one another. As population expands, so does, at least at a proportionate rate, the number of poets, and the number of readers who read what the poets compose. The crucial problem is organisational: educating the poets into the economics of it; persuading them to agree to band together in co-operatives so that they could negotiate, in an effective manner, with the banks or whichever other institution would finance them; taking care of problems of production and distribution; cajoling the financial bodies to forget their standardised notions about collateral. These institutions would have to be persuaded to accept the published copies as collateral and to forget the rest of their dehydrated regulations. With kindness in their hearts, they would also have to conduct the poets to the strange universe of accountability and economic viability, and, where necessary, organise them into marketing co-operatives so that distribution does not suffer.
Ultimately, it is a matter of judgment. Financing the poets is merely an illustrative category: there could be umpteen other creative activities which could be shored up if only some investment is thrown their way. Many multiples of seventy-five lakh rupees are being frittered away every year by the banking establishment here, there and everywhere. It could well be that one or two volumes would turn out to be what the Americans call lemons, and sell badly. But there is an elementary statistical proposition concerning the inertia of large numbers; seven thousand five hundred is a pretty large number.
There would be other objections, though. For one watching the current scene in West Bengal, the realisation may suddenly strike that the pity is in the poetry. Even revolution-mongering here has become a species of lyrical effusion; an excess of poetry has numbed almost all possibilities of activism. In these circumstances, to preach the notion of poetry as a marketable commodity could be akin to offering hostage to revisionist fortune. Between the Scylla of lyricism and the Charybdis of economism, the Bengali poet will thus have to make an awkwardly difficult choice. And, in the resulting frustration, he might perhaps end up by producing some more poetry. Which is where we came in.
Excerpted with permission from Calcutta Diary by Ashok Mitra published by Yoda Press.
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But even when frustrated by the random nature of the data concerning the number of Bengali poetry magazines, one is perhaps on much firmer ground while estimating the number of practising poets. There is a definitional problem here too, but the problem can be got over by adopting the point of view that a practising poet is one who has at least a dozen poems published in journals or magazines around the year. Alternatively, he could be one who, while appearing in journals only rarely, still manages to publish at least one volume of poetry every two years or thereabouts. Since an average issue of a poetry magazine carries poems by fifty poets—give or take a few—even allowing for overlapping and multiple appearances, there is a kind of coherence between the estimated number of poetry magazines and that of practising poets.
In the room serious people come and go, talking of Keynes, Marx or Pareto. But, meanwhile, what does one do with this furious rash of poetry, what does one do with West Bengal’s reserve army of poets? Is it at all impossible to convert this obsession with poetry into an economic proposition? Even in a society violently gone over to the pursuit of economic growth, it would be worse than philistinism to question the role of poetry. Poetry enlarges the stock of imagination for a nation: investment in poetry, therefore, along with investment in other branches of literature and philosophy, ought to pay off by enlarging this stock. It is this stock of imagination which helps a country to produce brilliant engineers, brilliant technologists or brilliant planners. One can thus make a perfectly economic case of the State taking an increasingly positive role for expanding the availability of poetry in society. And if it could be shown that, given organisation and goodwill, the publication of poetry is viable even on narrow financial terms, to vote for the poets would become respectable even without recourse to shadow prices and social rates of discount.
Assume that roughly half of the fifteen thousand practising poets would have a volume ready for publication every year. That is to say, if finance were not the stumbling block, as against the current average of three to four hundred, seven thousand five hundred volumes of poetry could have been published in West Bengal. Even if demand is assumed to stay put at the estimated current level, it should be possible to sell six hundred copies of each volume. Since about one hundred extra copies are to be kept for complimentary distribution, a print order of seven hundred copies would be called for. Given the estimated costs on the basis of accepted specifications, including specifications pertaining to the quality of paper, layout and get-up and the average length of a volume, an expenditure of approximately one thousand rupees would be necessary to print this number of copies. For seven thousand five hundred volumes, therefore, the cost would come to around Rs 75 lakhs. If the average price is fixed at Rs 2.50 sales should net Rs 1.25 crores. If the Government or the banks help the authors with marketing outlets, the cost of distribution could be drastically pruned from what it is at present. Even were a fifteen per cent margin allowed for distribution, one should be able to end up with a rate of return of around thirty per cent or more from this venture into organised publishing of poetry. If this return is now evenly spread between the poets and those who would finance them, the latter would still end up with a rate of return of fifteen per cent, which should be able to meet the test of nearly all the dogmas—including the corniest one among them—with respect to project evaluation.
A tongue-in-the-cheek exercise? Leading the good-intentioned ones up the slippery path of lyrical vacuity? One can straightaway list the difficulties in the way of pushing such a project through.
For instance, it would be said that if seven thousand five hundred volumes of poems are to be published each year, even the impossible Bengalis would reach the point of surfeit; diminishing returns would fast set in; beyond the third or fourth year, the number of copies which could be sold would register a sharp decline. This would be a fear without basis. There is no end of poetry in the world, particularly in this part of the world. There is, similarly, no end to generations of poetry-lovers; they follow close upon the heels of one another. As population expands, so does, at least at a proportionate rate, the number of poets, and the number of readers who read what the poets compose. The crucial problem is organisational: educating the poets into the economics of it; persuading them to agree to band together in co-operatives so that they could negotiate, in an effective manner, with the banks or whichever other institution would finance them; taking care of problems of production and distribution; cajoling the financial bodies to forget their standardised notions about collateral. These institutions would have to be persuaded to accept the published copies as collateral and to forget the rest of their dehydrated regulations. With kindness in their hearts, they would also have to conduct the poets to the strange universe of accountability and economic viability, and, where necessary, organise them into marketing co-operatives so that distribution does not suffer.
Ultimately, it is a matter of judgment. Financing the poets is merely an illustrative category: there could be umpteen other creative activities which could be shored up if only some investment is thrown their way. Many multiples of seventy-five lakh rupees are being frittered away every year by the banking establishment here, there and everywhere. It could well be that one or two volumes would turn out to be what the Americans call lemons, and sell badly. But there is an elementary statistical proposition concerning the inertia of large numbers; seven thousand five hundred is a pretty large number.
There would be other objections, though. For one watching the current scene in West Bengal, the realisation may suddenly strike that the pity is in the poetry. Even revolution-mongering here has become a species of lyrical effusion; an excess of poetry has numbed almost all possibilities of activism. In these circumstances, to preach the notion of poetry as a marketable commodity could be akin to offering hostage to revisionist fortune. Between the Scylla of lyricism and the Charybdis of economism, the Bengali poet will thus have to make an awkwardly difficult choice. And, in the resulting frustration, he might perhaps end up by producing some more poetry. Which is where we came in.
Excerpted with permission from Calcutta Diary by Ashok Mitra published by Yoda Press.
