Penguin turns 30 in India
The publisher Penguin is a cultural institution. Not just in its native Britain, but also in India, where English is the second official language and Penguin Random House India is the largest publisher of English-language literature. Every Indian bookshop has Penguin Random House books, with their striking black and white penguin in the orange oval, somewhere in their shop window. Every schoolchild on the subcontinent encounters the famous Penguin classics at some point. The Indian publishing subsidiary of Penguin has been handling the distribution of Penguin books on the subcontinent since 1985, and publishing its own books here since 1987. It celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2017 with a number of activities and promotions throughout the year.
The anniversary year kicked off in January with one of India's largest book events, the Jaipur Literature Festival, where Penguin India delighted book lovers with a variety of new collectibles as well as the “Penguin 30,” a special edition featuring 30 bestsellers from Indian authors from the past 30 years. They include Nehru’s autobiography as well as famous novels such as “The Golden Gate” by Vikram Seth, “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh, and “Unaccustomed Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri.
At the Jaipur Literature Festival, Penguin Random House India also presented its orange Pop-up Cart, a cart with fold-down sides and plenty of space for some of Penguin’s most popular bestsellers. The Pop-up Cart is part of Penguin Random House India’s new “Keep Reading” literacy campaign, designed to bring its books to the most remote – but also to unusual – places in the country. These places can be next to a newsstand, a busy crossroads or a gallery, and the contents of the Pop-up Cart can be adapted according to the target group in each case. At the literary festival, the Penguin Random House cart was definitely one of the attractions, with well-known Indian authors such as Sunil Khilnani, Devdutt Pattanaik, Ravinder Singh and Sanjay Barua happy to be photographed in front of it. The publisher says that the Pop-up Cart will be used at numerous other literary and cultural festivals throughout the anniversary year.
Penguin Random House India also began its anniversary celebrations on social media at the beginning of the year. Visitors to the festival in Jaipur had the opportunity to participate in the “#KeepTweeting” campaign, the country's first crowdsourcing Twitter book. It involved Twitter users developing a 30-line short story, for which only the first line was already predetermined. And in the evening at the Penguin Random House India party at Sujan Rajamahal Palace, another British, or more precisely Scottish, company expressed its congratulations: Glenfiddich whisky served guests a specially created cocktail called “The Flying Penguin.”
