Penguin’s Madras link
S. MUTHIAH
Great mind V.K. Krishna Menon
The other day, when Nandan Nilekani’s book Imagining India, was released before a large and high-powered gathering, I wondered how many present that evening realised that the imprint which was also being launched that day, Al len Lane, had a Madras connection.
That connection goes back to 1915 when a young man from Malabar, V.K. Krishna Menon, came to join his father’s alma mater, Presidency College, to study History and Economics. The young student, however, was indifferent to his studies and spent more time on the activities of the College Union, the College’s various debating societies, and the lectures by eminent men for which the Madras of the day was famous. He crowned his academic recalcitrance with a bit of derring-do that got him almost expelled — being saved only by the intercession of his History Professor, M.A. Candeth. One day, the red and green flag of Annie Besant’s Home Rule League had fluttered from the flagmast of the South’s leading Government institution, and it was traced to that rebellious student — and though Candeth had saved his skin, he was as uncertain as the young man’s father as to where the youth was headed.
The father, however, decided the boy was headed for Madras Law College. There, future lawyers always attended college in what was considered ‘proper’ attire, and that included coat and tie and turban even if you wore a dhoti — which had to be in panchakacham style. But that was not for this young man who daily turned up in a rather scruffy kurta and veshti set.
Whether the Law College faculty frowned on him or not, it did not particularly worry him. Annie Besant’s clarion call for Home Rule was what stirred him — and one fine day, he just quit college and landed on her doorstep, bedroll in hand. Living in a bachelor’s den in Adyar, he taught at Besant’s National University, became Arundale’s Secretary, and joined the Indian Boy Scouts’ Association Besant had launched, founding for it the first scout troop in Madras, the Mohammed Troop, in Komaleeswaranpet.
Three years later, Besant and Arundale sent him to England under a scheme they had launched to ensure Indian talent was further developed. In 1924, he arrived in London. He was to spend his next 30 years there.
He joined the London School of Economics, converted the Commonwealth of India League into the more politically focussed India League, became a Borough Councillor, qualified as a barrister and practised half-heartedly. During the course of all this, he also got into publishing.
In 1932, he became an editor of Bodley Head and got its Twentieth-Century Library series going. For Selwyn and Blount, he edited its series called Topical Books. Meanwhile, he dreamt of flooding the market with cheap paperback editions of quality titles. He discussed his idea with a colleague at Bodley Head and Allen Lane jumped at it.
In 1935, they quit Bodley Head and with a £100 capital set up office in the crypt of St. Pancras’ Borough Church. Thus was born Penguin books. Lane edited the fiction that they would publish as Penguins and his partner edited the non-fiction to be published as Pelicans. Among the Pelicans he edited were Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism and H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World.
It was a partnership that began to make money from the start. But it was too good to last. Lane loved publishing but he also saw it as a business. His partner was too much of an idealist. They argued over where their business was headed, in a restaurant one day. Lane called his partner a “bottleneck”. V.K. Krishna Menon got up and walked out — and out of Penguin too. Nehru, who had met Menon in London and forged a close friendship with him, later made Menon his Minister for Defence. The war with China in 1962 led to Menon’s fall. Allen Lane, on the other hand, went on to publishing fame and fortune.
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