A publisher by choice

MOHIUDDIN Ahmed has rarely, if ever, squabbled with his fortune, good or bad.
   At school it looked likely that the sturdy little boy who ran long distance and played basketball with equal promise would go on to shine as a professional sportsman, and perhaps even as a carpenter, but given his rap sheet, certainly not a publisher of scholarly and academic books. Some years later, while studying at the Pakistan Airforce Public School at Sargodha during his teens, he looked all set to become a pilot, or at least to join the armed forces. ‘But I had a fear of heights, so while I survived despite my poor mathematics, I was glad when they disqualified me because of my poor eyesight,’ he says. At every blind turn of his life, he has embraced change faster than change could engulf him. At university Ahmed studied journalism and taught mass communication and language & communication, and for two years worked at the Pakistan Times, Lahore did a series of exposes on the ruling junta, and was offered a scholarship by the reputed Stanford University in the US. He was on the verge of accepting when the Oxford University Press in Karachi offered him a job as a books editor, and he decided to shake it up all over again. Little did he know at the time that this decision, prompted by thrill and perhaps a little bit of thrift, was to lead him to his life’s work and legacy. Ahmed says: what attracted me more toward publishing was the freedom and the shelf life of books. The right to publish and distribute the works of great minds in complete freedom and that democracy can thrive and survive only in an atmosphere of complete freedom of expression. Five years later, when the OUP closed its offices in newly independent Bangladesh and offered him the job of roving editor for South Asia, Ahmed once again picked the less obvious of two choices, turned it down, and started a publishing house The University Press Limited (UPL). As the publishing house he built – crosses its fourth decade, it has already been a monolithic presence in the country’s publishing world for two of them.
   As we sit and chat at the head-offices of the UPL, six floors above a frenetic Motijheel afternoon, Mohiuddin Ahmed is uneasy. He doesn’t like interviews. ‘Its like a shameless advertisement of oneself, I don’t like to spend so much time talking about myself,’ he says. And he’s not being coy. When I say the photographer is on his way, trepidation casts a shadow on his face. When I ask him about his childhood, he says, ‘I grew up in Chittagong…it was happy, well…not happy all the time…I was very naughty…do we have to talk about these things?…let’s just stay on UPL,’ he says almost beseechingly.
   But the conversation does stray.
   Until he was in Class 2, Ahmed studied at the St Scholastica’s Convent School in Chittagong, report card politely instructing his parents to transfer him to a boy’s school for stricter supervision ‘when I started to get too naughty,’ he says. In the school yard, ‘there used to be a place where we played marbles under a tree’ he tells me. ‘But there were always too many children running around and playing around the tree. So I made up a story that the tree was haunted. For three days no one even approached the tree, and we played marbles in peace. When Mother Superior started noticing that the school yard had become awfully quiet suddenly, she investigated. I was made to stand on a bench by the tree, and tell the whole school that I had made up that story.’ Soon after, Ahmed went on to study at the Chittagong Collegiate School.
   While at Scholastica Convent, Ahmed was often called upon by his teachers to recite poetry. He was an avid reader of science fiction and adventure stories. It was nearly a decade later, when he was studying at the Notre Dame College in Dhaka that he had his first brush with publishing. As an editor of the Blue and Gold college magazine, Ahmed not only solicited and edited writing for the first time, he saw his first printing press. ‘I was enthralled by how a press worked,’ he says. So in 1964, fresh out of Notre Dame, when he was offered a Pakistan Council Fellowship to do an MA in journalism and media studies at the Punjab University, Lahore, he didn’t think twice. ‘I dreamt of getting to Fleet Street,’ he says, referring to the legendary London street which once housed all the big UK newspapers of yore. In fact, so determined was he to shine at his first job as a reporter at the Pakistan Times that Ahmed ended up losing it. ‘After I did a series of scoops, many of them against Pakistan’s military junta of the time, the editor AT Chowdhury called me to his room and told me that either I should get a new job, or mentally prepare to be jailed and tortured by the government,’ says Ahmed. That was what led him to apply to the Oxford University Press which had advertised a post for an editor for Pakistan. ‘It was a complete coincidence and choice for me,’ says Ahmed. ‘I had just been offered a scholarship for higher studies at an University in the US, under the supervision of the legendary Guru of Mass Communications Wilbur Schramm. But availing that scholarship was going to be expensive, and I had even forgotten that I had applied for the OUP job, I knew I would never get it. In the end, OUP’s job offer was too good for me to refuse at the time,’ he says. ‘Incidentally, the first manuscript I was given by the OUP was by an important National dignitary of the time and I had to do what I still think is the toughest part of my job, saying “no” to a writer.”’
   In 1972 Ahmed returned to the newly independent Bangladesh and headed the OUP office in Dhaka. Two years later, ‘the managers at OUP in the UK decided that the academics could no longer run the business, and they closed down offices that were not as profitable as they wanted them to be – so OUP closed its offices in Dhaka and Lagos’. Although Ahmed was offered the job of roving editor in South Asia, OUP’s other, more informal, offer was what excited him even more. ‘They told me that I could start up a publishing house and employ the 20 staff they were leaving behind, and in exchange they would give me the support I needed.’ By now, Ahmed’s years at the OUP had cultivated and honed his skills in identifying, editing, and publishing academic and scholarly books. So, was the University Press Limited born.
   ‘What’s been the biggest challenge in bringing UPL where it is now?’ I ask. ‘Keeping our head above water – and it’s a challenge even now, we still struggle in many ways going from one book to the next. Call it gambling while walking a tightrope and you can have an idea of how it feels to be a publisher of scholarly and academic books.’ Into its fourth decade, Ahmed explains, UPL still has to choose between whether it will renovate its offices or buy new computers. ‘I would like to have a showroom somewhere in the city, but it’s a choice between that and publishing a handful of new books, and I always tend to pick books over other expenses.’ In fact, says Ahmed, his biggest regret is that he has not seen the reading culture in Bangladesh graduate from reading what he describes as ‘exciting soft-porn fiction’ to more serious reading. ‘We don’t live in an informed society. We make uninformed decisions at every level: bureaucratic, academic and social,’ he says. ‘When Dr Yunus shared the Nobel Prize with Grameen Bank, we received orders for his autobiography Banker to the Poor from across the sub-continent, but sales here were as they are at any other time. So many people talking about Dr Yunus and Grameen Bank on the television talk shows, and so few had bothered to read his book, or any book on micro-credit or Grameen Bank.’ In this respect, Ahmed blames the successive governments for their failure to implement the National Book Policy and the National Libraries Policy. ‘Families, the teachers and the government all have a responsibility in helping readers graduate to more serious reading. ‘The government’s supplementary reading project failed even though it spent 6 crore Taka, and all because good books were elbowed out by party-political writers who placed the books they had written in the list.’ Sadly we are yet to become a reading society, says Ahmed.
   ‘I have mixed feelings when people describe UPL as successful,’ says Ahmed. ‘If success is measured by the accolades and platitudes you earn, well then maybe UPL is successful, but I have also published books that were not editorially sound. A newspaper is in a hurry and can afford to make mistakes, a publisher does not have that privilege. I am not saying all our books are perfect, in fact we have put out many books that were not editorially sound. I admit that.’
   ‘Listen,’ says Ahmed, as we prepare to leave. ‘Please try and make this article more about UPL and less about me. The books I publish are my best ambassadors, in fact, this is what I tell our foreign service top brass. A diplomat can only make it to the living room of his counterparts but if they start giving books on Bangladesh as presents, they can make it to the inner quarters of people’s lives and change opinions about Bangladesh. Books always make good ambassadors for a country.’
   Mahtab Haider