‘I was interested in the why and how of Seagull Books’: Pushan Kripalani

In a film that’s “meant to feel like a languorous conversation with a friend”, director Pushan Kripalani goes behind four decades of the Kolkata publishing house

Forty years ago, when Naveen Kishore began Seagull Books in Kolkata, he might not have imagined how many people his niche venture would touch, across countries. The independent publishing house specialises in books on art, theatre and cinema, is known for its translations, and also owns worldwide English-language publishing rights for authors (several of them Nobel laureates) as renowned as Peter Handke, Mo Yan and László Krasznahorkai. And, it has a backlist of over 500 titles.

To commemorate its four decades, director Pushan Kripalani — known for films such as Goldfish (2022) starring Kalki Koechlin and Deepti Naval — has come up with Of the Book and Other Stories, a 151-minute documentary on the publication house and the man behind it. The inaugural screening was in Bangalore on July 7.

The film is a coming together of conversations about Seagull and Kishore, by authors such as Romila Thapar and others in publishing. “The length was determined by the quality of the conversations. We went in with an open mind,” explains the filmmaker.

Edited excerpts from an interview with Kripalani.

I’ve literally known Naveen all my life. For me, Seagull is not separate from the person. I wanted the film to have the intimacy of that conversation, but I also wanted to approach it like a student. I wanted to learn how the organisation has maintained its integrity and independence over time.

All good documentaries are invested in the subject, but they also have the most subservient view of what they are going to embark on. I was interested in the why and how of Seagull, because everyone knows the what. I wanted to know how a person sitting in Kolkata can run something as precarious as independent publishing and overcome the mad vagaries of the marketplace.

For instance, I learnt that when the late Nemai Ghosh — who worked with filmmaker Satyajit Ray as a still photographer for over 20 years — approached Naveen for a book of photographs, he commissioned it though it meant giving up on other print-rich titles. Naveen did not want someone of that stature to go around hawking his life. The book was Dramatic Moments, and that to me is the gold standard of what being a human being is. Which is why at the centre of the film is Naveen’s humanist view of the world, with a completely different definition of success.