‘Love in a Headscarf’ Wows India

Many media and publishing firms, such as Yahoo! and Penguin, operating in India in English are looking at how to tap into readers in Hindi and regional languages. Manjul, a publishing house that has specialized in doing that for about 11 years, is going the other way with a new English-language imprint called Amaryllis.

Amaryllis
The imprint’s been very lucky with its first book, the Indian edition of Love in a Headscarf: A Muslim Woman’s Search for the One, a memoir about her arranged marriage by North London-raised writer and blogger Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, which came out here in July. Ms. Janmohamed tweeted about the book’s success in India earlier this month.

India Real Time spoke to Amaryllis’s head of publishing, Sanjana Roy Choudhury, about the book via e-mail and phone. Read edited excerpts below:

IRT: What is Amaryllis?
Choudhury: Amaryllis is a fiction and non-fiction imprint that will bring to readers worthy homegrown titles and international authors who are yearning to be read in the Indian subcontinent. The list is small, select and titles are carefully picked that Indian readers will immediately connect to. Many of Manjul’s titles have sold upwards of one lakh (100,000) copies. The authors we sign also have the option of being read in many Indian languages other than just Hindi and Marathi.

Full interview here India Relative