Fifteen lakh copies moved on the first day. Ved Prakash Sharma’s ‘Vardi Wala Gunda’ went on sale in 1992 and, according to reports, broke every record the trade had. No literary festival marked it. No jury shortlisted it. The book was stacked at bus stands and station stalls across the Hindi belt, priced at less than the cost of a meal, and it vanished.
Sharma was born in Meerut in 1955 and died there in 2017, aged sixty-one, having written 176 novels. Roughly twenty-three of them went out under other people’s names, since he began his career as a ghostwriter. His characters, Vijay, Vikas and Keshav Pandit, were household property across small-town north India. He founded his own imprint, Tulsi Books, and later wrote for Akshay Kumar’s Khiladi films.
The Meerut Model
Meerut was the engine. Publishers there worked on a logic entirely separate from Delhi’s literary houses: cheap paper, enormous print runs, and distribution through stalls rather than bookshops. Bhupinder Kumar Chaudhary, who ran Janata Book Stall opposite one of the city’s main bus stands for more than three decades, has described a market where readers placed advance orders, and stallholders placed advance orders with publishers, and where a first print run could sell out inside a week.
The journalist Mrinal Pande has located the appetite precisely. The demand came from an upwardly mobile middle class that had recently moved from villages into small towns, a readership that Nayi Kahani and the rest of the Hindi literary establishment had no interest in addressing and no vocabulary for reaching.
Why Nobody Counted
Surender Mohan Pathak, now eighty-six, has published around three hundred novels since 1963 and sold more than twenty-five million copies. His Sunil series alone ran past a hundred titles. For most of that career he was paid a flat fee with no share of sales, and his books sold for under a dollar apiece.
Reliable figures barely exist for any of it. Pulp sat outside the mainstream press and outside the reach of surveying agencies, so the numbers that circulate come from obituaries, publishers and the writers themselves. Estimates of Sharma’s lifetime sales run as high as eighty million, a figure reported widely but impossible to audit.
The Recognition That Came Late
Translation eventually arrived from an unexpected direction. Blaft, a small Chennai publisher, brought out ‘The 65 Lakh Heist’ in English in 2009, followed by ‘Daylight Robbery’. HarperCollins later signed Pathak and promised to make him the Agatha Christie of India. He was seventy-seven by then.
Pathak himself is unsentimental about the status question, and once opened a keynote in Delhi by announcing that Hindi had already died. He has also said the plainer thing about his own trade, which is that his books were sold as commodities rather than as art. That was the arrangement, and it worked. Two writers reached tens of millions of Indians in their own language while the prize lists were looking somewhere else entirely.