India’s version of Medium lets you read Tamil pulp fiction

Photo credit: The LEAF Project

Ranjeet Pratap Singh was the first person from his small village in Uttar Pradesh to complete his engineering degree. “One out of a hundred villages,” he says. “I even got my MBA after that.” This is something he has in common with Rahul Ranjan, Sankarnarayana Devarajan, Prashant Gupta, and Shally Modi, his co-founders at Pratilipi.

They were all raised in small towns or villages where they were lucky to get a higher education. “There’s not many opportunities out there for non-English speakers,” he explains. “It wasn’t a lack of intelligence that was stopping people. It was literally just a language.”

A voracious reader, Ranjeet’s young life was peppered with fantasies from different books. As he grew older, he knew that there was something special about it. “I read more books than anyone else I know,” he says. “It’s changed my life, and I wanted other people to experience it.”

Pratilipi is a publishing portal for non-English writers similar to Medium. It translates to “xerox” or “copy”, which Ranjeet explains signifies that one eventually becomes a reflection of what they read. It launched in September 2014 and currently supports Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, and Malayalam. Writers can upload poems, books, stories, and articles onto the site. “We consider ourselves the fastest growing self-publishing platform in the county,” Ranjeet says.

That is entirely possible: the site now claims to have 2,600 authors and over 2.6 million unique content views, with over 600,000 of these happening in just the last month. “In January we had nearly 900,000 visitors,” he says.

After his MBA, Ranjeet started working at the Indian arm of British telco Vodafone. “I kept waiting for someone to start something like this, and finally I decided that I had to jump at it.” Along with one person from each part of his life – Prashant from high school, Rahul from engineering college, Sankar from his MBA program, and Shally from Vodafone – he decided to launch Pratilipi. “I thought to myself, ‘who are the best people i know?’ and went and found them,” he says. The founders are also readers – although not as voracious as Ranjeet – and contribute to the website.

Culture is king

Photo credit: Wikipedia.

There’s a sense of autonomy and empowerment that comes with being able to express yourself in a language you’re comfortable with. Otherwise, a lot is lost in translation.

A good example is the popular myth about the existence of 50 different words to describe snow in the Eskimo language. It’s one of those oft-repeated claims that you see on “popular science” Twitter accounts and is usually said with a sort of bleary-eyed, sighing romanticism for a faraway, exotic world. In fact, the entire thing is a lie.

Actually, Eskimo – which, by the way, is a group of 25 languages and dialects – has more or less the same number of words for snow as English. Franz Boas, the linguist whose work inspired the myth, made the age-old mistake of speaking for the people he studied. He interpreted the many verbs that went with snow, i.e., “drifting snow” or “melting snow”, as independent words.

While this blunder may seem harmless, it’s something that can have severe repercussions, especially in a country like India, where the country’s strictest census yet has finally narrowed the number down to 780 languages. Translations from different languages are vague and often miss the mark, meaning that everything from education to skilling services for jobs fall short. On the other end, many cultures are insular and dominated by a few thought leaders, meaning that new ideas about technology and modernization are rarely introduced.

“Reading is the only way,” says Ranjeet. “It opens your mind and teaches you about things.”

Let the people speak

A business opportunity in book publishing