A couple of years ago, I strolled into a stall at the Chennai Book Fair. I pulled out a title here, grazed through a wrapper there and was generally soaking in the atmosphere, when I felt someone looking at me. Seated on a chair, with deep, curious eyes, he was gauging me by the titles I showed interest in. What followed was an interesting conversation on introducing people to good books. The book stall belonged to Cre-A Publishers; the man, S. Ramakrishnan, who started it all as a young man in Madras in 1974.
At Cre-A’s core is the 71-year-old’s love for literature. It was in the mid-1960s that Ramakrishnan left university and joined an “informal group” of people, who were driven by a thirst for books. They started a quarterly little magazine called Ka Sa Da Tha Pa Ra , which was “powerful, noisy and catalytic” during the 36 months it ran. The magazine was Ramakrishnan’s “stepping stone” into the literary world.
After a stint at an advertising agency and two years spending all his time “being with books” (he later quit his advertising job), Ramakrishnan started Cre-A in his home in T. Nagar.
“My friend Jayalakshmi was instrumental in introducing me to this field. She was one of the finest women I’ve met; strong and fiercely independent,” he recalls. In fact, Cre-A is named so after Jayalakshmi jokingly mentioned that Jaya rhymed with Cre-A.
Their first title was Naarkaalikaarar , a collection of plays by Na. Muthuswamy. For five years, Cre-A consisted of just one man who multi-tasked. Ramakrishnan would go to the post office, the printing press, the bank… Even today, after 42 years, Cre-A remains a small team of eight, with Ramakrishnan doing all the editing.
“I never set out to establish a business empire,” he says. He wanted to bring out books that regular publishing houses didn’t. Over the course of 10 years of working closely with contemporary Tamil writers, he realised that they were faced with a “problem”. “We didn’t have a dictionary for contemporary Tamil words,” says Ramakrishnan. He decided to address the issue himself.
With the support of linguist E. Annamalai, Ramakrishnan set out to make Cre-A’s magnum opus, Tharkaala Tamil Agarathi (Contemporary Tamil Dictionary). “Making a dictionary is a political act,” he feels. “The common man is empowered by knowing the meaning of words.”
Apart from the dictionary and books on theatre, poetry, fiction and healthcare, Cre-A is known for its French and German translations — these include Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince — and their latest pocket-size books on butterflies, dragonflies and birds. In the four decades of its existence, the publishing house has brought out around 150 titles.
But Ramakrishnan dismisses this as a mere number, for he doesn’t believe in quantity. “We do slog; but we do so for quality. This is possible because of the dedicated group of individuals who work with us,” he says. Cre-A also has a Braille version, has launched an Android and iOS app of its dictionary and has an online Tamil language repository as well.
Ramakrishnan’s love for words borders on obsession — he knows every word, every line in each of the books he’s brought out. “Tamil publishing is not a glamorous field,” he says. “I’ve led a hard life, but a rich life.”
