The quiet alchemy of Papyrus

Kalyan, a municipality on the outer edge of Mumbai’s sprawling orbit, is hardly the setting for a quiet, print-based revolution. Yet, it is here that a small band of young enthusiasts, six years ago, began a publishing house, Papyrus, with an ethos that seemed to reject the digital age and the mass-market paperback. Their mission was not to produce books cheaply, but to produce them well, with a kind of stubborn, almost devotional insistence on the object itself.

The philosophical blueprint for this venture was found in the words of the late Italian publisher Roberto Calasso: “A good publishing house to be one, if you’ll allow the tautology that publishes, so far as possible, only good books. Thus, to use a summary definition, those books of which the publisher tends to feel proud rather than ashamed.” 

For founders Dhanashree Khandkar and Shripad Aruna Subhash, this sentence was less a maxim and more a deeply ingrained conviction. They were not, originally, planners of a business; they were simply lovers of books and reading. Shripad, a playwright, had accumulated a deep knowledge of his subject through his craft, assisted by companions like Bhushan Kolte, who introduced him to world cinema and supplementary reading. Kolte, in a precursor to the formal business, was known for exhibiting and selling books on the streets with friends—an informal education in grassroots distribution that amazed his partners.

The drama collective they co-founded in 2015 evolved into an annual fundraiser centred on book exhibitions. By 2016, Shripad and Kolte were further immersed in the literary world through their work with 'Nav Anushtubh'. The behind-the-scenes creation of a magazine — the layout by Ketan Changal, the fine-grained debates over font, picture placement, and lamination — ignited a new curiosity about the publishing business. 

Bhushan Kolte, who had long harboured a vision, finally opened his bookstore in 2018. After much deliberation over a suitable name, he settled on Papyrus, a tribute to the Egyptian bark of the Cypress papyrus tree — the very genesis of paper, a material durable enough for text to survive thousands of years. The logo, designed by Ganesh Vispute, incorporated twelfth-century Marathi script, linking the modern project to a deep historical lineage.

It was this curiosity, fueled by a broadened awareness of world literature and a fascination with global book production experiments, that led to the publishing wing. The founders began to pore over old printing and binding techniques, studying books that had survived fifty or sixty years in excellent condition. They saw that these enduring objects had not only preserved text but had also conveyed the very atmosphere and spirit of the author and the era. The production parameters of world-class, old-school books — where the author, designer, conceptualiser, and publisher worked in concert to make a book good, rather than merely functional — became their north star.

Their first opportunity to put this ethos into practice arrived when literateur Nitin Rindhe called them and placed the manuscript for his work, Pasodi, in their hands. It was a baptism by fire and a trial by climate. In the humid air of Mumbai, paper with acid content quickly yellows and degrades. To ensure durability, Papyrus chose a natural shade acid-free paper from Seshaasai — a deliberate, costly investment in longevity. 

Pasodi, their first book, was bound in cardboard, sheathed in dark blue, cloth-textured Geltex paper, and silver-foiled with the title and author's name. Vispute’s drawing for the cover dictated the choice of textured paper. It was a pampered firstborn, and though they note that many details were missed, they learned with every subsequent title, perfecting a system that insists on 70 to 100-gsm Seshaasai paper, section-stitched binding for strength, and a careful pairing of artist to subject.

For their book Piwla Piwla Pachola, the cover paper’s texture was chosen to evoke a canvas; for Asamatiche Awaz, the cover, originally drawn on jute, was printed on Geltex to maximise the material’s effectiveness.

The publishing house was born in the Corona period, but Papyrus the Book Store immediately took over sales, demonstrating the necessity of a mixed approach. They realised that while social media sales had grown, traditional distribution still mattered. The process of sales and distribution became an ongoing research project: creating new options by continually examining the available equations.

In their six years, Papyrus has maintained a remarkable thematic diversity, publishing 26 books, including stories of different castes, innovative literature for the time, novels, translations of Nobel Prize-winning works, and rescued out-of-print titles. Their most important releases include Romila Thapar’s translated Voices of Dissent, Jayant Pawar's Truth, Power and Literature, and Orhan Pamuk's The Naive and Sentimental Novelist. Upcoming titles include the first Marathi translation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, along with collections by Kiran Kshirsagar and novels by Namdev Dhasal.

The founders’ core belief has been validated: if they continue to deliver excellent literature with the highest level of presentation, readers will eventually adopt the work as their own. It is a romanticism that, they are quick to note, must be tethered to a solid financial reality. In an age of rising inflation, the cost of paper and the increasing GST on printing are constant burdens. The challenge is to maintain their high standards, pay collaborators a fair wage, and keep the final price affordable. 

Papyrus Publishing is not a venture one undertakes for immediate, easy profit; it requires patience, perseverance, and financial support. For Shripad Aruna Subhash and his partners, however, the balance sheet is secondary to the constant, guiding thought: “what can be done best for Marathi.” It is that thought, and the strength it imparts, that ensures new possibilities and new experiments will continue to emerge from their small house in Kalyan.