For the last two years I have spent about half my time in Mumbai working on a new Indian publishing project.The Indian Quarterly (IQ), the product of that work, finally hit the shelves of India’s bookstores in November.
The magazine was designed to be an Indian combination of Granta, Intelligent Life and the New Yorker… with what we hoped would be a distinct “Bombay sensibility” (most Indian magazines these days being published out of Delhi).
The first issue includes: essays by Lawrence Osborne, Justine Hardy, Jerry Pinto, James Scott Linville, Michael Hanlon, Sunil Sethi and Daisy Waugh; fiction by Omair Ahmad; travel pieces by Sadakat Kadri and I Allen Sealy; a mordant memoir of reporting the China-India war by Peter Worthington, photography by Dayanita Singh and Sooni Taraporevala, profiles of Rashid Rana and Kushwant Singh by, respectively, Girish Shahane and Mark Tully; an interview with author Ed Luce by his FT colleague and Mumbai bureau chief James Crabtree; a history of Marine Drive by Sidharth Bhatia; a celebration of Mackenna’s Gold (India’s most popular Western) by Kaushik Bhaumik, paintings by Atul Dodiya and Sudhir Patwardan; and a diptych by Sarnath Banerjee.
As co-editor (with Madhu Jain) I’m very proud of what we achieved with a tiny, part-time staff and the help of some of the staff at Verve magazine. Now we are beginning to get some notices in the mainstream Indian media including this mention in Outlook magazine with its praise for IQ’s ‘superb production values’.
The magazine does not yet have a website (it is waiting for a budget commitment from the publisher) but we do have a Facebook page and a twitter account. In theory the second or third issue will be distributed in select bookstores in the UK and USA…
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