A celebrated translator launches a literary imprint on Stck — and builds a direct bridge between India's vernacular masterworks and readers everywhere.
An imprint born from a translator's frustration — and a conviction that India's literary heritage deserves to travel.
India is home to dozens of living literary traditions — Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Odia, and more — each with centuries of fiction, poetry, and prose that have never been rendered into English. While global publishers occasionally dip into this canon, they rarely do so with depth or speed.
Arunava Sinha, one of India's most prolific and respected translators — with over one hundred translations to his name — saw the gap clearly: a vast, underserved readership of English-language readers who were hungry for Indian literary fiction, and a publishing pipeline too slow, too commercial, and too geographically distant to serve them.
Rather than wait for legacy publishers to commission translations at their pace, Arunava chose to launch his own imprint. Chowringhee Press — named after the iconic boulevard in Kolkata (as well as Arunava's first translated book) — wanted to operate lean, move fast, and publish directly to readers through digital-first infrastructure.
Stck's platform offered the ideal home: direct-to-reader sales, print-on-demand physical books, and a growing community of readers who cared about literary depth over commercial formula.
"India has some of the richest literary traditions in the world. The problem has never been a shortage of great writing — it has been a shortage of the will to bring it to new audiences."
— Arunava Sinha, Founder, Chowringhee PressChowringhee Press publishes work that is canonical but overlooked, radical but literary, historical but urgently contemporary. Each title is chosen because it illuminates something about the Indian experience that the Anglophone world does not yet know — and translates it with the fidelity and verve of a practitioner at the height of their craft.
Chowringhee Press occupies a distinctive corner of the publishing landscape — one that no other imprint is systematically serving.
Each book published under Chowringhee Press is a deliberate act of recovery — bringing a specific voice, era, or literary tradition into English for the first time, or afresh.
Chowringhee Press moved from concept to catalogue with remarkable speed — a testament to what's possible when editorial vision meets the right publishing infrastructure.
A reflective look at the imprint's origins, ambitions, and the philosophy behind bringing India's literary canon to new readers.
After translating more than a hundred books for publishers in India, the UK, and the US, I had a clear sense of what was possible — and what was being left on the table. The pipeline for Indian literary translation is painfully slow. A title might take three to five years from commission to publication. Chowringhee Press is an attempt to move at the speed that the literature deserves. The texts I want to bring out have been waiting long enough.
Chowringhee is the heart of Kolkata — a boulevard that has witnessed over two centuries of Bengali literary and intellectual life. It is a name that carries a sense of place and of history without being sentimental about it. I wanted the imprint to feel rooted — to signal that this is publishing with a geographic and cultural consciousness, not publishing from nowhere in particular. Chowringhee is also the title of my first translated book.
The criterion is simple but demanding: it must be a text that deserves to be in English and is not yet there, or is there in an unsatisfactory form. The Laboratory was Tagore's last novel — and previous translations have been overlooked. Rashid Jahan wrote some of the most radical Urdu fiction of the twentieth century, and she was relatively unknown in English. These are not obscure choices. They are central figures in their own traditions who simply hadn't crossed the language boundary.
The economics of independent literary publishing are brutal under the traditional model. Stck changes the equation entirely. I can publish a title, price it at ₹200, and have it reach a reader in Bengaluru or Berlin the same day. I don't need a distributor, a warehouse, or a sales team. What I need is good work and readers who care about good work — and Stck gives me the infrastructure to connect the two. It is genuinely a new model for what literary publishing can be.
I would like Chowringhee Press to be the first name a reader thinks of when they want to understand Indian literary fiction in depth — across languages, across eras. Not just Bengali, not just the canonical period, but the full range. There is so much to do. We have barely begun.
From literary Twitter to Instagram, readers and critics are paying attention to this new imprint.
Follow @arunavasinha on Instagram for the latest from Chowringhee Press.
If you care about great writing from India — in all its linguistic richness and historical depth — Stck makes it possible to support independent literary publishing directly.