Fellow Fridays Featuring Suvani Singh
Literature, community and social impact with Suvani Singh
Asia Society India Centre spoke with Suvani Singh, part of the Asia 21 Next Generation Class of 2012. Suvani is a creative entrepreneur, founder of Quixote’s Cove (QC), an independent bookshop and community space and Satori Center for the Arts, a non-profit sister organisation of QC. She was the force behind initiatives including the Kathmandu Literary Jatra, a literature festival and La.lit, a literary magazine.
In this interview, we talk about Suvani’s love for literature, her journey as a creative entrepreneur and the significant strides she’s taken to foster community and culture in Nepal.
Could you begin by briefly introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your work?
I started working as a creative entrepreneur back in 2009 by opening up a bookshop. In 2008, the civil war in Nepal had ended with the peace treaty being signed – and at that point in time, the socio-political context was very different from what it had been in the ‘90s and the early 2000s. The economic situation seemed to be opening up; people were looking to start new initiatives. There was also a lot of talk about political changes in the country: about federalism and indigenous rights, all of which was very new for Nepal. One of the things that my partner and I felt was missing, was a space for people to come together, that allowed for an exchange of ideas, opinions and thoughts – a neutral space for people to gather and meet. Also, when I was a student in Bombay (now Mumbai), the bookshops and theatre spaces there, really opened up the communities for me in the city. And I just felt it was important to create a cultural space that would be able to fill that gap [in Nepal]. And I thought of a bookshop because I'm a reader, I've always been a reader, I love books. And for a reader the dream is always to open up a bookshop, right? (laughs)
And so that's what we did. We found like this small little nook of a place in a very quiet neighbourhood, and it was on the road, so there could be footfall – all of that business stuff that you have to look into. I told my partner that if I'm going to get into this, I want to be able to do events at the shop, I don't want it to just be a bookshop where we sell books, I don't want it to be only a transactional space, I want it to be like a literary salon. And so we started working on it – Quixote’s Cove.
Tell us more about the name, Quixote’s Cove.
I think we were so drunk on our dreams that when it came to naming the bookshop we went with what felt right. In 2008-2009, a lot of independent bookshops were closing down all over the world because of Amazon. And here we were in Nepal, talking about opening up an independent bookshop, and everyone we talked to about it said ‘you guys are mad!’ which reminded us of the story of [Don] Quixote going mad after reading lots of books. And also the building – it was from the 1930s, with low ceilings, and it looked like a cove. So we said let's just call it Quixote's Cove since we’ve lost our minds like Don Quixote.
So how did the bookstore run and grow to become a community space?
I think the vision for the work that we wanted to do was very strong. The first three or four years that I was back in Kathmandu [after studying], I couldn't find a community where I could meet like-minded people. It was either through family or friends, but no one outside those circles. And I found that really strange. Earlier, the only way I could find out about events that were happening was after they had happened, through the newspapers. And I used to feel like just so annoyed with that, you know? How am I supposed to meet [new people] and enter a new community if I don't even know about the events that are happening?
So I was looking to create such a space. We started hosting a lot of events at the bookshop. It was attached to a restaurant, and we had a nice little space where we could do poetry readings, host book clubs, or writing groups. That’s how it started. And whenever we had events at the bookshop, I made sure to reach out to all the media houses, befriended all the journalists and asked them to do pre-event coverage of the events I was organizing. I gave them ideas to do interviews with the writer, carry a book review, and so on – and requested them to mention that the event is going to happen at so-and-so time, in this venue, at the end, so that interested people could come. And that turned out to be a really good strategy, because we used to get a lot of people turning up with newspapers asking about the event. So I was really happy with that approach. Slowly, the community started building, we started attracting writers, translators, editors, poets, artists, and started collaborating with them to do a lot more events.
So how did this lead to the Kathmandu Literary Jatra (the literary festival) and eventually La.lit, the literary magazine? And why did you decide to move away from the festival after the first edition?
We were doing all these small things on our own, with a very minimal budget. But the media coverage we generated, attracted the attention of the embassies. We started collaborating with the Indian embassy, as well as the American embassy to do literary events. The US Embassy reached out to partner with us to bring spoken word poetry to the youth in Nepal. So we started organizing these larger events, which eventually led to the Kathmandu Literary Jatra, a literature festival. Back then, 10-12 years ago, the scenario in Kathmandu was really dire, especially when it came to funding [for the arts]. We were obviously inspired by the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, and had met Namita [Gokhale] as well. She was really supportive. In fact, she was one of the advisory board members for the festival and really helped us make connections and made it possible to pull off the event as well. But it just was really draining on many levels because businesses were not sure about what they would get out of sponsoring a literary festival – it was a very young industry in terms of raising sponsorships. And then around the same time some other people, including publishers, also started organizing literature festivals as well. And as you know, Kathmandu is very small. I talked to them about maybe collaborating and doing the programming together or something like that, but it didn't work out – collaborations can be tricky. And so, for the second iteration, I felt like there was no point to be competing for funds. I also think that after the first festival I was a bit sceptical about whether we had enough manpower or resources, like the event management companies that run like a machine in India. In Nepal, it wasn't like that. I literally managed the first festival with just a handful of people. I wasn't able to raise funds to pay myself. I was barely able to pay the people that helped out! They were all working on a voluntary basis. From the very beginning, I did not believe in working this way.
One of the turning points while planning for the second iteration was the festival catalogue. The largest amount of funds during the first event went into producing the catalogue. And at that point, I was already thinking: do we need like a paper catalogue? Why can't we just go digital, right? Facebook and social media was just starting off, at the time. It's a very different landscape now but back then, when we spent so much money and time and effort on a catalogue that had nothing but bios of the writers, it felt like such a waste of time, energy, and money as well. So when we were planning on the second festival, I said: instead of the catalogue, let's put that money into publishing a literary magazine around the festival. And that idea really excited all of us who were involved in the programming. I felt like our efforts would be better channelled into working on the literary magazine than doing a literary festival - a three-four-day event, which takes more than a year to produce, and for which the outreach can be pretty limited, so it can be very insular. On weighing the pros and cons, I decided to not do the second edition and just focus on publishing. And I think that was a really good decision, because I think the community that we were engaging through the bookshop itself could get directly involved. We got a bunch of writers and editors who were really passionate about the project – working on a literary magazine – and started publishing La.Lit. And it was easier to also raise funds. We would ask for 5,000-10,000 rupee ads from the businesses that we knew, and basically cobbled together funds to publish the magazine.
In terms of the literary festival – another reason it was not making sense to continue it was because it was very Kathmandu-centric. We’d been talking about how Nepal is not just Kathmandu, and with the festival I didn’t want to do this Kathmandu-centric event - I wanted to explore ideas that took us outside of Kathmandu, to see what kind of conversations are happening in communities all around Nepal. And around that point, the U.S. Embassy made a call out for a mobile library project. And that really intrigued me: the idea of traveling the country with a mobile library, engaging with lots of people. We proposed our idea of a moving literary festival where we take writers and artists to engage with different communities, which got accepted. And so the next 10 years were taken up by that project.
How exciting. Tell us more about the model of the Mobile Library – how did it operate, what were some of the challenges and milestones you had, and how did people engage with it on-ground?
We were the local partners for the US Embassy in Kathmandu for a programme they run called American Spaces. This was the first mobile American Space program. We worked with auto workshops to customise a bus to operate like a mobile library. We literally googled what mobile libraries look like to customise the bus. The program was funded by the US Embassy, and we conceptualised, designed and executed the programming.
I have to say we had a really great partnership with the US Embassy as this was a pilot program, for instance, they understood where we were coming from when we brought up issues about going into communities that speak different languages. Most of the time, American Spaces will only have English-language books but we were able to negotiate with the Embassy to include Nepali-language books in the collection. We felt this was important because in the first couple of months, we saw how young people or children were responding and reacting to the bus and the books. The bus was exciting, but very intimidating. We had all these fancy books in English, which were all brought from the US directly so they also had very unique titles – people would be too intimidated to even touch these books! And we realised we needed to bridge that gap. So we started purchasing books from local publishers, so we could say we have Nepali books too and allow people to feel a little less intimidated to engage with the rest of the resources on the bus. Whenever we went to a community where they spoke a different language, we would try to find newspapers or magazines or any kind of book in the local language and keep it in the collection. We would also engage local volunteers, young adults from the community, who we would talk to and train while we were there. We stayed with a community for at least two to three weeks, depending on how far we were going.
Geographically, we covered the East to West of Nepal, as far as we could, given the travel routes that exist. And we did a lot of intense programming with communities, too, working with schools to introduce new elements like the arts and STEM – working with the curricula they had to follow in an attempt to not disrupt school, and trying to make the activities as locally relevant as possible. For instance, in a science class if they were talking about photosynthesis, we would try to create activities that would help students understand how and where it happens around them. Or, when we discussed climate change, we would encourage students to go and talk to their elders, to learn from them about the effects of changes in the climate. We put a lot of work into customising the programming to address not just the goals of the embassy but to also make the content approachable for the community that we were working with it. And we ran the project for ten years, which was a really great experience.
And what was happening with the bookstore during this time?
When we started the literature festival, the retail business did not do well as we were getting pulled in different directions by the event. So we had to close the shop down and change the business model. Luckily, that was also when cafe culture was starting to pick up in Kathmandu, so we partnered with a couple of cafes to have a book section. And that's the kind of model we went with. We didn't have a retail space [of our own] per se, but we had a retail wall space in a cafe. And we’d organise events at those cafes as well. It was about thinking on our feet, figuring out what would work best to move the business along. And then once the mobile library project came along that's when it grew from just my partner and me working together to actually forming a team and managing it.
That is also when I started learning how to be a manager [of a team]. We were working with young people, so I started exploring new ways of thinking about leadership. I had worked in the development sector before and had only experience a top-down leadership style. And I found that slightly problematic, so I tried different styles of leadership, trying to be more inclusive in decision-making processes and so on. There was a lot of trial and error, and that is how my leadership style also evolved over the 10 years. I learned how to be more inclusive, more receptive as a team leader, how to listen to my team members and respond to their needs, as they were the ones that were going out into the field.
It’s interesting you bring up your experience with leadership in the development sector. Often conventions of leadership are derived from the West and don’t take into consideration the intricacies and lived realities of South Asian culture and experience. It becomes important then to push back against those conventions and work through situations that are in need of culturally-specific solutions. As a leader, what has your experience been while addressing such complications? Can you give some examples?
With the mobile library, it was mostly a team of young women [who would go out into the field], so I had to really think about creating a safe space for them. They had to deal with patriarchal values and learn how to navigate them without disrupting things in the communities that we were going to – that was very important. We were going with the U.S. Embassy Book Bus, which had both the American and Nepal flag, so we really had to ensure the community would welcome us and not view us as yet another NGO with an agenda. We had to make it clear that we were there to learn from them and share knowledge that they were interested in.
So this whole idea of learning from the community was something that we practiced very early on, because we were going from Kathmandu into communities in other parts of Nepal. And we didn't want to go with this perception that oh, we know everything, and we're coming here to teach you. It was more about saying that we're coming here with these resources to learn from you and see what you would like to learn from us. This kind of approach was, I think, very different for a lot of the community members, because they were used to development organisations that would always come with an agenda, with a “we are here to teach you” approach. And I was trying to flip that narrative through the approach that we were taking. There was a lot of lessons to learn from that.
We also managed to engage not only a lot of writers and artists, but also a lot of young people who were interested in working in Nepal, or didn't have options to go abroad so were studying in Kathmandu. We conceptualised this program called the Creative Educators Programme, where we trained about 20-30 young people who were studying at the undergrad level and taught them about creating safe learning spaces through the arts both in classrooms and outside the classrooms to work with older people, mothers, or other young people outside of Kathmandu, and introduced them to ways of creating spaces where they could express themselves – to create a learning culture. Over the past 10 years we’ve worked with maybe 200 young people who are part of the creative industries now, and it’s really rewarding to see how they have grown and what they are taking forward from the experience that they have had with us.
Mentorship is such an important part of any narrative on leadership. Have there been any mentors that have shaped you as a leader? Also, have there been any spaces or institutions that have inspired you?
In terms of mentors, Subina [Shrestha, documentary filmmaker and journalist] was a big influence – she was my first boss. I learned about the different ways of working within different environments while working with her, because on the one hand we would be dealing with the development sector head and on the other hand, we’d go all the way down to the community, the beneficiaries of different programmes while filming the impact of the project. I got to observe her work with a wide range of people. And it taught me how to respond to different scenarios. And one of the most important things early on was having a space to make mistakes, and learn from them. That’s something that I have also tried to provide for my team members: a place where they can fail and not be reprimanded for failing, but instead creating an opportunity to learn from it by having a conversation with them about why that didn't work and what we can do better. I also learned to own up to my mistakes, and lead by example.
Another person I want to mention is Sadhana Shrestha, one of the partners who supported us to start the bookshop. She is a development professional and has worked at Tewa (Women’s Fund of Nepal) for a very long time in leadership positions. She didn't really take on the role of a mentor, she was more of a silent partner but just being with her during business meetings taught me a lot. I learned to observe the way she responded, the way she advised us. Her approach was very soft, but firm, whereas Subina was just the opposite – she was vocal and very assertive.
So there were these two different women - both feminists, but both approaching feminism from very different aspects. And I was able to compare and see what it was about each of them that I related to most and take from both of their approaches. This helped me shape my approach and temper my own personal traits as someone in the professional world. I tend to be very hot-headed, but I’ve learned to temper that, and understand that I can choose to not react but respond instead. This learning came from these two women that I met very early on in my professional career.
In terms of spaces: Prithvi Theatre [in Mumbai] was a very big influence. What I really liked about Prithvi was that we could just go hang out, and if we weren’t doing anything else then we could watch a play. But even just being around the cafe, you would hear theatre people gather and talk around you, which was great. I also really love the libraries and art galleries in Mumbai, as well as events like the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. I think those are the kinds of spaces that really helped form my idea of creating a space where people can come together to explore ideas. And now, whenever I travel, one of the first things I do is go to a bookshop and tell them: I started a bookshop as well! (laughs) This is how I met Rick Simonson, one of the founders of Elliot Bay Books in Seattle! The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is another institution that helped me understand the value of community-led art; that making a mural does not need to necessarily be just an artist-led event, we can actually invite the community in, that is what get conversations going. These kinds of institutions have influenced my work.
Now that you've had many years of experience as a cultural leader, if you had to give advice to somebody who's maybe just starting out as a creative entrepreneur, a young person, perhaps in their early 20s, what would it be? And this is not restricted only to literature, it could be in any creative field.
I would talk to them about “reacting versus responding”. That is something that I would get them to start thinking about very early on: that you can react, but it's better to actually respond, and know what the difference is. And it’s okay to take a breath, take time – you don't have to immediately react to something, it’s okay to collect yourself, to think about it, and it's also okay to say no. It's also important to observe and plan as well, and not just jump into things because an opportunity has come up. So yeah, these would be some lessons that I would definitely share.
Are there any leaders from your Asia 21 cohort, or the Asia 21 alumni in general, that you have felt inspired by?
It’s been a while! But I think one of the things that I really enjoyed about the Asia 21 Summit was actually meeting people from not only the big countries, like India and the US but also from smaller countries. I remember people from the Philippines, from Indonesia, from Cambodia, and being from Nepal I found myself identifying with them and felt like I could understand and relate to the context that they were working within. I thought their stories were really interesting - the kinds of challenges that they were overcoming, and the ways in which they were working with their communities.
One leader from my cohort whose work has left a lasting impression is Phloeun Prim from Cambodian Living Arts. I continue to be inspired by the work they do, not just to revive but also sustain their traditional artistic practices. It was really serendipitous to have met Phloeun and shared a ride to the conference venue on the very first day!
Finally, I want to ask what's next for you professionally? You told me that you’ve recently wrapped up your MFA. What plans do you have for the future?
My MFA was on publishing, and that has always been something that I've wanted to do. But I don't have this big pot of money, so I've been going at it really slowly, taking my time. Through my MFA I was trying to articulate what my publishing curatorial paradigm would be – what books do I want to publish and why. So I spent two years in this state of inquiry about how I want to take my publishing initiative forward and I think that’s what’s going to be next for me professionally. I want to look into publishing from the margins: promoting stories from Nepal, in my own mother tongue Nepal Bhasa, translating literature from my community into English and also publishing unpublished stories in both languages. This is what I want to give back to my community, I want to also help revive the language. There’s been a couple of books I've already published along those lines, so I want to continue that.
I am currently working on a really interesting project: oral stories in Nepal Bhasa that were collected and published by Karunakar Baidya back in the 1940s. His son is now keen to translate them to English and has approached us. The collection is quite big so I have roped in three other editors to work with me – all three of them are Newars who have been working on different Nepal Bhasa literature related projects and we are super excited about this project. We workshopped the editing process as we're not very fluent in our mother tongue, we understand it but working collectively allows us to learn how to translate the oral material into English. So instead of one editor struggling with this, I formed a community of editors to work with each other. I'll be publishing the stories in both Nepal Bhasa and English. It is a lot of work, but it is very rewarding!
And is your publishing practice the same as the magazine?
Quixote’s Cove is the legal entity under which we publish, and Safu, which means books in Nepal Bhasa is the imprint. La.Lit [the literary magazine] is also published by Safu. As a publisher, I stay out of the editorial team [of the magazine] because these are editors who have jobs and they want to keep La.Lit as their passion project. And it’s really worked out well, because La.Lit has created a benchmark for writing in English from Nepal. And I want to keep it at that. So La.Lit will continue to trudge along according to the editors’ time and they will publish the magazine one much awaited edition at a time!
More of Suvani's work ––
Website links related to publishing:
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Website links related to Satori Center for the Arts: