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A
young book peddler hawks his pirated wares on the streets of Mumbai.
India has laws against both child labor and copyright infringement, but
both are openly flouted. By
SONIA FALEIRO
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As the lights turn red at the Haji Ali traffic intersection in Mumbai,
the boy slouching against the railings quickly straightens up. Yakub
Sheikh is just 12 years old, but he knows he has only 45 seconds to make
some money. Holding aloft his wares, he dashes toward a black BMW and
in his cracking preteen voice addresses the woman inside: “ ‘Fifty
Shades of Grey’?”
Mumbai once prided itself on its literary culture — libraries, journals
and poetry societies flourished; foreign books, though hard to find and
prohibitively expensive, were all the rage. It was into this economy of
scarcity and exclusivity that, somewhere around the 1970s, the book
pirates stepped in.
Initially, these literary entrepreneurs produced only thinly bound
copies, their pages spilling out or missing altogether. Popular fiction
sold well, as did American cookbooks and Asian volumes of dress
patterns. It wasn’t until the ’90s that best sellers were pirated;
today, they dominate the black market, selling at less than half the
Indian cover price. (Don’t tell E. L. James, but the woman in the BMW
bought the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy for the equivalent of $10.)
Eagerly anticipated books like those in the “Harry Potter” series are
often available the morning of their worldwide release. As a result, the
books most readily found in Mumbai these days aren’t purchased in the
city’s established bookstores but outside, where children peddle
shrink-wrapped paperbacks.
Ever since children have slept on Mumbai’s streets, they have worked on
them, whether as sellers of trinkets or of talismans. The city has
thousands of street children, but only a chosen few get to sell books.
These are children like Yakub, who lives with his family and has a place
to call home, even if it is on the pavement and contrived of bamboo
poles and scavenged tarp. Such children are considered high-value
sellers, more reliable than those who live in gangs without any parental
supervision. Because the cost of one book is many times that of a
handful of trinkets, book suppliers, who are called “seths,” or bosses,
value trustworthiness in their ranks above all else. Suppliers
traditionally hire only boys. “Boys move fast in traffic, and they carry
many more books,” explained Ganesh, a seth I spoke with in Haji Ali.
Ganesh, who uses only one name, is just 19 years old and has 15 boys
working under his direction.
Bosses like Ganesh pick child peddlers over adults because they’re happy
to earn small amounts. And they do exactly as told. Selling in traffic
is also considered a starter job. After dodging speeding buses for a few
years, inevitably suffering injury, child peddlers typically graduate
to safer work as hawkers of fruits or temple flowers. If they’re
ambitious, they become seths, working a group of children as they
themselves were once worked.
India has laws against child labor and against copyright infringement,
but both are openly flouted. In fact, most sales of pirated books, which
take place at traffic crossings and on railway platforms, occur in
direct view of the police. Traffic and railway officers say it isn’t
part of their job description to round up child laborers or chase down
seths. Ganesh is one of several seths who admitted to paying them off.
“I know I’m breaking the law,” he told me. “That’s what bribes are for.”
Child labor and book piracy have something else in common: In India, at
least, they’re socially acceptable. Children don’t just work on the
streets for shady suppliers; they cook and clean in middle-class homes.
And while some Indian readers disdain the very idea of a pirated book,
most do not. It’s routine to watch Hollywood films on pirated DVDs and
download American music from file-sharing Web sites. And it’s spoken of
as openly as if this were legal. Students even buy expensive medical or
technical textbooks from street sellers. If the excuse for buying
pirated books was once an economy of scarcity, the justification now is
that of abundance. It is far easier to buy a pirated book than it is to
find a bookstore or library.
Some Indian authors have a similarly unconventional view toward the
pirating of their books; they see it as a stamp of mass popularity. At
least in private, they say there’s no greater thrill than spying their
own latest novels in stacks of pirated books for sale.
The real problem, however, may not be corruption or social acceptability
but poverty. Once a street child experiences the exhilaration of
spending his own money, it’s hard to sell him on the long-term advantage
of trading paid work for homework. Sellers pay their seths a fee of 100
rupees (about $2) a book; everything the sellers make above that is
profit. Yakub sells at least three books a day, making a minimum of 300
rupees for himself. That’s more than his father, a plumber, brings home.
“The key to encouraging street children to come to school,” said Kishor
Bhamre, an assistant director at the nonprofit education organization
Pratham, “is to show them that good money does not necessarily equal a
good life. And that in any case, they can never hold on to the money
they make. Older kids bully them out of it, their parents snatch it from
them, it’s stolen.”
The tragic irony of Mumbai’s illicit book trade is that its best
salesmen will never fully understand the value of what they’re selling.
They can rattle off book titles and the names of best-selling authors.
But because they forgo school for work, they can’t read, and so view
books as no different from anything else they’ve sold — like boxes of
tissues or bags of oranges. The pleasure, indeed the magic, of
literature that shapes so many avid readers as children, defining who we
are and influencing what we make of our lives, is beyond their reach.
Yakub is poignantly aware of this. “I’ve grown up with novels,” he told
me. “But I have never read one.”
Yakub has yet to realize that children like him are the face of an
underground trade that operates in extreme secrecy. So little is known
about the scope of the problem that the last official figures on the
cost of piracy to Indian publishing were released in 1999. That study
estimated that 20 to 25 percent of all books sold in the country were
pirated. In fact, the only other adult in his network that Ganesh has
even seen face to face is the young man who delivers his books. “When my
seth retired, he passed on three mobile numbers to me,” Ganesh said.
“When I need to place an order I call one of the numbers and a delivery
boy reaches my house with 50 books. I’ve no say in what we sell. I’m
told, ‘These novels are hot this week, move them quickly,’ and that’s
what I tell my boys.”
Nor does Ganesh ponder the moral implications of his work. For him,
selling pirated books is neither about the process of selling nor about
the works themselves. It’s about survival. “My stomach doesn’t know the
difference between an original and a duplicate,” he told me. Yakub, who
along with so many other street children forms the mainstay of this
trade, would agree. His father isn’t always around, and his mother, he
says, is crazy. “If you catch her at the wrong moment she’ll scream
curses that will fill you with shame,” he says. “I give her half the
money I earn. She buys tea and chewing tobacco and forgets to swear. I
ask only one thing of her: ‘Don’t touch my books.’ But I don’t take
chances. At night I sleep with them. I use my books for a pillow.”