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Magazine
The wrath of grapes
RAMACHANDRA GUHA
Bangalore's Premier Bookshop ... a treasure trove.
A YOUNG journalist rang to ask me to recommend a book that all Bangaloreans should read, "you know, like all people from Los Angeles must read The Wrath of Grapes". I told her that the novel was actually called The Grapes of Wrath, and that it was set in rural California, not Los Angeles. She persisted: "But Mahesh Dattani says when a group of Bangaloreans meet they should read Maya Jayapal's Bangalore: Portrait of a City. Next I will ask Anita Nair. Please give me your choice."
We seem to live in an age where more books are sold, but less books read, than ever before. Books are bought to gift as presents and to adorn drawing room tables, but not, it seems, to read or to discuss. To be fair, the journalist's question seemed to display an almost guilty awareness of this. It might even have been the product of a desire to uplift and educate, to promote the idea that Bangaloreans should not merely drink alcohol or write computer software, but also improve their minds. Perhaps she thought: let me get a group of writers to each recommend one book that "every Bangalorean must read" — and read collectively, around a table stacked with beer cans. In time they might even come to read books alone, in their rooms.
Bangaloreans, whether journalists or otherwise, have little reason not to know of The Grapes of Wrath. For this is a city of decent bookstores, none better than Premier Bookshop, on Church Street. The shop is run by a reticent, but slyly witty, man named T.S. Shanbhag, who learnt his trade from his uncle, the legendary Mr. T.N. Shanbhag of Strand Book Stall, Bombay.
Premier extends over a single room 25 feet-long and 15 feet-wide. In its centre is a mountain of books, seven or eight layers deep, these representing the sediment of knowledge discarded or scorned by Bangaloreans down the years. The last layer of this mountain — the only one that is visible — showcases modern classics: Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, P.G. Wodehouse, and the like. One has to walk around the hill to view the other books on display: set in piles against the walls of the shop. As one enters one sees, first of all, the new hardbacks, these carefully chosen: not books on the soul and chicken soup but, rather, works of history and biography that Mr. Shanbhag feels will attract the more elevated among his readers. Then one begins the ritual circumambulation of the mountain, clockwise. The wall to the left features, as one goes along, first, Indian fiction: then Indian sociology and political science; then Indian history and economics and ecology. Now it is time to walk around the mountain, to consult, on the other wall, first, children's books; then books on nature; then works of spirituality and resting appropriately next to them, of science; and last of all, paperbacks on current affairs and military history.
There is a method to this mayhem, but one needs to have (as I do) 20 years of experience to know it. Still, even if one were to find a book on one's own, without Mr. Shanbhag one cannot easily take it off the shelf; else, dozens of other books will come tumbling down with it. There are, too, frequent traffic jams as one goes around the hump in the middle. This happens when customers ignore the shop's unspoken rule, that walks of discovery be undertaken only clockwise.
The crowd and these cramped quarters are, however, redeemed by the charm and knowledge of the man in charge. Once, I went to buy some books for a friend in America who wanted to acquaint himself, long distance, with modern India. I ordered Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India and a volume of Subaltern Studies. Assessing the train of my thought, Mr. Shanbhag then pulled out a breezy book on India by a not unknown Indian. "Not that," I said "I am looking for serious stuff." "Wait a minute," said Mr. Shanbhag, "we don't want any more fights in The Hindu. Titters of laughter broke out from the men and women in the shop who had caught the mischievous put-down, which referred to a bloody polemic which I had then just started in the pages of this newspaper.
No good bookshop is like any other, but I suppose Premier in Bangalore might still be compared to Giggles in Madras. Giggle's owner, Nalini Chettoor, is also ferociously knowledgable about her commodities and her customers. She appears to have as many books in her shop as Mr. Shanbhag, if in roughly half the space. The columns run ragged along the wall and on the floor. Weaving a zigzag path through them, one gets, finally, to see the gentle owner sitting on a stool in the far corner.
With no disrespect to Mr. Shanbhag or Ms. Chettoor, it must be said that the granddaddy of all independent bookstores in India is the eponymous Ram Advani, in Lucknow. Like his namesake, Lal Krishna, the bookstore's owner is an émigré from Karachi: but whereas that other Advani is humourless and hardnosed and fundamentalist, this Advani is kindly and wise and capaciously catholic. His passions, aside from books, are the mountains, the game of golf, and Western classical music. I like to think that he and his Southern counterpart, T.S. Shanbhag, represent two varieties of civilised urbanism: where one sticks to coffee and talks little, the other is a connoisseur of conversation and also of good whisky.
For 55 years now Ram Advani's shop has been a haven of civilisation for the book-minded residents of, and visitors to, Lucknow. He commands a large and airy space, this in an old building in Hazratganj, in the heart of the city. Till its recent closure, this locality also had Lucknow's only decent library (run by the British Council), as well as a bustling coffee house patronised by the intelligentsia. For the young, "Going Ganjing" meant parading your new clothes on the streets of Hazratganj; for the slightly older, it meant a triple pilgrimage to the Coffee House, the British Library, and Ram Advani.
Generations of Indian and foreign historians have built their collections by and through Ram Advani. Last month these scholars gathered in a special ceremony in New Delhi to honour him. Those paying tribute included such distinguished academics as Shahid Amin, Alok Bhalla, Sudhir Chandra, Basudev Chatterjee, Michael Fisher, Mushirul Hasan, David Lelyveld, D.A. Low, Thomas and Barbara Metcalfe, T.N. Madan, and Francis Robinson. They had gathered to tell the world that as much as their Oxford or Berkeley degrees and their hard work, Ram Advani had helped make them who they are.
"When Ram Advani started his shop, in the late 1940s, Lucknow boasted of a university which had perhaps the best social scientists in India. Bangalore in the 1970s, when T.S. Shanbhag started his business, still had journalists who bought and even read books. The culture of these two cities has grown steadily more philistine. But these honourable booksellers have kept alive a residue of refinement. Both Shanbhag and Advani could tell you, were you interested, that The Grapes of Wrath is a classic novel by John Steinbeck. The Lucknow man might add that "The Wrath of Grapes" would make a rather fine name for a pub.
Ramachandra Guha's books include Savaging the Civilised and Environmentalism: A Global History.
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