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Magazine
Honouring the bookman
RANJIT HOSKOTE
Paradise ... T.N. Shanbhag (left) at the annual Strand Book Stall sale.
THE timing couldn't have been improved upon. The annual Strand Book Stall sale, which has established itself as a prominent feature of Mumbai's cultural calendar over the last five years, was well under way when the honours list for 2003 was announced. So that T.N. Shanbhag, as he stood in the centre of the swirling crowds of book lovers who unfailingly save the late January-early February date, had the unique pleasure of having hundreds of delighted readers come up to offer him their congratulations. Not a few of these had first stepped into his bookshop as children, and were now shepherding their grandchildren into his presence. Shanbhag's name is among the few on this year's honours list that are beyond reproach, beyond the reach of scepticism; his Padma Shri, fully deserved, is all the more important in that such an honour has never before gone to that crucial but often overlooked actor in the drama of writing, publishing and reading: the bookseller.
T.N. Shanbhag is the founder-proprietor of the Strand Book Stall, so named because he started it, 55 years ago, quite literally as a stall in the old Strand Cinema in Colaba. The memory of those early, struggling years is preserved in the name, although the bookshop has long since moved to its present premises in the Fort. "I can't offer you coffee or music," he says, in his wry and deceptively self-deprecating manner, when someone brings up the subject of the large and fashionable bookshops that have opened in Mumbai during the last decade. "My bookshop is just a hole in the wall." It answers to this description only in the sense that the entrance to Ali Baba's cave was a hole in the wall; some sense of the cultural wealth that Shanbhag pours into Mumbai can be gauged from the success of his annual sale, which he holds at the spacious Sunderbai Hall in South Mumbai. Large as this venue is, it proves too small to hold the thousands of readers who fill it for the 20 days of the sale; the stocks, replenished every day, disappear into the carry-baskets of perfectly ordinary citizens who, even in times of economic crisis, are prepared to invest in the transmission of culture. As at the great festivals that punctuate India's ritual calendar, distinctions of class, persuasion, gender and region break down completely here, and even the privilege of education does not count for more than the enthusiasm for learning. Ever the loquacious raconteur, Shanbhag recalls with amazement and affection an ageing couple from the Gujarat hinterland who brought their life's savings with them, to buy their grandchildren a multi-volume encyclopaedia, which they then carried away in gunny-sacks. The poignant story offers an oblique insight into the workings of a country where literacy in English translates as a guarantee of advancement.
Those prophets of doom who periodically announce the death of the reading habit should look in at this secular version of the Kumbh Mela. They might be persuaded to change their opinion; if they could get a foot in the door, that is, and shove their way through the surging crowds to reach the books. Those who risk death-by-stampede are rewarded with visions of the finest volumes on art, architecture, design, religion and philosophy published in recent times. The feast of temptations laid out on the tables running the length of the hall is aimed as much at the eye and the hand, as at the mind; you can delight in the elegant Modern Library classics, the crisp Thames and Hudson volumes, the dignified Phaidon editions, the refined Dover reprints and the burnished Shambhala titles. For this writer, it has been a special treat, over the last five years, to watch readers savouring the delight of marbled end-papers, running a finger over mediaeval calligraphy or Renaissance drawings, losing themselves in the foliage of a suite of Pahari miniatures, or simply abandoning themselves to the deep green or burgundy of a hardbound volume, its title lettered along the spine in discreet gold. And here and there, among the heaped books, lie the discoveries that account for the real magic of the book-hunt, the secret pleasures and unshareable excitements of the reading life: long-lost biographies of eccentrics and madmen; the hopelessly politically incorrect but uproariously funny novels of a lost Edwardian age; folios from long-crumbled royal ateliers; the defiant confessions of magus and shaman; idiosyncratic studies of geographically remote areas and forbidden territories of the mind.
Shanbhag often says that his chief pleasure as a bookseller derives precisely from the experience of watching people come to life in the healing and redeeming presence of books. He shares in their joy as they forget, however momentarily, the overcrowded trains and the choked underpasses, and are transported to the elsewheres of the wandering imagination. Strand may not be able to compete with some of Mumbai's new bookshops when it comes to floor space and the attendant frills of a music shop and café, but it has something more important on its side: the Strand culture, which Shanbhag regards it as his mission to maintain. Just as vital to him as the business side of the operation, the Strand culture is easily defined. As regulars at the shop off Pherozeshah Mehta Road in the Fort will testify, it is articulated in the warmth and unobtrusive attentiveness with which you are treated, the unmetered browsing time you get, and finally, the celebrated discounts that are offered on every book, from the slightly yellowing study of Tiepolo or the exquisite catalogue of the treasures of Topkapi Palace secreted on the mezzanine to the latest Booker Prize-winning novel in the display window. This is why Strand remains the only bookshop in Mumbai that a book-lover would regard, not simply as a place to buy books, but as a centre of pilgrimage.
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