As it turned out, in the middle of its anniversary year, OUP India had what may, in retrospect, be viewed as the worst episode in its history. In November 2011, the University of Delhi withdrew an essay by the poet, folklorist, translator and theorist A.K. Ramanujan from the BA History syllabus. The essay explored the many renditions of the Ramayana in India, an exercise in scholarship (and ecumenism) that offended right-wing dogmatists seeking to impose a single, authorized, invariant text on the public.
The decision sparked outrage, for Ramanujan was a truly great scholar, whose work has had a profound, enduring influence on Indian and global scholarship. That his essay was being suppressed due to pressure from Hindutva extremists was particularly ironic—for his majestic translations of medieval Hindu poetry had done much to make the world aware of the beauty and depth of our mystical traditions.
The essay had originally appeared in a volume edited by Paula Richman called Many Ramayanas, and then in Ramanujan’s Collected Essays. Both books were published by the OUP. However, they had been allowed to go out of print after a petition filed in a court in the small Punjab town of Dera Bassi claimed that Ramanujan’s essay offended religious sensibilities. In withdrawing the books, OUP assured the litigant that it ‘very much regret[ted]’ publishing the essay, apologized for causing him ‘distress and concern’, and assured him that the books containing the essay would be withdrawn.
As it happens, the vice chancellor of Delhi University had justified his decision to drop Ramanujan’s essay on the grounds that since the books containing it were no longer being sold, teachers and students would not be able to access it. When these facts were made public, a series of critical articles appeared in the press. A petition urging the OUP to bring the essay back into circulation was endorsed by more than five hundred scholars, many of them very distinguished indeed.
The anguish over the OUP’s betrayal of Ramanujan was in part because of the Press’s reputation; in part because of Ramanujan’s own distinction; and in part because it followed on other such examples of the betrayal of scholars and scholarship. In recent years, the OUP has withdrawn books on the law, on medieval history, and on Indian nationalism under pressure from fanatics and from the state.
Admittedly, Indian courts are ever willing to entertain frivolous or tendentious petitions, and fighting them can be costly in terms of time and money. On the other hand, the OUP has on occasion been willing to engage in a battle in court. While it lately acquiesced in the suppression of A.K. Ramanujan’s work, it recruited some of the country’s most expensive lawyers to fight a tax case on its behalf in the 1990s.
When the first series of articles on the Ramanujan controversy was published, the OUP dismissed it as the work of malicious or motivated individuals. Fresh articles appeared, highlighting previous instances of the suppression of books by the OUP in India. Then came the cross-continental signature campaign. In personal meetings with the company’s CEOs in Oxford and New Delhi, OUP authors expressed their anger and dismay. Eventually, the publishing house agreed to reprint A.K. Ramanujan’s Collected Essays as well as Paula Richman’s Many Ramayanas.
The original disavowal of Ramanujan in court forces us to ask whether there is anyone working in the OUP today who has read his books and essays. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the focus on scholars and scholarship, so evident in Ravi Dayal’s day, is not any more a conspicuous hallmark of the OUP’s functioning. I was myself alerted to this some years ago, when a book of mine appeared for the first time in paperback. Sent an advance copy, I found that excerpts from the reviews of the hardback had been inserted after the prelim pages; in fact, in between the prologue and the first chapter. The editor to whose attention I brought this lapse had a hard time comprehending what I was complaining about. Other OUP authors have their own stories, of works of scholarship published without an index, with pages transposed, and the like.
About a year ago, I asked the OUP for access to the files in their archives dealing with the abridged edition of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth, which they had published in the 1930s. I knew from other references that there were many letters to R.E. Hawkins from Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai, perhaps some from the Mahatma himself. The letters could not be located—worse, I was told that the archive, sections of which I had consulted in Apollo Bunder, no longer existed. It had been a casualty of the OUP’s decision to sell the property in south Bombay and move their office to the suburbs. The acts were of a piece—the abandonment of that wonderful old building and of all that it contained and represented.
Chapter Fourteen
Turning Crimson At Premier’s
~
I
It was a fellow writer, Achal Prabhala, who called to tell me that Premier Bookshop was closing down. ‘Mr Shanbhag seems quite determined,’ said Achal: ‘The landlord is giving trouble again. He has to undergo an eye operation himself. And his daughter is keen that he come visit her in Australia. The nice thing is that he seems very calm about it.’
I claim a long connection with Mr T.S. Shanbhag and Premier Bookshop, but Achal’s connection was deeper. Since he is some fifteen years younger, he had known them all his life. (I was already a teenager by the time I made my first acquaintance with bookseller and bookshop.) Like me and countless other residents of Bangalore, he had come to regard them as indispensable and immovable. When, after many years overseas, Achal had moved back to his home town, it was in the knowledge that Mr Shanbhag and Premier’s would take care of at least one part, perhaps the most critical part, of his life. To see the shop close and the owner retire was for him as unanticipated, and as hard to bear, as the death of a revered family elder.
One of the attractions of Premier’s was its closeness to the café known as Parade’s to the old Bangalorean, but as ‘Koshy’s’ to the new immigrant. Premier’s and Parade’s were a cricket pitch’s distance away from one another. In between lay Variety News, where one could buy magazines in all the languages of the Eighth Schedule (and then some). The usual drill was to start at the bookshop, proceed to the newsagent, and end in the café, where one placed the material newly acquired on a chair, before ordering a coffee and perhaps a vegetable patty to go with it. (The routine used to be more elaborate—and more fulfilling—in the days when the floor above Parade’s was occupied by the British Library.)
I first began to patronize Premier’s in the 1970s, at a time when, unbeknownst to me, the lady who is now my wife began to patronize it as well. My first clear memory of the bookshop is of a day in January 1980 when my wife—then my girlfriend—took me there to buy a parting gift. I was off to begin a PhD in Calcutta, and she was due to rejoin her design school in Ahmedabad. At my request she bought me a copy of Isaiah Berlin’s biography of Karl Marx. Somewhere before or after buying the book she gave me a gentle peck on the cheek. By the standards of Bangalore today that gesture was timid. However, by the social norms then prevailing, it was outrageously provocative. Unfortunately, she was caught in the act by the bookshop’s owner, who turned a deep shade of red in consequence.
I was back in Premier’s on my first holiday from graduate school. It took longer for my girlfriend to return, not because her love of books was any less, but because it took her a while to overcome the embarrassment of that perceived transgression. So, we usually went there separately. In any case we had—and have—different tastes, she reading literary fiction and a little poetry, me going in for history and the harder—or more boring—stuff. Fortunately, Premier’s had plenty to suit us both. In time, our children began going there as well, to develop as keen a sense of ownership as we had.
II
Among Premier’s lesser attractions was that the shop gave decent discounts—10 per cent to the first-time visitor, 15 to the regular, and a hefty 20 per cent to the true old-timer. Among its greater charms was the charm of the owner himself. T.S. Shanbhag had learnt his trade from his uncle, the legendary Mr T.N. Shanbhag of Strand Book Stall, Bombay. Our Shanbhag fir
st set up shop in Bangalore in 1970, opposite the Technological Museum on Kasturba Gandhi Road. A year later he moved to the ground floor of a building on Church Street, in the very heart of the city.
T.S. Shanbhag is of medium height, with a round face. He is clean shaven and does not wear spectacles. For as long as I have known him, he has not had a hair on his head. He is a reticent man, who says just enough to let you understand that he knows a great deal. He has a sly wit, infrequently expressed verbally, but doubtless always at work in words thought if unspoken. As it is, so long as he ran the shop most of what he said was about books, usually to alert you to a new arrival that his experience suggested might be of special interest.
Also among Premier’s attractions were the wild eccentricities of its layout. The shop extended over a single room, this twenty-five feet long and fifteen feet wide. In the centre was 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 the mound—the only one that was visible—showcased modern classics: Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, P.G. Wodehouse, and the like. One had to walk around the hill to view the other books on display, set in piles against the walls of the shop. As one entered one saw, first of all, the new hardbacks, these carefully chosen: not books on cheese and chicken soup but, rather, works of history and biography that Mr Shanbhag felt would attract the more elevated among his readers.
Then one began a ritual circumambulation of the mountain. The wall to the left featured, as one went along, first, fiction; then sociology and political science; then history and economics and ecology. Now it was time to walk around the mound, 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 was a method to this mayhem, but one needed years of experience to know it. Still, even if one were to find a book on one’s own, without Mr Shanbhag one could not easily take it off the shelf; else, dozens of other books would come tumbling down with it. There were frequent traffic jams as one went around the hump in the middle. This happened when visitors ignored the shop’s unspoken rule, which was that walks of discovery be undertaken clockwise only.
The crowd of customers and the cramped quarters were, however, redeemed by the character 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 put-down, which referred to a bloody polemic which I had then just started in the pages of that newspaper. Now, it was my turn to turn crimson at Premier’s.
III
In January 2001, my wife and I threw a party to celebrate thirty years in the life of Bangalore’s best-loved bookshop (and bookseller). She had printed a card with a photo of the shop’s inner circle, looking even madder than we had imagined it. Those who were invited all intimated that they would attend, but I was very nervous that the chief guest would not show up. The party was scheduled for a Sunday, on which day Mr Shanbhag usually kept his shop open in the mornings. I was there at 9.30, chewing my nails until he arrived. He came at 10, and for the next two hours I hovered around him. At noon he gave in, closed his shop, and drove his car behind mine to our home.
The scientist C.V. Raman liked to say that his greatest discovery was the weather in Bangalore. Fortunately, the day of our Premier party was in keeping with this—a cloudless sky, a gentle breeze blowing, and the Green Barbet calling in the middle distance. After the bisi bélé had been consumed, it was time for the speeches.
The first tribute was offered by Chiranjeev Singh, a Kannada scholar of Sikh extraction, and one of the state’s outstanding civil servants. Chiranjeev recalled how he and his senior in the service, Christopher Lynn, built the secretariat library more or less from the selection at Premier’s. Then he added: ‘There is one thing that I want to tell you about Mr Shanbhag, which speaks to the kind of man, or businessman, that he is. He has never entered a government office.’
Following Chiranjeev was Tara Chandavarkar, for long one half of the city’s most reputed architectural firm, for long also a great patron of music, and servant of the suffering and the elderly. ‘Those of you present here,’ began Mrs Chandavarkar, ‘know of Premier’s as a bookshop. But I have also known it as a crèche run for charity.’ Apparently, she would leave her grandchildren in Shanbhag’s shop while she herself went off for a meeting with a client.
Other speakers that day included Narendra Pani and Janaki Nair, who remembered how, when they were impecunious students, Mr Shanbhag would allow them to take away books and pay when they could. (Years later, they became established authors, and Premier’s proudly displayed, and sold, their books.)
In the end, though, it was the sly old man who had the last word. As the party dispersed he commanded us to wait, disappeared into his car, and returned with a gift for each of us, this, of course, a book.
At the risk of sounding snobbish, I should say that Premier’s had the most cultivated tastes of all the bookshops in India. It is only here that works of literature and history outnumbered (and outsold) books designed to augment your bank balance or cure your soul. When it came to fiction, Shanbhag stocked not merely the latest Booker winner but the backlist of the author (if he or she had one). When J.M. Coetzee won that prize, even the pavement seller was selling Disgrace, but only in Premier’s would one find The Master of St. Petersburg as well. Shanbhag kept more, and better, hardback history than any other Indian shop I know; more, and better, literary fiction; and more, and better, translations.
The quality of his stock was, as I have said, enhanced by the quality of the man himself. One winter I was in and out of Bangalore, one week in town, the next week out of it. Taking a plane back home, I suddenly remembered that I owed Mr Shanbhag 500 rupees. The next morning I went into the shop to pay it back. Mr Shanbhag denied that I was in the red; to the contrary, he said it was he who owed me the money. In his version he did not have the change for a larger note, which I had said I would collect the next time. I was certain that the debt ran the other way. We argued back and forth, till ultimately I gave in. I still think I owed him the money. However, my guilt at having done so was substantially exceeded by the guilt felt by Mr Shanbhag at the mere possibility that it was he who was the debtor. The entire conversation was conducted to the growing bemusement of the customers present. Which other shopkeeper would refuse an offer of money owed, and claim that it was he who had to settle accounts instead?
Sadly, the Bangalore that T.S. Shanbhag represented appears to be dying. Some years ago, a 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 LA. 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 adorn drawing room tables, but not, it seems, to read or 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 boo
k 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.
However, that the question was asked at all shows a depressing lack of familiarity with the most civilized pocket of what was once a very civilized city. So long as T.S. Shanbhag was around, and selling books, residents of Bangalore, whether journalists or otherwise, had no reason not to know of the works of John Steinbeck, and of other great writers past—such as Ivan Turgenev and Evelyn Waugh—or present—such as Milan Kundera and Ian McEwan—or home-grown—such as R.K. Narayan and Shivaram Karanth.
There was only one bookshop anywhere in India that matched Premier’s: that run by Ram Advani in the Hazratganj locality of Lucknow. That place too was adjacent to a library run by the British Council and down the road from a famous coffee house. The owner was a refugee from Sindh with a keen interest in golf and western classical music. He started his shop in the Lucknow of the 1940s, a very different place from the Lucknow of today. The city’s university was then first class; with superb sociologists, historians, literary scholars, and musicians. Sensing the city’s decline, the British Council closed down its library. The Hazratganj coffee house fell victim to a strike and a lockout. But Ram Advani is still there, pushing ninety, still attending to books and book buyers, the strains of Mozart in the background.
IV
After Achal Prabhala called with the news that Shanbhag was shutting shop, I went to Premier’s the next day, to find the owner almost as stoic as I had been told he would be. He rehearsed his reasons for retirement, but when I found a book to buy (Simon Winchester’s essay collection, Outposts), he said, with some emotion: ‘I will not let you pay for this.’ When he insisted, I asked only that he inscribe the book for me.