BackLOUNGE LOVES: Sahitya Akademi Metro Bookshop, Delhi
The Kashmere Gate Metro station is turning out to be a book lover's paradise
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Afew years ago, publishing house Penguin Books India launched a series called Metro Reads. These breezy, brightly packaged chick lits and murder mysteries with titles such as Losing My Virginity And Other Dumb Ideas, Love On The Rocks, With Or Without You, give a perfect sense of the kind of books that people prefer to read while commuting on the Delhi Metro. Actually, let me correct that: These are the books that many read, period—when they do read.
So even as one gets used to the sight of easy-to-consume books literally getting sold by the kilo all over the city, the Sahitya Akademi recently opened a book store at one of Delhi Metro’s largest and busiest stations, Kashmere Gate, in the hope of ensuring mass appeal for books with some literary weight. “We take part in some 50 book exhibitions in a year, but our books are still unable to reach the masses," says K. Sreenivasarao, secretary, Sahitya Akademi. The Akademi publishes books, translations and in the original, in 24 languages; in the last nine months alone, he says, it has come out with 350 books.
The Sahitya Akademi’s first bookshop outside its office premises, this compact booth has a window display that one wouldn’t normally consider a mass draw; “pure literature", as Sreenivasarao defines it. There stand, among others, the three-volume Medieval Indian Literature: An Anthology and Modern Indian Poetry In English, both edited by K. Ayyappa Paniker, Sant Singh Sekhon: Selected Writings edited by Tejwant Singh Gill, The Frontiers Of Fiction by M.T. Vasudevan Nair, and four fat volumes of The English Writings Of Rabindranath Tagore. And yet, the book store finds constant visitors, some browsing casually, a couple of men who came looking particularly for Uchat, the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel in Maithili by Asha Mishra, and some others who dropped in to look for “course books", since “the classics" often equal “educational".
The three-level Kashmere Gate Metro station is without doubt a great spot for a book store. Right outside is the Inter State Bus Terminus. This interchange station, connecting the red and yellow lines, has trains heading towards the New Delhi railway station and the airport line on one side, and the Delhi University on the other. The Sahitya Akademi book store hopes that this heavy human traffic will translate into customers, though a bold notice stuck at the entrance of the two-year-old book store on the opposite side, run by the National Book Trust (NBT), is rather telling: “NO ENQUIRY ABOUT METRO." The NBT store manager, nevertheless, patiently continues to direct some especially lost souls, while politely denying any knowledge of train schedules to others.
The Sahitya Akademi book store, if anything, is refreshing. Here are books that one will never find at a regular book store, and they are inexpensive too. Here, one can finally pick up books by storytellers and poets who write in Indian languages, names that we are familiar with, but stories that we are not. There are monographs and autobiographical films on writers such as Arun Kolatkar, Amrita Pritam, O.N.V. Kurup, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Bodo writers, and children’s editions of Premchand, Gopal Das and Vishnu Prabhakar’s stories, as well as others in Urdu and South Indian languages.
This, and a hunt through the chaotic display at the NBT book store, are sure to yield some gems.
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