Over the last year, I have been researching the life story of a minister who played a part in Indian politics between the 1920s and 1940s, and went on to serve in India’s first cabinet. He was also a businessman, a patron of the arts, an orator and a voracious reader. His personal library was said to hold a few thousand volumes. On his passing, it was left to his brothers with instructions that it be donated to a school started by the family trust. Seventy-three years later, I am trying to track this library, to meet the person behind the public persona from the books he read, the inscriptions the books may hold, their binding and language, in titles more dog-eared than others, and even in books unread.
For as long as he lived, his library was part of his house in Coimbatore, a bungalow he had built and christened Hawarden, a tribute to William Ewart Gladstone, a former British Prime Minister whose estate in Wales was named Hawarden. I wonder if he was so inspired by the public life of Gladstone or the man and reader he had been. I am curious, too, whether the minister paid heed to Gladstone’s exacting advice on how to set up a library.
In 1890, Gladstone, a four-time prime minister published an essay, On Books and the Housing of Them, in The Nineteenth Century magazine. Through his lifetime, he read exhaustively, wrote prolifically, and built a library that was set to his own specific design and cataloguing system. In his essay, he writes about the pain of seeing books of eminent men “ruthlessly, or at least unhappily, dispersed on their decease.” While still alive, he created a library down the road from his house and is said to have transported his nearly 30,000 books across using a wheelbarrow. He was 85 at the time. Today, the collection is housed in Gladstone’s Library, a residential library in Flintshire in the UK with 26 rooms that has since grown to over 150,000 books and archival material and is open for 50 weeks of the year.
Gladstone’s advice on housing books was precise: fixed shelves at right angles to the walls, not so high as to need a ladder to reach the top, and deep enough to accommodate two rows of books. He bats for sorting books by subject even as he acknowledges that “sympathy and its reverse” may influence the company a book is fated to keep by its keeper.
I remember Gladstone’s essay and the minister’s library as I return to my own books after a prolonged reading drought. It’s been a while since I have given in to that free fall as you enter the pages of a novel, to be there wholly, without an ear cocked for an alert, a notification, a call. I am looking for a way back in, and tell myself that if I can hold books and surround myself with them, I will regain the old feverish desire to read everyday. I miss being a reader and the only way back, I decide, is through my own library.
For a few years now, my family has been straddling a life across two towns. Most of our books have remained in Bengaluru and on a recent trip home, I decided to reconnect with my library. There are three generations of books scattered through the house, on shelves fixed and loose, often pushed against the wall and I start to gather them.
I never knew my husband’s parents except from their books. I know that my father-in-law read non-fiction and travelled widely, often bringing a book back from trips, while my mother-in-law enjoyed fiction and collected cookbooks. Both inscribed their books, she in long and neat cursive, a teacher’s handwriting, while he scribbled in the corners, making sure to include the date and place. I find a postcard inserted as a bookmark in Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story; I assume my mother-in-law was a fan of Princess Di and set out to house it in the rows holding her books. “My father, actually”, says my husband, and I wonder if my father-in-law was mid-way through his reading—he died exactly a week before Diana. Alongside their books are my now-teenage son’s books—an entire childhood reflected there—books of sheet music and plays belonging to my husband, and my own books that have somehow arranged themselves by the decades, my teens, 20s and 30s… I am yet to sort my 40s by my books.
When I was 15, we moved houses, and I made my acquaintance with my neighbours, Kumar and Uma, who opened their library to me. Theirs was a reader’s home—you could stick your hand out and catch a book. On my first visit, Kumar chose two books—one of them was Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, a book of letters between an American reader and an English bookseller. I visited often, and read every John Steinbeck and Irwin Shaw they owned. I attempted Saul Bellow but failed, encountered the comic brilliance of The Confederacy of Dunces. When I returned The Count of Monte Cristo as “too long”, or Helter Skelter, on Charles Manson’s murders, as “too gory”, Kumar would simply thrust them back and say read it anyway. Uma would lighten the pile with her favourite Georgette Heyer romances, which too I enjoyed. I have since gone on to add many of these titles to my own library.
Do we inherit a love for books as we do our libraries?
I read because my father did. Kumar, now 74, recalls his grandfather reading Shakespeare and Dickens using a magnifying glass by the light of a hurricane lamp in his Madras home and his policeman father reciting Alexander Pushkin and insisting that Kumar read The Count of Monte Cristo. When his marriage with Uma was arranged, neither knew if the other was a reader. “Before the wedding, I sent my niece to Kumar’s house to see if there was any sign that there were readers,” says Uma, and was reassured by the definite presence of a bookshelf. The first gift the couple exchanged were books; he gave her The House that Nino Built by Giovanni Guareschi, and she gifted him Mrs Harris Goes to Paris. Their collection simply expanded after marriage.
“I love buying books. Even if I have the book unopened and unread, looking at it gives me intense joy,” says Kumar. The couple estimates they have around 3,000 books—Uma, who loves fiction, is attempting an inventory. Their daughter Pooja has introduced Kumar to audio books though he continues to buy books.
Pooja, 40, an engineer in Houston, inherited their love for books but her reading choices were her own. She gives me a virtual tour of her library, which is not just “a bedroom with bookshelves”. She enjoys audio books, especially for non-fiction and can dip into a Kindle, but there’s pride in her voice and she shows off the library, pausing to reply that many of the books on her shelves are old, as she prefers them to be, bought in unexpected places, and sometimes one to treasure, like the 100-year-old copy of Pride and Prejudice or her painstakingly put together Chalet School collection, a schoolgirl’s escape still remembered. When Uma and Kumar visit her, the suitcases are heavy with books, on both legs of the journey.
“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books,” wrote German-Jewish philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin in his essay Unpacking My Library in 1931, after being away from his books for two years. Some readers may recognise this about their relationship with their books, that they carry a part of our lives as much as the story. With some of my books, I surprise myself with how much I can remember of the day and time I bought it, even what the day felt like. Sitting amidst my own pile of books, I savour the moment, like Benjamin whose entire day is spent in unpacking his library. As he reaches the last box, it’s past midnight: “Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories.”
A private library is so much more about the reader than its books. In placing each book on one’s shelves, finding it a home among others, there is a sense of destiny, that book and reader have met and chosen to stay the course.
*****
I read about Bengaluru-based Thejaswi Shivanand’s reading retreats and call him. I have known him as a teacher, reader and librarian. Over the last 15 years that he has spent working with adults and children, he says, he has grown absorbed by the question of how and why people read. His reading retreats that started in 2023, and take place away from home and screens and have been two-day getaways. The retreats are neither a book club nor a vacation, he says, but a way to support a reentry to reading. “Some come because they are exhausted; one said they just want to read. Two sisters came together because as children they read together and wanted to reclaim that…My approach is to enable them to share, speak and reflect on their experience of reading. The books, the readers and the experiences are different each time.”
Another question Shivanand, 45, keeps returning to is: “How do you help adults who do not have rich reading experiences?” In response, he opened his own home library in Bengaluru to the public. His library of 14,000 books is shaped by his interests and his work—birding led to natural history, then geology, Indian history. Working with children led to creating an archive that holds 7,000-8,000 picture books, non-fiction picture books, pop ups, folk tales, and Russian children’s books in several Indian languages, that allows him to “see publishing history through books”.
When he decided to open his library, the first visitors were a queer group, where 10 people arrived and spent a few hours exploring and engaging with his library, “a safe space.” He has since hosted student groups and editor groups. “Books are meant to be read. I am not hoarding them.” There’s an act of generosity and communalism to his reading that I have not experienced in myself. It remains very much a private engagement for me.
Achyut Rokkam, 30, who lives in Goa, was 10 when I first met him at a children’s library where I worked, and he was discovering books. I am curious about how the years have shaped his reading and his library. He catches me up on his reading since we last met in his early teens. His love of Roald Dahl led him to Quentin Blake’s illustrations, Blake’s picture books and sketches, his autobiography, a documentary… a rabbit hole that led him to take up sketching himself.
“I reread more books than I read new ones,” he says. “I read so quickly that every couple of years I can reread a book and it will feel new. I find something new or catch something I have skipped before or details I have missed.” He has taken to annotating books, and when he rereads, those too add to the renewed experience. His reading mirrors his life in Goa, slow, immersive, not driven by accumulation. His books, not neatly shelved but loosely scattered, within reach when the mood strikes. He speaks of giving away books easily. “If I think a friend will enjoy a book I have, I will give it to them.” And then he adds, “I would actually love a large library. It would be such a gift to future generations.”
It surprises me that despite his seeming detachment to books, and an easy willingness to part with them, he still thinks of having a library as a worthy pursuit and a gift for future generations. As a legacy, I can’t think of anything better than their library to know the person.
I finally find an extract of the minister’s collection online, away from his home, an assortment of books of fiction and non-fiction, in English and Tamil; it feels a little more connected to meet him as one reader to another.
*****
Putting up my library takes a little more than a day. I stop at Ann Fadiman’s Ex Libris, a gift from a young colleague, who has inscribed that she thought I’d enjoy it as much as she did. It’s here that I found Gladstone’s essay and seems fitting that I return to it. Reading Fadiman’s essay Marrying Libraries, on merging her library with her husband’s, I feel somewhat relieved that I have been on my own with mine, a primal need rather than an exercise in home decor. When I first read Fadiman’s essay, I had chuckled at the arguments she makes on how authors must be arranged and whose duplicates must be sacrificed but reading it now, I feel a pang for books that have left my life, surprising myself by how much I still remember them.
And although I didn’t locate the minister’s library itself, the search seems to have brought me home to my own.
Aravinda Anantharaman is a Lounge columnist.