Where do old Indian language books end up remains a mystery as it is extremely rare to find one in the few secondhand bookshops in the country

Could anyone tell me where used books in India end up? There are hardly any used or secondhand bookshops left anywhere in any Indian city other than the New and Second Hand Bookshop at Kalbadevi Road, Mumbai, Prabhu Books in Sadar Bazar, Gurgaon, and Select Books at Brigade Road, Bangalore. There are a few pavement booksellers in Mumbai, a Sunday book market in Delhi and some secondhand textbook sellers in College Street, Calcutta, but that is about all. Publishing businesses are growing and expanding but how can new books businesses keep growing without a parallel secondhand books business growing side by side. What is surprising is that even the few old and secondhand bookshops that are still around hardly ever have any Indian language books on offer. Where do used Indian language books go when their time to go comes, that is, when their owners grow old or die or move from one city to another or retire from active life. Is there any old books depository in India where people can consign their books when they no longer want to keep them? I have been visiting secondhand bookshops and pavement stalls all over the country for nearly four decades but I have not come across many number of old, used, rare or collectable Hindi books. I have, no doubt, once in a while chanced upon an interesting book here or there but not really as many as I should have in view of the face that Hindi printing and publishing has a long history extending over to more than two hundred years.

First Nagari or Hindi script types were cut not in India but in Europe, at the Vatican, Rome, to be specific, as early as in 1667. In India, first Hindi texts were printed towards the end of the 18th century. From 1802 onwards, books in Hindi began to be printed at the Hindustanee Press of Gilchrist and the Serampore missionary press near Calcutta. The man who cast the first Nagari type under the guidance of the Baptist missionary William Carey was one Panchanan Lohar or ironsmith. Thereafter, Nagari printing received a fillip at the Fort William College under Lallu Lalji. Soon, printing presses sprang up all over north India, especially in Banaras or today’s Varanasi, Lucknow, Allahabad, Agra, Kanpur and even such small towns as Bulandshahar. Large numbers of books literary works and magazines were published from different centres during the first half of the 19th century. Even a greater vigour in Hindi publishing was witnessed in the 1960s and ‘70s. The print orders were, of course, never very large. Most first editions were limited to a few hundreds and, at best, a thousand and second editions of even the best works were scarce except, of course, in case of books prescribed as textbooks in universities, colleges and schools. I do not know what the state of Hindi publishing today is, but it cannot be any great because after independence Hindi has increasingly lost ground to English, at least, as far as reading of Hindi books is concerned. Anyway, I am not talking here of the recent times but of the old. Where have all the old books published from 1800 to the 1950s and bought by readers disappeared? I mean books outside libraries and institutions. Up till 1960s and even during the early 1970s, a few Hindi works used to surface once in a while with the usual raddi dealers here or there but rarely in good condition. I am sure there were always a fair number of people in different cities in north India who built private libraries. Where must have they gone? I have never seen any advertisement offering a large collection of Hindi books for sale or donation to institutions. May be, some were offered to local libraries as there has never been any active secondhand books market in India, especially for Indian language books. Collecting books for their rarity or historic value or for the beauty of their printing or the attractiveness of their illustrations or bindings is not much of a passion in India, as it is in Europe or China and Japan.

Sometime in the 1970s someone told me that a lot of raddi or waste paper was trucked to Sanganer near Jaipur from all over India because the town was the largest centre for manufacture of handmade paper. The raddi that flowed in there also contained large quantities of old books in all languages as well as old, discarded mail, revenue documents, government reject such as old budget copies and reports, and such and similar waste paper. So, I went to Sanganer and rummaged through quite a lot of raddi at some places but did not really find any book that I could call a find, though there certainly was a lot of material for a collector of postal ephemera. So, where old Hindi books end up remains a mystery for me even today. A Hindi author said that most probably they end up as wrap for chana murmura.

Anyway, as far as my Hindi books are concerned, they are going to a Japanese university. As my book closing years come to a close, I must ensure that my books fetch me money and go to places where they will be read, loved and taken care of, as I have read, loved and cared for them all these years. These are the books that I picked over the last several decades from the kabari bazaars (junk markets) and secondhand booksellers in different cities. These are fine books and of great historic value, some for their beautiful illustrations like Mahadevi Varma’s large size Deepshikha and Yama, some for their beautiful bindings like Suryakand Truipathi Nirala’s Geetika and Tulsidas, and some for their absolute rarity and freshness even long after their publication such as Ratnakar’s Gangawataran.