College Street

It is said to be the largest secondhand book market in the world and the largest book market of any kind in India. Whether or not the superlatives hold, the density does: stalls stacked two and three metres high on both pavements, for about two and a half kilometres.

The trade works on request. You describe what you want, the stallholder disappears into a wall of paper, and eleven minutes later it is in your hand. Nobody knows how the index works and there is not one.

Publishers, printers, binderies and paper wholesalers occupy the buildings behind the stalls, so the whole trade is on one street from typesetting to resale. Some of the binderies still sew signatures by hand.

Hindu College opened in 1817, founded by Rammohan Roy, David Hare and others, to teach European sciences and letters in English. It became Presidency College and then Presidency University, and its students became the Bengal Renaissance.

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio taught here, died at twenty-two, and shaped a generation of Bengali radicals who questioned everything and were mostly disowned for it.

The Baker Laboratory behind the main gate is where Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray worked, and where Satyendra Nath Bose and Meghnad Saha were taught. Subhas Chandra Bose was expelled from here in 1916.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay founded Bangadarshan in 1872 and effectively created a Bengali literary public. Michael Madhusudan Dutt decided at Hindu College that he would be an English poet, failed, and came back at thirty-four to invent Bengali blank verse.

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay published almost everything through houses on this street and became the most widely read Bengali novelist of the century. Jibanananda Das was championed here by Buddhadeb Bose and bought by almost nobody.

The little magazines are where most Bengali poetry still first appears: a few hundred of them, hand-stapled, sold from the back of the Book Fair and from these pavements.

Publishing in Bengali is unusually decentralised: hundreds of small houses, thin margins, print runs of a few hundred, and a readership that will still buy poetry at scale, which almost no other market anywhere does.

The Kolkata Book Fair, twelve days in late January, draws over two million people. It is not a rights fair and almost no trade business is done at it. It is a retail fair, on a field, and it is the largest of its kind in the world.

College Street is what that trade looks like for the other three hundred and fifty-three days.