Kolkata’s oldest bookshop opens a free library at its historic College Street premises

The oldest surviving bookshop in Kolkata has finally opened a free reading library at its historic premises on College Street, attracting 30-40 visitors every day, including many foreigners.

While it’s common for many present day bookshops to allow customers the comfort of browsing through new releases and classics, Dasgupta and Co., which has been in the business since 1886, has made the rare gesture of transforming a part of it — the second floor of the heritage structure in which the shop is located — into a public library, mainly with the intention of benefiting students who can’t afford books.

“Education is a basic right as well as very crucial in the development of our nation. This free library is a way of making knowledge and education more easily accessible to society,” Arabinda Dasgupta, 73, managing director of Dasgupta and Co., said. The bookshop has been owned by his family right from the time it was founded. The library, which was been in the offing for nearly three years now, formally opened on July 24, Mr. Dasgupta’s birthday.

“We have been receiving 30 to 40 visitors daily on an average. Most of them use the reading room to enjoy the rare books in our collection. Our long-time acquaintance, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, congratulated us over telephone very recently, and we gave him a virtual tour of the library over a video call. Several old clients across the city have also expressed their enthusiasm. One of them was kind enough to donate almost 500 rare books for the benefit of our readers,” the proprietor said.

“The visitors often include people from Germany, France, Italy, the U.K., the U.S. Just the other day, a UNESCO team that happened to be in Kolkata visited us. They interviewed me, and also bought several books on India, including books on Calcutta,” Mr. Dasgupta said.

Dasgupta and Co. was opened in 1886 by Girish Chandra Dasgupta, who hailed from Kaliagram in Jessore in present-day Bangladesh. At the time, the village was considered more literate than others in the region, and possibly its reputation made Girish Chandra set up a bookshop on College Street, the education and literary hub of India’s most important city at the time. Today, the shop enjoys Grade IIA heritage status and draws about 400 customers a day, most of them coming for academic titles.

After the upcoming Durga Puja festivities, the shop also plans to open an online library, something that has been on the cards as well for quite some time now. “The Union Bank of India had approached us with a sponsorship plan [for the online library], but the whole deal has been up in the air for almost three years now. They plan to decorate about 250 sq. ft. area close to the physical library, and provide us with six computers and three air-conditioners. Readers can access any book in the world,” Mr. Dasgupta said.

Dasgupta and Co. is possibly one of the few institutions in Kolkata, perhaps even in India, that has lasted this long, that too without any change in ownership. Mr. Dasgupta finds assurance in the fact that the shop has lived through the freedom movement in Bengal, the two World Wars, the Partition, the Independence of India, the Bangladesh Liberation War, and the Naxal movement — he believes that if Dasgupta and Co. has survived all of this, it will survive online shopping for books, too.