Bengaluru: An oasis of knowledge amidst the desert of mundane consumerism and instant gratification, a bookshop off Bengaluru’s upmarket Brigade Road transports us not just into the world of words, but also to a much slower, quieter time when life’s worries could be forgotten, lazing by the window with a book in one hand and coffee in another.
Tucked in an unassuming corner, located in a nondescript building, one of Bengaluru’s oldest bookstores, Select Bookshop, has been quenching the thirst of readers for 77 years.
It is one of the last remaining fragments of a time when Bengaluru was still a small, charming, colonial hill station. Its peeling signboard is a decrepit reminder of an ageing icon.
Run by the father-son duo of KKS Murthy and K. Sanjay, the legendary store was founded by Murthy’s father KBK Rao in 1945.
Holding the fort for almost four decades, 93-year-old Murthy is not just the central cog holding this vintage institution together, but is also the only link between its past and present, representing two worlds at the same time.
According to Murthy, his father KBK Rao, who was a lawyer and a secretary in the government of the Nizam of Hyderabad, started this shop accidentally.
“After the World War II, there was a lot of movement happening away from India, many of the foreigners who had settled here were packing up and going back to Europe. Many of them had collections of rare books and artefacts and some of them were leaving those collections behind. My father always had a taste for rare books, he was always on the look out and acquired some through antique collectors. This is how our relationship with rare books started,” said Murthy, who took over the business from his father around 40 years back.
What started as a passion for rare books soon turned into a business, when a British friend of KBK Rao offered his garage for free and suggested the idea of a store of rare books.
“In one of his bulk purchases my father got Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland’ with the author’s original autograph, which was a rare thing to have. This particular book was also being sought by an Englishman, and my father courteously obliged when he requested for the book. This gesture blossomed into a friendship. In a couple of years, my father had a decent collection of rare literature and the Englishman suggested that he should open up a book store and offered the garage in his house on Museum Road for free,” said Murthy, walking down the memory lane.
Murthy, who was a young school-going boy then, recalls his days rushing through the wide expanses of the Cubbon Park on the way to and from the shop, running errands.
“When the book shop opened, I was a little boy and everyday I used to carry lunch for my father. I used to walk through the Cubbon Park. Those were such fine days, without much crowd, noise or traffic,” said the nonagenarian, fondly reminiscing the bygone.
Starting from a garage of a colonial cottage, the store has come a long way, literally moving places.
“Select Bookshop operated from Museum Road for around seven years, then we moved to an Anglo-Indian-owned property on MG Road, that is where we were for the longest period. In the early 1980s, when the building was about to be demolished we relocated to a place down the lane on the MG Road-Brigade Road junction. We were there for a couple of years and again we were asked to vacate because of a property dispute among the owners, so we temporarily moved to Malleswaram. Finally in 1984, we were lucky to get this place where we have been since then. It’s been 38 years in this location now,” said Murthy, walking through the chronology of the store.
A magnet for seekers of knowledge since its early days, the store continues to be a hub for bibliophiles, especially the collectors of rare books.
Murthy says that within short time of its opening, the book store gained a reputation due to its collection, attracting a lot of well known people and many legendary book lovers. One among them was renowned philosopher J. Krishnamurthi, who used to frequent the shop whenever he was in town.
Other regular customers those days were Telugu poet Narayana Reddy, famous dancer, Shantaram, and the renowned scientist and Nobel Prize winner CV Raman.
“CV Raman was one of the very few car owners in Bangalore in those days. He owned a fancy car and would park it outside the shop whenever he came, it used to attract a huge crowd. In the later days, when I took over the bookshop Ruskin Bond frequently graced the shop, when he stayed in Bangalore during his research for a book,” Murthy recalls.
Though, the store is known for rare books, it has kept itself updated, attracting a big horde of young readers.
However, it is a special haunt of classic literature, with its shelves full of out of print editions of classics as well collections of last surviving 19th century first editions.
Among the rare books currently in store are the 1896 edition of ‘Man and His Bodies’ by Annie Besant, an 1898 English rendition of Omar Khayam’s ‘Rubaiyat,’ the 1898 edition of ‘The Seat of Authority in Religion’ by James Martineau, the original edition of Winston Churchill’s ‘Second World War,’ and countless other gems.
“We have gone through many ups and downs to be here, we built our reputation one book at a time, catering to the thirst of our customers for rare knowledge,” said Murthy, who is too old and frail now, but still loves to visit the store every day.
He says spending time surrounded by beautiful books reminds him of his father and the good old days.
“I don’t handle the day to day business anymore, my son who joined me in 1998, takes care of that. As long as there are people who value knowledge and good books, we will be here to serve for many more years.”
Whether you love rare books or not, the smell of old books coupled with the sage-like presence of Murthy make visitors experience an era that is long beyond us and as one starts to leave the store one can’t help being nostalgic for a time we have never lived in.
- Shafaat Shahbandari, founder-editor of Thousand Shades of India, is a freelance journalist based in Bengaluru
