Encounter was a literary and cultural magazine that started in the Fifties in the UK. Poet Stephen Spender was one of its founders and editors. Later it was also edited by eminent scholar and critic Frank Kermode. Both left because of an ironic twist in the plot.
Featuring leading names from the Anglo-American world of letters, and supposedly conceived as an anti-Stalinist left platform, the magazine somehow appeared distinctly uncritical of the US. Then it turned out that it was being funded by the CIA, no less, as a fake-Left platform, after which both Spender and Kermode left. But by then the magazine had caught on in Kolkata. It was available at only one place in the city: Foreign Publishers’ Agency, in the Grand Hotel Arcade.
It is still a tiny shop, more like a narrow passage, stacked with books, but then it was, in the words of Ashis Bhattacharya, who runs it now, just “a cupboard”. It was a cupboard, however, of great distinction.
It rose straight from the pavement, like a window bursting with books, which were the best foreign publications, in English, classic and contemporary. The shop attracted a steady stream of readers, among them the most eminent scholars, writers, filmmakers and photographers from the city and beyond. (Which it still does.) The books would spill over onto the pavement, which added another dimension to browsing.
The police did not like that, though. One day there was a raid and several books from the pavement were seized.
“My jyathamoshai (his father’s elder brother) went to the police and was received warmly by an officer,” recalls Bhattacharya, who is much better-known as Babu. When the officer learnt that books had been seized, he was outraged. He called the officer responsible and reprimanded him for raiding the only bookshop that sold Encounter. All books were returned.
It will never be known why Encounter was held in such esteem by the police: for being “Commie”, as cerebral stuff was assumed to be so and the most hard-boiled policeman admired the “intellectual”, Commie or not, for being “anti-Commie” (this was the Fifties or Sixties, and the magazine was that), or for just for being a reputed journal from abroad. The episode shows a long-lost kindness towards books and points at a few more things. That this is not very imaginable in Kolkata now. That printed matter cannot easily be imagined to have such power now. And that Kolkata has few, very few, bookstores where you get books that make things happen.
But Bhattacharya proudly says that other than in shape, the shop has not changed. It is as exclusive and select and the books contain the best that is thought and said. Now 58, he has been coming to the shop since 1982, when he was a student of Bhawanipur Education Society. The shop can still be accused of an uncompromising high seriousness, it has a set of buyers who have remained loyal forever, preferring a discreet NYRB (New York Review of Books) edition of a novel to the normative paperback, and it has the courage never to submit or yield to stationery. “Never,” declares Bhattacharya.
A bookstore must remain a bookstore.
The high seriousness is not daunting because browsing through the books is fun. A good bookshop is an adventure, where you find the new and the unexpected. It should not resemble a clothes store where identical items are on display, only differing in size and colour. Or be so severe and lofty that it makes you feel small. It should be fun.
At Foreign Publishers you find a recently published Simone de Beauvoir, The Inseparables, next to a Slavoj Zizek, supported by a column of Michel Foucaults. But not far away from The Andy Warhol Diaries, or Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet or Tove Ditlevsen’s The Trouble with Happiness. Poetry, or poetry-like prose, or prose by poets, seduces, especially in a time overwhelmed by prose, often very bad. Or smileys.
“You will also find books that are not left-of-centre,” laughs Bhattacharya. Though critical thought still tends to lean towards the left, a bookshop should have a bit of everything, though, of course, there is such a thing as a sense of what is right. Or wrong.
The shop was started in 1941 by Bhattacharya’s pishemoshai, his father’s sister’s husband, who was like a father figure to Bhattacharya’s father and his siblings. From his pishemoshai, his father and his jyathamoshai took over the shop. All of them were well-known to the reading classes of the city. Bhattacharya was introduced to the shop by his cousin Tapan Chatterjee. Now he runs it, with his daughter, an economics graduate, helping him with online interactions, which Bhattacharya avoids.
The Eighties were an exciting time. “It was the time of magic realism. I would read voraciously then. I would gobble up Marquez, Llosa, Fuentes,” says Bhattacharya. “But now I don’t.”
Then there was Rushdie, and the tumult he brought. Is Kolkata a little too much into Latin American literature? Bhattacharya does not think so. There is so much African writing, and Japanese, and not just Achebe and Mishima.
The Eighties brought in Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, followed by Agamben.
A young person drops in. As he looks around, Bhattacharya suggests a few titles. The visitor looks surprised, as if his mind has been read.
“That is my business. To connect the right book with the right person. That’s how my relationship with my clients continues,” says Bhattacharya. He keeps himself updated about every book that is coming out, here and abroad.
The recent imposition of duties on import of books, previously waived by other governments at the Centre, has made the business a little difficult. Getting some of the best art books, which the shop used to take pride in — books from Thames and Hudson, Phaidon and Taschen would be on display here — has become limited due to the huge amount required as duty, he thinks. But every year, he goes to the World Book Fair in Delhi for new books. Otherwise, he combs through university press lists and magazines and newspapers.
“I am a conduit of the best ideas. I have great job satisfaction,” he beams.
And readers are a strange lot. “They are addicts. They will, somehow, come to the shop,” he laughs. Again one thinks of the luminaries who visit the shop. But the nameless, mad, passionate reader, who saves money to buy a book he really cannot afford is no less important a breed.
Jayprakash Narayan had visited the store, says Bhattacharya. So had Satyajit Ray, more than once. But every time he came, looking for film magazines such as Sight and Sound and Cineaste, a crowd would form around him. He stopped coming after a young man swooped down and touched his feet, says Bhattacharya.
Meanwhile, a veteran reader from the city remembers his rich haul of two books from the shop, in the late Sixties, when he was a precocious 14. One was Paul Rotha’s Film Till Today, priced at Rs 80 but given to him for Rs 60, and the other Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography, bought for Rs 8. He still glows at the thought of these.
Meanwhile, one also spots a Paulo Coelho in the shop, lurking in a lonely corner. “One has to live,” laughs Bhattacharya.