What He Gave Our City'

5/8/2021 ‘What he gave our city’: Ramchandra Guha on TS Shanbhag (1937-2021), the ‘Bookseller of Bangalore’
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Saturday, May 8th 2021
LITERARY TRIBUTE
‘What he gave our city’: Ramchandra

Guha on TS Shanbhag (1937-2021),
the ‘Bookseller of Bangalore’
TS Shanbagh died of Covid-19 on May 4 at the age of 84.
Ramachandra Guha  
May 07, 2021 · 08:30 am
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TS Shanbagh (right) with Ramachandra Guha inside Premier Bookshop, around 2001. | Raghav Shreyas
Shortly before TS Shanbhag shuttered his Premier Bookshop in 2009, Asha Ghosh and
Kathleen Dargis made a short film about him. The film was dedicated to the
photographer Raghav Shreyas, who died tragically young, and was a habitué of the
store.
It features, among other things, a lovely cameo of the owner of Premier Bookshop
meeting the owner of Koshy’s Parade Café, which lay just a hundred yards away, and
where Shanbhag often had a coffee before opening his store. But perhaps the nicest
moment in the film comes early on.
A mother with a teenager alongside her speaks of bringing her son to the store when
he was little, en route to her monthly visit to the British Library, then situated just
above Koshy’s. As they entered Premier the boy asked the mother whether this was
the library. When she answered in the negative, he said, but it contains all the books
in the world.
Warm and generous

I first visited Premier in 1979, when I was in my twenties. For the next three decades
the store and its owner were an indispensable part of my life. My younger friends in
Bangalore came to Premier as little children. The activist Achal Prabala’s first
memories of Premier are of himself, aged six or seven, being left there by his parents
while they had work in the area, and spending time leafing through kids’s books. He
first knew it therefore as a de facto reading library, before growing up and having his
literary and political education transformed by the books he bought from the store.
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Basaveshwaranagar, in west Bangalore. It was a wonderful and happy occasion, and

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we wished to repeat it often. In the event, we did so only once, when Shanbhag came
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to an event in our part of town, and we spent some time with him. On Tuesday
morning, when I heard of Shanbhag’s passing, I called Achal to tell him. He wept, and I
began weeping with him too. I gently put down the phone, leaving each of us alone
with our memories of the man.
Twenty-four hours later, as I write this piece, in a calmer frame of mind, I think more
constructively of Shanbhag and what he gave our city. If, as the novelist Anthony
Powell said, books do furnish a room, then perhaps booksellers – the best of them at
any rate – do nourish a community. For a full four decades, TS Shanbhag and his
Premier Bookshop sustained the interests and obsessions of those who lived in
Bangalore and bought and read books in English. But it was not merely the
astonishing range of books that he stocked that made him so beloved of his customers.
It was also the warmth and generosity of the man.
A bookshop for writers

I have written extensively of my own relationship with Premier and its owner
elsewhere, so here let me gather together the memories of others. The Kannada
novelist Vivek Shanbhag recalls going there first as a shy 18-year-old, fresh from the
Konkan coast. Seeing him lovingly flip through a book, and then set it aside with a
sigh, the older Shanbhag (who was unrelated to the younger) would say,
sympathetically, take the book with you and bring it back tomorrow.
Later, when Vivek could afford to buy all the books he wanted, he particularly came to
value Premier’s Shanbhag for his ability to source books unavailable anywhere else in
India. Vivek had developed a fascination for the novels and stories of Isaac Bashevis
Singer; of the 30 books by Singer that he now proudly possesses, the bulk were
obtained for him by TS Shanbhag, one by one. In those pre-Amazon, pre Abe Books,
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But then Shanbhag was like that with everyone who The Plus
walked into his store more than
just once or twice. As he came to recognise one’s tastes and interests, he developed an
uncanny knack for anticipating what one might like to pick from the vast holdings he
possessed. Mailing me on hearing of the death of Premier’s owner, the economics
writer Rahul Jacob remarked: “Long before the algorithms had decided (wrongly) that
I might care to read Bhagwati on globalisation, he seemed to know that I would be
interested in the Didion or Ondaatje that was hidden in one corner of the bookshop.”
The biologist Vidyanand Nanjundaiah wrote to me: “The range of his stock was
amazing, as was the ever-increasing difficulty of negotiating one’s way through the
shop. I bought The Art of India by Sivaramamurti, EO Wilson’s Sociobiology and
Smullyan’s Logic Puzzles all from him. He had a shy, diffident smile, and quickly sized
up my interests. Whenever I dropped in, he used to pull a book from somewhere
inside a huge, almost tottering pile and say, ‘I think you may like this.’ It was almost
always true. Others told me their experience was the same.”
When I tweeted about Shanbhag’s passing, others chipped in to share their memories.
One person remarked: “This is so tragic, was a regular at his shop till it closed. You
could tell him, ‘Uncle, I am broke, will pick the book later’ and he would give a hefty
discount and say – take the book, pay when you get your salary. Incredible man.”
A second wrote: “Still remember, he called us telling us that Sunil Gavaskar was
coming to autograph his book Sunny Days. I still have the book with the little master’s
autograph, thank you Mr Shanbhag.” A third observed: “Fond memories indeed . As a
young management student, grew up reading books that Mr Shanbhag recommended.
Gentle, friendly and charming, he inspired the habit of reading to all Bangaloreans.”
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aimlessly, only to buy one impulsively, and head for home. My Dad and I shared the
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reading habit and when he could no longer travel, I would make the trip on my own,
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with reduced hours for browsing.”
Literature, science, travel, management, sport, and more – Premier had arguably a
wider range of themes and subjects than any other bookstore in India, alongside an
owner capable of effortlessly matching individual readers to individual titles. No
wonder he inspired such love and regard. As one person remarked on Twitter: “Do
you remember when nearly all of Bangalore came together to donate money when Mr
Shanbhag announced he was closing Premier as his landlord had increased the rent?
He managed to keep it going for a couple of years more, from perhaps being moved by
this.”
Among the reasons Shanbhag was so greatly loved was that he was a person of
kindliness and compassion. The lawyer Aarti Mundkur grew up with the store, asking
her mother to buy books for her before saving up her pocket money to buy some for
herself. Aarti went to university in Mumbai; returning some years later, she walked
into Premier to be greeted affectionately in Konkani before being told, in English: “The
first book you bought from your own money was Daddy Longlegs.”
Many years later still, after having her sociological and legal education substantially
shaped by Shanbhag’s offerings, Aarti went to Premier an hour before closing time. As
she came out with a bag of books it began to rain. She huddled under an awning,
contemplating hours of waiting thus. After he locked the store and came out himself,
Shanbhag saw Aaarti looking anxious, not perhaps for herself, but for those waiting
for her at home. He came up and asked Aarti where she lived, signalled for her to get
into his car, and deposited her safely with her family.
Doing good for the world
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interview published in The Bangalore Review. This was conducted in 2014, some years
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after he retired, and contains a most informative account of his career as a bookseller.
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Here I found that, while I certainly knew and remembered the many debts I owed
Shanbhag, I had forgotten the modest debt he owed me.
Apparently it was I who first persuaded him to get a credit card machine, in view of
the fact that other bookstores in the city now had them, and he had to keep up with
the competition. Long-time customers like myself, of course, continued to pay by cash,
sometimes weeks after we had taken away and read the books we had bought from
him.
Shanbhag’s store stocked books only in English, but, as the bilingual writer Sugata
Srinivasaraju reminds me, Premier played a critical role in expanding the horizons of
many Kannada writers too. Sugata’s own father, the dramatist C Srinivasaraju,
assembled a large collection of books on drama theory from Premier, which are now
housed with the Indira National Centre for the Arts.
When the great director BV Karanth visited Bangalore, he would ask Srinivasaraju to
meet him at Premier where, after an hour of happy and productive browsing, they
would walk over to Koshy’s for an hour of intense (and productive) conversation. On
my own visits to the store, I often saw the Kannada poet Pratibha Nandakumar and
the Kannada critic GK Govinda Rao and the Kannada editor Sudra Srinivas there, as
also the Tamil writer G Sivaramakrishnan. Doubtless Shanbhag and his shop stoked
the literary and social sensibilities of some Urdu and Marathi and Konkani writers
too.
Behind Shanbhag’s shy demeanour lay a mischievous wit – reserved only for people
he had known long enough – and a great strength of character. He had an inner
contentment, an inner peace, that kept him and his store going while the city and the
world changed
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I have never known a man – or woman – to take Exchange The Plus

retirement with such equanimity,
with absolutely no bitterness or regrets. When Achal Prabala and I went to see him c
2016, he radiated the same sort of kindness and warmth (and mischief) as he had in
the days he ran Premier. Walking around his locality with him, it was clear his
neighbours adored Shanbhag just as much as his customers once did.
Among the many comments on Twitter posted after Shanbhag’s death was one which
offered this quote from George Elliot: “For the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they
might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and
rest in unvisited tombs.” Through the books he selected and sold, through the
knowledge he helped convey and the moral compass he himself represented, TS
Shanbhag did far more good for the world than some vain and vindictive men who
claim to have the force of history behind them.
Ramachandra Guha’s books include Patriots and Partisans, with an essay titled
“Turning Crimson at Premier’s”.
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5/8/2021 ‘What he gave our city’: Ramchandra Guha on TS Shanbhag (1937-2021), the ‘Bookseller of Bangalore’

Exchange The Plus

Saturday, May 8th 2021

‘What he gave our city’: Ramchandra

Exchange The Plus

Warm and generous

Basaveshwaranagar, in west Bangalore. It was a wonderful and happy occasion, and

A bookshop for writers

Doing good for the world

I have never known a man – or woman – to take Exchange The Plus

Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at

Bengaluru Bookshops Covid

 Exchange The Plus

‘I always found him reading’: A tribute to Shamsur

Readers’ comments on An Indian Army officer Watch: Large crowds Arundh

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