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A quiet escape
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Don’t be deterred by the pedantic look. The Sahitya Akademi book exhibition has many worthy buys
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Photo: Murali kumar K.
Take your pick For that rare anthology or for that meditation in print
For almost a week now, newspapers have written reams and reams about the seventh and last Harry Potter book. Each time a Harry Potter book is released the media goes into a frenzy almost as if there have been no books before it and there will be none
after it.
With so much hullabaloo, the chances of good old Sahitya Akademi publications getting any attention is not just far-flung, but also next to impossible. So, in the leafy environs of the Central College campus, there were hardly any camera lights flashing and hardly any eager beaver journos making furious notes on the best book bestowed upon humankind. One can go around the quiet Senate Hall at a dawdling pace, through the enormous spread of books in 22 languages. You’ll just have a handful of book companions, completely lost in the book in hand, be assured.
The Sahitya Akademi books don’t boast of stylish production. They look stolid and somber, but they go back to a time when looks were not all. In fact, some Sahitya Akademi publications are a boon for serious students of literature, research scholars and academicians. For instance, in their series Makers of Indian Literature they have monographs of some of the most obscure writers. You’ll find from Kamban to Kerala Varma to Bhabani Bhattacharya to the great sufi poet Bulle Shah. Where else would you find books on tribal literature? In the series, Indian Literature Tribal Languages you have anthologies from the almost unheard of Garo literature to the more familiar Dogri and Bodo literatures. There are endless surprises – go a step ahead and you’ll stumble upon wilting copies of Sindhi Partition poetry and folktales of Nicobar. And there are books on Indian Poetics and Paninian Semantics, huge tomes of erudition that is so distant to our world of information at the fingertip.
It was heart warming to unearth from among these huge stacks of books a Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, a la Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, but this one put together by our own V.K. Gokak. Going through the contents of the book was even more elevating, for, the book has poems by poet-philosophers such as Vivekananda, Aurobindo and J. Krishnamurthy too.
The books that draw your attention – not just because they are thick volumes, but also for their production value – are Anthology of Ancient Indian Literature, Complete Works of Rabindranath Tagore and Anthology of Modern Indian Literature, three volumes each. They make for very good buys, both in terms of content and pricing.
Alongside this, there is a big collection of books on culture studies, translations, biographies, criticism, writings in the regional languages, and Sahitya Akademi’s bi-monthly journal, Indian Literature. Don’t miss the greater treasure in the films made on eminent writers of the country. These films can be bought.
With helpful personnel who knew their books, the exhibition is a quiet escape into the world of words, when they weren’t all that dressed up.
Sahitya Akademi’s book exhibition at the Senate Hall is on till July 30, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. There is a discount of 20 to 75 per cent on the books.
DEEPA GANESH
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