The worlds of politics and literature are often deeply entangled. It’s an intersection I’m sure you’re deeply invested having worked in both fiction and non-fiction. For the past 8 weeks, funded by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the Center for Advanced Study of India, I have been reporting on the field in Kolkata, India, specifically investigating the state of India’s literary markets as a contemporary political battleground. I was particularly considering the implications of an erosion of this seminal literary space that was once a cultural touchstone for Indian intellectualism. 

Considered the oldest book market in India and the largest secondhand book market in the world, College Street is a marketplace of ideas. In a stretch of little less than 900 meters in Central Kolkata, over a thousand vendors stretch along the main road and extend into the alleyways and nooks, as they beckon passersby to look through their assortment of books that run the gamut of English popular novels, medical textbooks, Bengali poetry, and out-of-print rare books. Some of the bookstores are nothing more than a tarp showcasing a random assortment of secondhand books, while others are multi-floor expanses that date back to the 19th century. Home to some of the first official universities in Asia, College Street represented a historical frontier for intellectualism where books were imported from around the world and new ideas came in conversation with the old. As a result, the ideas exchanged on College Street were often the catalyst for radical movements. The history of the space is closely tied to the Indian Freedom movement and, later on, the communist Naxalite Movement of the 1970s. 

However, under pressure from a changing economic market and ongoing challenges, College Street’s face has begun to shift. The people I interviewed over the scope of my research noted an ongoing trend as the market has slowly lost its cultural relevance as an incubator for radical thought. What was once a space dedicated to political theory and revolutionary treatises has now become overrun with textbooks, pulp fiction, and state-sponsored publishing—genres that all have distinct political implications according to the Indian literary theorists I interviewed. The defanging of College Street as a radical space of particular importance given the growing cultural dominance of far-right Hindu nationalism in India. I do want to be clear, however, that I’m not necessarily trying to make the argument that College Street is the sole or even primary battleground of Indian intellectualism in the current age—instead, I’m attempting to use it as a microcosm of the broader political and social changes rippling across the subcontinent.

Over the course of my reporting, I spoke with student activists defending Arundhati Roy while smoking on campus, adults who went to university on College Street during the height of political unrest, book hawkers who didn’t speak English yet sold rare English literature, law students looking for textbooks, and even an 80-year-old bookseller running a family book store that dated back to 1886. As I see it, my research brings forth a personal and human lens that both highlights this underreported, cultural history of College Street while also contextualizing that very history by the politics of contemporary India.