People still ask me sometimes, seven years after I moved back to Delhi from the United States, what it is that I miss most. I have had an answer prepared for years: public transport, I say, and beef steak, but above all public libraries. I write this column from Puducherry, where the public transport is a disaster, but the French Quarter is dripping with places that promise you the best steak in town. That I expected. I didn't expect, however, the libraries.
Puducherry wears its French heritage lightly. The caps on its policemen, the French-army-blue Art Deco memorial on the seafront to the French Indians who died in defence of the "patrie" in the Great War, the children in French-language schools and so on. Much of it is ignored, sadly - the old mairie or town hall, which has stood at the heart of the seafront for two centuries, collapsed a few days ago. INTACH was supposed to be restoring it, but it is suspected that they estimated the wrong wall could be removed and the whole thing came down. The local government delayed too long in fixing it, and now a historic landmark, one of India's oldest, grandest and most unique buildings, is gone forever.
But what lives on is the libraries. This is what took me by surprise. More so than steak, even, Puducherry is a city of libraries.
Just behind where the old mairie stood is the headquarters of the Puducherry Department of Culture, with tall rounded windows and jutting-out grills in what must be the French-colonial style, since I have seen it nowhere else in India. The office-goers have to walk in under an arch that says "Bibliotheque Publique"; for this grand building, near the seafront and overlooking the central park - "Place du Gouvernemente" - was built by the French as a public library.
The library, now named for the French Nobelist, pacifist and Indophile Romain Rolland, has now been moved to a squat and ugly structure across the park, the two buildings depressingly demonstrating the comparative understanding of aesthetics proudly possessed by the French and the Indian republics. Inside, however, it is far from depressing. The periodicals reading room is full. Even the stacks - featuring tall, elegant wooden bookshelves along the walls that presumably were dragged over from the old building - are full of people. People reading, whispering, preparing for examinations, browsing, writing. That was the most civilised thing I saw in a very civilised city.
Just next to the main library is the even larger library of the Aurobindo Ashram. The Ashram, which owns blocks of real estate that it has painted battleship-grey, is still the dominant presence in Puducherry. I have never been a massive fan of barrister-turned-spiritualist Aurobindo Mukherjee, as I am ideologically predisposed to believe lawyers are marginally more useful to society than mystics. But the Ashram has nevertheless had a big influence on my life, as it has on generations of kids from Calcutta (now Kolkata), thanks to its fondness for libraries. The library on Shakespeare Sarani in that city was one of my favourite places. It provided all that you wanted - familiar favourites in familiar places on familiar shelves, a reassuring reminder that a comfortable re-read lay in your future; and the occasional bit of serendipity that sends your life and your tastes in a completely different direction from otherwise, as happened to me the day I found a replica of the first edition of The Hobbit at the bottom of a haphazard pile, opened it up to J R R Tolkien's meticulous hand-drawn map of Bilbo Baggins' journey, and was hooked.
In Puducherry, naturally, the Ashram has a library, and it was all that it could have been expected to be. But there are yet others; the libraries, for example, of the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient on Rue Dumas. The first, with high ceilings and high bookcases, overlooks a lovely courtyard on one side and a road leading to the sea on the other; the windows are open, and as you sit at one of the tables, the sound of the waves aids your concentration. The floors are iron oxide red, light polished wood and flagstones; you notice because you're asked to take off your shoes. There were a few people reading when I went. One of the books was lying open on the table I sat at - a study of Pallava inscriptions, a volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, open to a chapter about Mahabalipuram, 100 km north. Across Rue Dumas is the second, the Ecole's Tamil library, with little chairs in a courtyard for readers; and across town is the French Institute, where you walk past glass-walled laboratories with concentrating scientists and a courtyard with a coffee lady who hands you big, buttery biscuits, to a big reading room that overlooks the sea.
The French ran this little town for a little while, and they left libraries, big imposing ones in the centre of the town. The Indian government can't build a library unless it's a by-product of a political rivalry - up in Chennai they'll show you one such if you ask, a building meant as a secretariat turned by M Karunanidhi to other, finer purposes. Delhi's public libraries are hidden away, not the centres of civic life they should be.
In Romain Rolland Library, in fortunate Puducherry, a huge painting of Jawaharlal Nehru - with some sort of religious tika added on - watched over quiet readers. Young people browsed shelves marked "Generalia" (seriously) and "American novels" (English novels were simply "novels"). It provided a space too rare in our country - one carefully policed and quiet, and yet welcoming, one where you can be solitary and undisturbed amidst a crowd.
Oh, and libraries help people read, too. Nothing gives you more hope for India than to pick up a random book and see how often its been taken out. I randomly took down an obscure book on the colonial history of Sri Lanka, for example, gifted by the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation of Salt Lake in Kolkata; it has been taken out every month for the past few years. Some people, at least, are better informed about how the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict came to be. One wonders why the Indian republic doesn't want that to be the case with more of its citizens.
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