K U M A R S
One can only imagine it today: a set of cosy rooms in an ancestral house on a busy street in Calcutta in the '5os, resembling the finely appointed private library of a gentleman with its complex of bookcases and sitting-room furniture — that was actually an antiquarian bookshop. One could walk in for a browse and hold long conversations about rare books with its bohemian-bibliophile owner. His name was Nirmal Chandra Kumar and his bookshop was called, simply, `Kumars'. From 1945 until his death in 1976, Kumar ran the rare bookshop from his home. The establishment took up several rooms in the house and the stock ranged widely, from fine bindings to prints to maps.
I first learnt about Kumar and his bookshop when I stumbled on a blog by his son, Aloke Kumar, on his father's bookshop and its influence on the life and work of many Bengali artists and intellectuals of his time, who were all regulars at Kumars. I was, first of all, delighted to discover there had once been such a fabulous bookshop in India — a genuine antiquarian bookshop in a country where antiquarian bookselling and buying is not an ingrained tradition. In this sense, Kumar was no doubt a maverick, and thank god for that, or Kumars would have been just one more second-hand bookshop. Eager to know more about his magnificent bookshop, I managed to contact the owner's son, Professor Aloke Kumar, to have a brief chat with him on the phone.
In his blog, 'Antiquarian of Calcutta', Aloke describes a not so typical photo of Nirmal Kumar: 'a stocky Bengali... he wore a white collared shirt, half-sleeved and a lungi; his formal dress was a dhoti and kurta with pump shoes. Can you imagine somebody wearing this dress and smoking a pipe or a Davidus Cigar sitting in his library surrounded by books?' Kumar was probably the first Indian bookseller to publish a rare book catalogue in the long tradition of all bespoke antiquarian booksellers around the world, especially the legends Kumar had done business with, Quaritch and Maggs. The city's bibliophiles, artists, luminaries, antiquarians and bohemians — all frequented Kumars. Satyajit Ray, a regular browser here, consulted Kumar when he was making Shatranj ke Khilari. In a London book auction, Kumar had bid for and won a priceless scrapbook on the Mutiny.
Ray went on to pay his own little tribute to Kumar in the character of the encyclopaedic Sidhu Jyatha in the Feluda stories. The other well-known antiquary, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, was also a customer. When he donated thousands of rare books from his collection to the National Library, several books in that collection had come from Kumars. 'In the early 1940s,' writes Aloke Kumar, 'rare book collection was in a dismal, class-bound rut. The famous rare bookshop Cambray... was already fading, Thacker and Spink, the other well-known bookshop was alive, but there were hardly any rare books... Kumar helped to change all that. His enthusiasms included the then-unheralded British painters, Thomas and William Daniell, to be re-introduced to Calcutta once more. He bought the rare elephant folio of the plate books by T and W. Daniell from Sotheby’s to sail it to Calcutta.'
What was just as remarkable about Kumar reading his son's reflections — was how generously and freely he gave to his customers, friends and family, even though the bookshop wasn't always a profitable business. It just about broke even most of the time, but Kumar, in the middle of his struggles to keep the bookshop afloat and care for the needs of his own family, invited his parents to come live with him. He was also apparently a gourmet and 'organized the very best of fine cooking to be presented to his friends. Sometimes such delicacies that you would only find in the pages of some rare Mughal document'.
Aloke recalls running a regular errand for his father: being sent off with books in hand to be delivered to Satyajit Ray. He also remembers how cautious everyone in the house was about handling the books, tiptoeing around the shelves, careful not to disturb them. One of the things that broke Kumar's heart, something he could never be a part of, was the sharp practice in the antiquarian trade in the late '7os, of breaking apart rare books and atlases and maps to make a bigger profit. Some of his fellow booksellers in the trade had begun to buy books with rare prints and maps, and tear them up in order to sell each print or map individually, rather than keep them intact. You made more this way than when you sold the set or the atlas as a whole.
`Kumar did not want to be a part of this and lost out,' says Aloke. And it was with a sense of bowing to the inevitable that Kumars mentally gave up. Nirmal Kumar died in 1976 and with his death, the literary world lost a sweet and genuinely unselfish man who freely gave of his vast knowledge and delighted in the achievements of those he influenced so profoundly.'
My interest in this unsung bookman and his cherish antiquarian bookshop is not so much for the luminaries who once buzzed around it, as much as imagining the regular stream of ordinary bibliophiles, scholars and collectors, for whom Kumars must have been a Mecca of fine and rare books .