A Summer of Books: Exploring College Street

A Summer of Books: Exploring College Street

I grew up with my Didu’s stories of College Street. Having attended Presidency University, College Street was my Didu’s academic garden, where she met her friends, bought her school books, and witnessed the Naxalite Movement firsthand. The last time I came to India, a little less than ten years ago, I was taken aback by the rows and rows of stalls. I came back home to Texas with an English-Bengali dictionary and a series that adapted the story of Shiva into a fictionalized politically-charged saga not dissimilar to Dune. 

I packed up that same dictionary around weeks ago when I first departed for a two-month long reporting expedition in Kolkata. As a Fellow with the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, I’m reporting on College Street as a microcosm of broader political and economic change happening across Kolkata and India. Through journalism, I have the opportunity to share this unique pocket of intoxicating intellectual vibrancy with the world. But I also have a chance to dig deeper in order to understand the gears making this book market turn and the changes it’s experiencing in the process. 

College Street gets its name from the universities that line the streets, bringing students and their outspoken politics along with them. Crowded around the schools are over a thousand stalls of books and books stores. The rumor goes, if you want a book, you can find it on College Street—everything from rare books to small-batch prints. Through my research, I was even able to get my hands on a first-edition version of Che Guevera’s diaries being sold for an equivalent of around 2 dollars.

Doing journalism in my second-language has been far from easy. I only started learning Bangla this previous year at Penn in preparation for this project. Prior to that, I knew little more than the alphabet and a few greeting phrases. But being here, my Bangla has improved rapidly. I’m still far from fluent, but I’m able to conduct interviews and converse with booksellers in Bangla—a feat that, I’ll be honest, quite surprised me. 

Coming to India for the first time in my adulthood after a little less than a decade away is a personal reckoning of its own. There’s no doubt, I’ve been forced to confront questions of belonging and identity in the process. A girl asked me at one point, “Norah, do you think of yourself as Indian or American?”. I didn’t have an answer for her, but I figured by the end of the summer I would figure that out. Four weeks in, I’ve realized that there isn’t an answer to that question at all. 

I found myself feeling distinctly at home here, surrounded by so much support and compassion already—even as I nervously stumble through questions in Bangla. Through my conversations, I’ve been able to meet some truly amazing people. While doing interviews in a bookstore, I stopped to interview an economics student looking for a book. Three hours later, we found ourselves finishing each other’s as we discussed the theoretical implications of the Dialectic of Enlightenment on quantitative research. Right now, I’m writing this at a coffee shop with a girl I met while doing research at Dasgupta’s, College Street’s oldest bookstore. 

The best part of coming to Kolkata as a journalist is that I have an excuse to go up to people and start asking them questions—turning interviews into conversations. Through my research, I’ve learned about so much Bengali history and literature that was previously unknown to me. My summer research in Kolkata is just beginning, yet amongst the thousands of books lining College Street, I’ve already begun to find my own stories here in the city.