In the multitude of all things abstract, the concept of memory is most tangible. When Albert Camus published Rebellion, Resistance, and Death , a compilation of his essays through the 1960s that addressed issues ranging from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment, he was also building a repository of memory. That is, a form of writing that explored both the political atmosphere of the era but also served as a glimpse into his personal views on what he called “a reflection on the problem of freedom”. And this is but one fish in a sea of opinions, personalities and imaginations that are held in the pages of a book, keeping alive thoughts and tangible memories for the reader.
Bookish friends
In an attempt to document memory that exists within the cupboards and shelves of the People’s Free Reading Room at Dhobi Talao, photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri and writer Jerry Pinto have collaborated to tell a story about the library, through the books in its collection. Their numerous conversations about the loss of reading, either at their favourite haunt — bookshop Kitab Khana — or during their travels, found space to come alive when Pinto joined the library’s board of trustees. Chaudhuri, always on the prowl for new projects, quickly sent email to Pinto, which he affectionately dubs “a dhobi list”, centred around documenting the library’s treasures.
While sipping on an iced-latte to beat the mid-afternoon heat, Chaudhuri shares how the collaboration, titled In the City, A Library , was also born as a result of a number of existential life questions. “I remember us sitting in the library and thinking about all the authors who had written these books, some famous, some obscure, and if these guys are forgotten, what chance in hell do we have,” he says. While the two weren’t sure about the direction their idea was heading in, Chaudhuri was certain that he wanted to leave the architecture of the library out of it. “Here’s where the challenge began, because at the end of the day, you’re only photographing a flat rectangular piece,” he says, demonstrating some of the angles he resorted to with the menu card that lay in front of us.
Trawling through treasure
Chaudhuri first wandered into the old library situated right opposite the famous Irani café Kyani & Co. in the early 1990s during his stint at The Sunday Observer, whose office was round the corner. With friend Prasad Rao, who worked as a volunteer at the space, Chaudhuri recalls passing a shelf piled with massive bound volumes of Punch magazine, which had recently shut down. During his frequent visits to the library over the years, the pile never shifted, but his curiosity about the rest of the collection only heightened. After all, there were 37,000 books to draw his fancy.
Through the 18 months of this project that began in January 2016, Chaudhuri and Pinto brought a lot of their interests and personalities into the kind of collections they were sifting through. “I have this thing for illustrations, so I remember being drawn to books with drawings of various African tribes, pagodas in jungles, illustrated poetry books, and even a tiny red book that Jerry discovered with a sailor boy demonstrating the A-Z of semaphore signals,” says Chaudhuri, while lamenting the fact that the last one was something he decided to leave alone and not pursue photographing.
He also believes that the drama before a shot was always thrown up by the material, either with trails of an insect that had eaten through the page, decaying spines of untouched books, a pressed flower in the pages of Shakespeare, or a tram ticket possibly used as a bookmark once upon a time. The vandalism that the books faced also signifies the fragility of memory and its form. “There was also drama in the landscape of the unknown, a finding that we hadn’t quite made yet,” Chaudhuri adds with a smile.
Apart from leftover personal items, the pages also had scrawls with reviews like “a damned stupid story”, a reader who added bits about the advantages of homeopathy even if it was in a book like Oliver Twist, and a draft letter to the police commissioner with a request for a new passport. The scribbles held as an inception of personalities, bringing together the thoughts of the author and the reader, to merge a story that once was. “Sometimes when I found books with odd numbers, I’d almost imagine that I had entered Tintin’s The Secret of the Unicorn , and there was a treasure to be found,” Chaudhuri chuckles.
It’s a thought that was echoed by Vedika Singhania, assistant to the project and a student at Social Communication Media department, Sophia Polytechnic, where both Chaudhuri and Pinto teach. According to Chaudhuri, Singhania looked for interesting artefacts with “a kind of vengeance”. It was Singhania who inspired one of the walls at the exhibit that has records of the people who borrowed the books, some from 1901. “I think it helps document the aesthetics of decay,” says Chaudhuri as he goes on to talk about discovering entire cupboards filled with books on debates in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Now, even though the halls of the library are filled with readers, the shelves remain fairly untouched. With mostly students using the space to study, or the newer biographies of Barack Obama or Sachin Tendulkar taking precedence over say the study on the human evolution, the project comes at a time when curiosity is a rarity. “There were times when I’d be standing on top of the table photographing a book and nobody would even question us,” says Chaudhuri. While this might have played spoilsport in encouraging the collaborators to believe in the eternal aspect of memory, for now, the books and their authors have found another way to exist in a world where they were almost forgotten.
In the City, A Library is on at Project 88, Colaba, till April 8
