Chittaranjan Bhavan at Delhi’s CR Park, the hub of the city’s Bengali community, hosted the Bhavan Bookfest from 20 to 29 September 2024, just before the Durga Puja celebrations. Bengali fiction and non-fiction titles and a large variety of Bengal-themed books were featured at the fair, where small and large book publishers and bookstores from West Bengal participated.
Niyogi Books had a well-curated collection of books for readers of all ages – captivating fiction from its Olive Turtle imprint, thought-provoking translations from its Thornbird imprint, engaging non-fiction from its Paper Missile imprint along with enriching Hindi titles from its Bahuvachan imprint. The publishing house’s youngest imprint Perky Parrot featured a collection of national and international children’s literature.
The stand had a fascinating collection of coffee table books on Kolkata and West Bengal history. Some of the coffee table books that caught our eye were The Forgotten Palaces of Calcutta by Joanne Taylor, Calcutta 1940 – 1970: In the Photographs of Jayant Patel, The Great Houses of Kolkata: Their Antecedents, Precedents, Splendour, and Portents by Joanne Taylor and Jon Lang, and The Shaping of Modern Calcutta by Ranabir Choudhury.
Daksha Bharati, a children’s book publisher from Kolkata, came with its collection of interactive storybooks and detailed atlas. “Children want to know about animals, science, and Indian epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata. We have created a book on Jurassic World in Bengali so that children retain an interest in the Bengali language while learning about natural history.
“The old type of Atlas had only pictures and names of places but we have come out with a new design where we write a few paragraphs about the history and culture of every place with its map so children have a holistic understanding of geography. This is the reason why our Atlas is very popular all over India,” said Kaushik Paul from Daksha Bharati. The publisher was giving away complimentary paper hats featuring Daksha Bharati’s logo and name in Bengali with every purchase.
Read Bengali Bookstore from Kolkata, about which we had written earlier, had a prominent stand with a good collection of fiction and non-fiction titles in Bengali along with merchandise such as coasters with characters from Satyajit Ray’s movies, Kolkata-themed fridge magnets, notebooks and notepads featuring famous cartoon characters on their covers along with T-shirts featuring the hand-pulled rickshaw from Bengal, Kolkata’s yellow taxis, trams and artwork featuring Goddess Durga.
Since CR Park mostly houses the Bengali community, leading Bengali publishers from Kolkata participated, Pritam Sengupta from Read Bengali Bookstore said, adding a lot of people visited the fair and purchased Bengali literature and some English books as well. Upcoming publishers from Bengal are publishing new content in detective fiction as well as non-fiction books, which reached a large number of Bengali readers, he said.
The IPP team picked up Contemporary Urdu Short Stories from Kolkata, translated by Afif Shams Siddiqi and edited by Fuzail Asar Siddiqi, An Anthology of the Best Ghost Stories from Bengal published by Bee Books, The Bengalis: A Portrait of a Community by Sudeep Chakravarti, Patachitra of Odisha by Anita Bose, and RK Laxman: Back with a punch by EP Unny from the book fest.
