BOOKED FOR CHANGE: An artist’s impression of Varnaparichay and (bottom) a typical College Street bookshop

WHEN YOU ARE OVER A hundred years old, you tend to look at change with some trepidation. And for the book shops of Calcutta’s famous College Street, some of them venerable centenarians, threat comes in the form of a new kid on the block.

One of the most atmospheric streets of Calcutta, College Street may soon lose some of its quaint ambience. The haunt of generations of readers and intellectuals who browsed through its countless book shops, or spent hours discussing literature and politics over coffee and kabiraji cutlets in the Coffee House, the street has always been a unique blend of shabbiness and culture. Whether one belonged to the groves of academia or not, for the initiated, this was the coolest crucible of adda and ideas. Today, though, the city’s traditional book district is all set for an image makeover. Come 2009, it will boast a slick new mall — a mammoth, one million square feet of spiffy retail space devoted to — you guessed it — books.

Varnaparichay, as the mall is to be called, will be a one-stop shop for books and the first of its kind in the country. A joint venture of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation and the West Bengal government, the mall will be located in the old College Street market.

“Ten years ago, I mooted the idea of setting up a book mall in Calcutta after I had seen similar places in Amsterdam and Beijing,” says Samar Nag, managing director of Bengal Shelter, the joint sector real estate company run by the West Bengal Housing Board. Nag approached Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, then urban development minister, with a plan to rebuild the crumbling College Street market and turn it into a book mall. However, it was not until last year that the Rs 200-crore project finally took off.

“VARNAPARICHAY IS A unique idea to bring together publishers and buyers, book shop owners and bibliophiles from all over the world in the heart of Calcutta,” says Calcutta mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharjee. Though it will be devoted primarily to books, the eight-storeyed mall will also set aside 20,000 square feet to accommodate 1,000 displaced tenants of the College Street Market who have been temporarily housed in nearby Marquis Square.

One big advantage of Varnaparichay, its architects point out, will be the availability of ample parking space — something that is a perennial problem on College Street. “We plan to provide space for as many as 1000 cars,” says Atanu Chakrabarty, architect at Prakalpa, the firm entrusted with designing the mall.

Though Varnaparichay will come loaded with a raft of features for bibliophiles to shop and browse in comfort, some feel that a shiny new mall in Calcutta’s book district, dotted with shabby bookstores, will destroy its character forever. Says Priyabrata Dasgupta, 32, a book lover and a College Street habitué, “A mall on College Street will stick out like a sore thumb and be totally at odds with the ambience of the place.”

BUT NOT MANY SHARE Dasgupta’s romantic vision of preserving College Street in a time warp. In fact, several intellectuals and writers support the idea of a book mall. “Change is the only constant factor in society and I welcome this new place,” says author Sunil Gangopadhyay. “The new mall is likely to spur the small, dilapidated book shops that line the road to spruce up and smarten up.”

Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, another contemporary Bengali writer, too feels that College Street has become much too down at heel and that any change will be for the better. “Once there used to be a quaint charm in poring over old musty tomes,” he reminisces. But over the years the charm declined with the gradual decay of the institutions that gave College Street its essential flavour. “Decaying buildings, inadequate facilities for publishing, amateur facilities for printing and preserving books and the relentless pressure of heavy traffic have made the beauty of College Street a thing of the past,” he says.

However, some local publishers are wary of the advent of the book mall. They feel that they may not be able to rent space there because of high costs and hence lose out to the competition. “The rates suggested are too high. We hope to get at least 5,000 square feet of space at a reasonable rate to Bengali publishers,” says Sabitendranath Ray, managing director of Mitra and Ghosh Publishers. The secretary of the Publishers and Booksellers Guild, Tridib Chattopadhyay, says that the guild plans to demand a separate section for regional publishers.

But nearly everyone agrees that College Street needs to move with the times. As Subir Mitra, managing director of Ananda Publishers, puts it, “Varnaparichay will lead to good competition among traditional and regional publishers. This will be a mall with an intellectual bent.”

Vidyasagar would surely have approved.