Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.

The last time I was in Dehradun, it was to check on my older sister and her husband, who had both faced serious health issues. Dehradun is no longer a town we knew as children, full of tree-lined lanes, large houses with well planted gardens and quaint markets with perfectly preserved old public schools, bakeries and a cantonment area. But it is still very nice. We still get a minimal sense of continuity in Doon. Here’s where my husband went to school, various grand aunts waited for us during summer breaks with welcoming arms, and some three decades ago my sister and her academic husband Dr B.K. Joshi set up home after he took early retirement from his job as a vice-chancellor.

As always happens in close-knit families, as we were handed our steaming hot cups, we slipped backwards in time with old friends who had also relocated to Doon, like the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Then the talk veered into a discussion on Joshi’s pet project since 1998 and my sister’s pet peeve: The Doon Library and Research Centre. Joshi, as a well-known academic, had continued his research work as a social scientist and had provided consultancy services to Save the Children and Unicef . My sister felt this was too much work for a frail man like him. Their squabbles were stuff of many family jokes and lore.

Born and schooled in Mussoorie, my brother-in-law had selflessly devoted himself to the governments of Uttar Pradesh and the new born state of Uttarakhand and when asked to, headed various committees on development and the changing ecology of Uttarakhand. He found that a town that had groomed and housed writers and poets like Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Nayantara Sehgal, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Allan Sealy did not have a public library. For his own projects, he had to go all the way to the LBS National Academy of Administration library.

My sister, like the devoted and headstrong wife she is, pooh-poohed it as the mad obsession of an absent-minded professor. All siblings and their spouses were expected to take her side and talk him out of the idea. “Who reads books anymore? You see all these moronic anchors on TV and party spokespersons on TV and YouTube, do you think they even touch books? Everyone doesn’t have this passion for learning!” Then she’d turn to us, "Who listens to me in this house? Even our son agrees with his Babba." The stubborn man with a gentle voice remonstrated, backed by us, "Don’t you see, I am giving the people what they did not know they needed!"

"But what about your own health? You are no spring chicken!" my sister continued.

A routine answer was shot off: "I owe the State that enabled me and whose subsidies paid for my higher education, fixed my body each time I fell sick and paid my hospital bills. I am only trying to repay.” My sister would pull her familiar bored face and say something to the effect that any argument like this to her lacked sense and remains a socio-liberal one. “You are a fine one to ask him not to care for others,” I yelled back at her once, "when you’ve been running a free school for construction site workers’ children in your home for as many years!"

This shut her up, but not for too long.

By 2006, Joshi had registered the library and framed a Memorandum of Association and a governing body comprising eminent persons and academics backed by his close friends Alan Sealy, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Surjit Das, the chief secretary. So now they had a registration, some money and a good librarian, but there was no place to start work. “Mil gaya koda, ab kya chahiye jean lagaam aur ghoda? (We have a whip, a saddle and the rein, who needs a horse?)" he laughed as the team faced the toughest priority – to find a large place for the library to house the books and a large reading area.

Several buildings they found and liked had rentals the library could not afford. Some that were offered were far outside the town and the team felt that would defeat the very purpose of a public library, to be accessible, easy to locate and free. The thousands of aspirational but poor students and locals needed a library that became a home to them, an adda for brainstorming and occasionally listening to mind-expanding lectures. Finally, a renovated building in the heart of town was made partially available to them. This spurred them to procure books and journals. The Education Directorate made the first donation of many rare books and some were purchased with the funds at their disposal. One minor problem remained – sharing the premises with a minor political party’s cacophonous office. The party had already used bullying, secrecy and outright arm-twisting to bag the largest room as a permanent dharna sthal. The pandemic helped the library group get the space vacated .

By now, the library was attracting a large number of young regulars, especially students preparing for various competitive exams who had no one addressing their needs except some coaching centres that charged a huge fee. When the library began to keep popular books and material they could use only on the premises, the response was phenomenal. The youth, which also included many young women by now, were happy to sit outside on the lawns as the reading room filled up. But Joshi still felt they must offer more. He ordered multiple copies of popular journals, and helped by his devoted team, converted the existing stack rooms for books to another reading room. The numbers grew and discussion groups were born.

Despite problems of mounting bills and water logging during monsoons, the library by 2017 had the reputation of a serious quiet and accessible public space for book lovers and students. At this point, they started a series of events for which local writers and bureaucrats became his willing allies. They helped bring the library under the Uttaranchal Public Library Act 2005, which made it eligible to receive government grants. In February 2018, finally a major light was visible at the end of the long tunnel. The Airports Authority of India had sanctioned Rs 7.50 crore for the building. Alongside this, the then chief secretary Utpal Singh identified a plot of land at Lansdowne Chowk, where a new building soon began to take shape. Meanwhile Joshi, who was by now over 80, agreed at last with his spouse that all this hard work was taking a serious toll on his health. In 2022, he persuaded the general body to allow him to hand over the reins to a former chief secretary, N. Ravishankar.

The library by now has 32,031 books in both English and Hindi spanning a wide variety of subjects, old gazetteers, colonial historiographies and administrative correspondence dating back to the 1850s. It has 4,829 active members who on an average borrow a total of 300-400 books each month. The University Grants Commission has also chipped in by helping the library digitise and use an open-source library software (Koha) in the new building they have just shifted to.

The new building will have multiple uses. It will have place to expand with the times and also provide facilities to members like internet connectivity, spaces for holding seminars and exhibitions, and various galleries. The market, Joshi feels, may have no use for libraries today. Nor can a library experience be created online. But citizens’ cooperation and a charming benign state's help, rare though it is, can bring about miracles in the quality of public life. Libraries like the Doon Library are today filled with members and regulars because as the students told the staff, what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay and soak in the good air.

There is a hierarchy of needs in a small young hill state like Uttarakhand, that are struggling to come up for air. Libraries may not figure in most priority lists like a big hospital or school classrooms do, but a public library will remain a significant part of the social reality of the state. It is the only place, Joshi says with a twinkle, that does not claim your vital data or your wallet. After the inauguration of the new building where a wheelchair-using Joshi received a standing ovation from the public, even my sister was moved. She knew he had been right of course, and we must all promote public libraries.

"But I must also defend my old man and guard his health like a dragon even if he will not! Call me a shrew if you will," she said to us, "but you must agree I am a good guard for those who guard public spaces!"

Who is one to disagree?

Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.

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