Readers who frequent The Bookshop Inc. will tell you it’s a sanctuary. The bookstore in Delhi is known for its curation—a refreshing break from the humdrum of bestseller lists that thrives on spotlighting the lesser-known gems of world literature like translations and small-press titles often pushed to the sidelines. Tucked between an upbeat Japanese restaurant and a carpet showroom in Lodi Colony Market, The Bookshop Inc.’s crimson door is an invitation into the city’s intellectual life.
The location itself is relatively new in the long history of the bookstore, a reincarnation of the beloved bookshop started in 1971 by K. D. Singh in Jor Bagh, which shut its doors in October 2023, owned and curated by one of its former partners, Sonal Narain. The mirrors mounted on the ceiling—remnants of the old store—scale up the dark wood shelves that cover the walls from floor to ceiling. Cane stools planted in quiet corners wait, ready to oblige. It takes very little to lose track of time browsing here on a weekday afternoon.
On other days, crowds flock to The Bookshop Inc. for their evening programming of readings and talks, which has hosted an exuberant roster of authors, scholars and literary commentators. Among them are the who’s who of the country’s cultural life, including the likes of Ramchandra Guha, Ravish Kumar, William Dalrymple, Joe Sacco, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitava Kumar and Chiki Sarkar. Between the occasional recital, lecture and screening, they also run a pop-up sale of second-hand books, endearingly called ‘After-School Patri.’
Mahika Chaturvedi, the other half of The Bookshop Inc. and the mind behind its social media, believes that our banal day-to-day crushes our capacity for imagination. “This is a place people can come to when they need respite from the assaults of everyday life and to be reminded that they’re not just a cog in the wheel. That’s the end goal.”
The Bookshop Inc.’s newest enterprise builds on this promise of creating a space where chance encounters, not only with books but also with writers, bookmakers and readers become inevitable. “Over the years, so many readers have asked us if we have a book club and if not, could we start one?” says Chaturvedi. Taking heed, the independent bookstore launched three quarterly book clubs, one each for backlist titles (a publisher’s books that are still in print but have been on the market for at least a year), food writing and fiction in translation. “Each book club is a way for us to highlight books that may otherwise go unnoticed and let people discover something they wouldn’t normally pick up.”
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
The inaugural club gathered in the bookstore’s back garden one overcast Sunday afternoon this February. “We weren’t meeting as strangers,” Swati Daftuar, an editor and organiser of the Annual Book and Bake Sale, who moderates the book clubs, tells me. Members had spent the last month reading in companionable silence and following each other’s progress on a WhatsApp group. “The idea is to create an old-school book club where readers are the main stakeholders,” she explains. Daftuar’s own relationship with the bookstore is especially intimate—she would frequent the shop in Jor Bagh when she started working in publishing and it was here that her now-husband proposed to her one evening after hours.
Though reading is principally solitary, we rarely read by ourselves. Beyond the universe of Bookstagram, there are invisible networks of readers all around us, reading privately in their homes, on the train, in coffee shops, in public parks—“Secretly, they formed circles,” in Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s words. In recent years, book clubs, which gained new momentum during the pandemic, seemed to have grown in celebrity and number, drawing readers into communities of varied sizes. Chaturvedi notes reading together can be a great way to make a difficult book seem rewarding. The draw is simple, one member of the book club tells me: it is the pleasure of looking up from a particularly moving passage and finding someone to share it with. “It doubles the joy of reading alone.”
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
This month’s reading list, three novels from unique vantages of history, offers a delightful taste of The Bookshop Inc.’s aesthetic and geographic range—Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days, set during the seminal years of the Renaissance in Bengal; J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, set in a fictional town in colonial India; and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, where the narrator travels through Europe in search of his own past. Last summer, in collaboration with patrons and experts from the industry, The Bookshop Inc. took a swing at The New York Times’s sensational list of ‘100 Best Books of the 21st Century.’ Their version, published by Scroll under the cheeky headline ‘Not the NYT list: 100 fine books from around the world (and not just the USA) of the 21st century,” and available in the form of a pocket-size accordion at the bookstore, was on the ball: a savvy response to the myopia that rigs much of the Anglophone literary world.
March promises to be a busy month at The Bookshop Inc., with six events lined up in the next four weeks, including a talk by Pradip Krishen on Delhi’s wildflowers, a conversation with Ruchir Joshi on his new novel, Great Eastern Hotel, and of course, another book club, this one on food writing with a special focus on Japan. On the reading list for the month are Asako Yuzuki’s bestselling novel Butter and Michael Booth’s capacious The Meaning of Rice.
With a few part-time interns, the small team of two that runs this bookstore in Delhi has its hands full. Yet, their unstinting innovation in getting the right books to its readers—the way a good friend might slip you a copy over lunch—makes them much more than a store. A trip to The Bookshop Inc. is full of possibilities, with the opportunity to chat with the booksellers and authors and leave with an unexpected reading list or an unlikely companion.
Also read:
Banu Mushtaq wrote Heart Lamp for 33 years. Now, it’s nominated for the International Booker Prize
25 books to read in 2025—right at the start—to get over your reading slump
Indian books of 2025: 18 most anticipated titles you must read this year
