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archive: Fishing among books

Fishing among books

Hiren K. Bose
The Sunday Times of India
May 16, 1999


    Title: Fishing among books
    Author: Hiren K. Bose
    Publication: The Sunday Times of India
    Date: May 16, 1999
    
    Sita, a Katkari Adivasi, a maidservant in one of the housing colonies
    in Naigaon, makes it a point to send her two school-going daughters to
    the neighbourhood library every day.  "I don't have a TV and the kids
    en-joy dabbling with the books," she replies simply.  Shashikala Kale,
    a former sarpanch, visits the library in the afternoons to look
    through the newspapers and to meet up with friends.  Reading is
    certainly not a dying habit here at the 40-year-old Dariyawarti
    Vachnalay of the Naigaon koliwada in Vasai taluka.  It is probably the
    only library in the country that is run by fisher-folk.  And that,
    too, with close to 12,000 books, mostly in Marathi.
    
    The library is revered as a temple of learning and visitors leave
    their footwear at the door before entering the premises.
    
    Three-km from Naigaon Station on the Western Railway corridor, this
    koliwada is home to Mahadeo Kolis, Sone Kolis and a handful of Koli
    Catholics.  "We started adding Hindi books, papers and periodicals
    only after the new residential complexes started mushrooming here
    bringing in people of different backgrounds," explained the
    54-year-old Vishnu Sakharam Satrange, one of the founder members of
    this library and till recently its secretary.  It was on August 15,
    1956 that a group of young fisher-folk, who read books while waiting
    for fish to get entangled in their nets, decided to pool their
    re-sources and start a library.
    
    Today, they have a membership of nearly 200 and the library
    sub-scribes to eight dailies and 20 periodicals.  As a result, the
    3,000-strong koliwada has TV sets, videos, cars and other luxury
    items, but nobody subscribes to a newspaper.  A B-Grade library,
    Dariyawarti gets an annual grant of Rs 30,000 from the state
    government.
    
    It also periodically gets books from the Raja Ram Mohan Roy
    Foundation.  In 1986, the members managed to build the present
    structure with Rs 1,00,000 they had managed to raise along with a
    grant of Rs 48,000.
    
    One is as surprised to see the translated works of Sarat Chandra,
    Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Shivram Karanth being devoured with
    relish along with Vijay Tendulkar, Pula Deshpande and Baba Kadam by
    the kolis attired in their angular-shaped dhotis and shirts.
    
    The library management seems to be happy with the response.  In recent
    years, non-Kolis too have come and settled in the koliwada as new
    high-rise buildings have come up nearby.
    
    "Our membership figures have increased due to outsiders taking up
    residence here," says Satrange, as he sits in his study clad in a
    kolidhoti.  A crossword addict, he is surrounded by the encyclopaedias
    Brittanica, Frank and Wagner, Academic American.  Yes, Satrange is
    certainly the kind of person to have around in a library.
    



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