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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