One of many fondest memories of my childhood is when I got an opportunity to visit the state library of my home-town as part of a school trip. It was a jaw-dropping experience for a ten-year-old me. I vividly remember pacing through columns of bookshelves, mesmerized that a place can hold so many books.
Thirty years forward, I wanted to revive the childhood memories and decided to visit the same library with a friend. As soon as I walked into the reception area, my expectations came down crashing. The place looked like a creaky government building from the 80s, lacking modern renovation and any potential to inspire. I wondered what might have befallen this library.
That brings me to the central idea behind this post. If you have ever visited a library anywhere in Europe or the Western world, you’d agree with what I am going to say.
We have no beautiful libraries.
It’s a sad tragedy that seems to have gone under the radar of every successive government. Don’t get me wrong. Yes, we have large libraries, busy ones, even a few “modern” ones with glass facades and air-conditioned reading rooms. But that mixture of breathtaking aesthetics and sublime architecture, has not found a home here.
Walk into most Indian libraries and you’ll be greeted by the sheer state of neglect. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, paint peels from the walls and rows of grimy steel cupboards masquerade as bookshelves. The librarians look tired. There is zero vibe. I might sound harsh but most of our libraries feel more like storage units than the places to stimulate your thinking.
Libraries in Europe, on the other hand, remind the world of what reverence for knowledge looks like. Take the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague – an 18th century Baroque masterpiece. It’s impossible to not be absorbed by the beauty of this library.
Another example is the Vorarlberg State Library in Austria – a gothic-style castle with the elegance of a monastery.
Now before you say, “Amitesh, aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?”, hear my argument. Europe, thanks to the monastic traditions going back to the 7th century, built monasteries that doubled up as libraries. And, since a large part of the modern Europe was never colonized, specifically Western Europe, its resources remained available for good use.
India took a long time to stand back up after 200 years of nonstop plunder by the British. But now we are the fourth largest economy and sooner than later, will climb to the third position. But we still lack the aesthetic infra that marks countries like China, Singapore, South Korea, etc.
We are building glass and concrete blocks for corporate offices, towering statues for politicians that nobody likes and gaudy stadiums for cricket. But when it comes to libraries, there is no real initiative. All we have is mediocrity. In fact, our priorities are as clear as our skylines are hazy.
In my view, this lack of beauty is not just an architectural failure, it is a political and a philosophical failure.
Why should a library be beautiful?
I don’t think it needs any corroboration that a conducive environment is central to stimulation of mind. A beautiful library, in that sense, can shorten the transition from a confused state of mind to an engrossed, rapt state. When you step into a place like Trinity College Library in Dublin, your mind instinctively falls silent. In India, however, we still got librarians shouting “Silence!”
What makes this tragedy deeper is our intellectual heritage. India is the land that produced Nalanda and Takshashila, where monks taught astronomy before Europe had emerged from tribal chaos. Our ancestors built learning centres that attracted scholars from China, Persia and Greece. What we have now are municipal libraries with broken fans and guards who treat you like an intruder.
Even our modern “flagship” libraries such as the National Library in Kolkata, the Delhi Public Library or Anna Centenary Library in Chennai, for all their size and scale, are largely utilitarian in spirit.
I was in Kozhikode recently and visited the Kozhikode Library. From the outside, the place looks beautiful, but the moment you step in, the spell breaks. I mean these libraries smell of files, not of books. That’s the deeper problem. It seems our policymakers and municipal bodies confuse modernity with mere functionality and the idea of the library as a cultural destination continues to fly under their radar.
Why does this matter?
Because architecture shapes thought. A civilization that surrounds its readers with ugliness (sorry to say) will only produce functional readers, not reflective ones.
If a library feels like a ration office, reading will be a chore. The Europeans, whatever their other sins, understood this. They built libraries not to impress donors but to express belief that human mind, like a cathedral, deserves a sacred space.
In India, meanwhile, libraries are the places meant to “help students study for exams.” There is no vision of the library as a public space of beauty and shared heritage.
For our bureaucrats, libraries are pieces of infrastructure that they feel no pressure to beautify. Given that, it’s no surprise that our libraries have the aesthetic charm of an income-tax office.
We can learn something from Europeans
Yes, we must learn a few lessons from the Europeans.
First, we need to imbibe the same passion with which they preserve their historic libraries. It’s nothing short of missionary devotion and not some bureaucratic exercise. The Clementinum (est. 1772), The Joanina (est. 1717), and Melk Abbey Library (est. 1089) continue to stand to this day because of a pervasive cultural consensus that knowledge is sacred.
Second, Indian civic bodies must integrate art and architecture with intellectual purpose. In Europe, every fresco, column or sculpture has a story to tell about the human pursuit of knowledge. At this point, you might be wondering why I am only yapping about the historic European libraries. Well, let me clarify – even the modern European libraries such as the Oodi Central Library in Helsinki and the Black Diamond extension of the Royal Danish Library underline the same marriage of style and scale.
Third, just as our politicians always evoke patriotism and national pride, they should also champion libraries as sources of civic pride and visible symbols of a city’s soul.
Political and Civic Will
A lot can change in out country if our government shelves its next vote-bank-fueled vanity project and invests in building a couple of exquisite libraries. If our politicians spent less on self-aggrandizement and more on at least one public space in every metro, let’s say, the tourism scene – where we struggle – would get a shot in the arm.
Imagine tourists coming to India not only for temples, forts and beaches, but also for libraries. We have the financial wherewithal to do it, but what we sorely lack is both political and civic intent.
Some may argue that we are not the West and that all we need are functional reading rooms, not frescoes on the ceilings. In my view, such misplaced reasoning keeps us from getting out of the utilitarian block.
The library is a temple for reflection. And temples are not built for efficiency. They are built to remind us of what we worship.
When we abandon beauty, we abandon aspiration. We teach our young that reading is utilitarian and that learning is a means to an end. But the truth is that true reading is sensual, contemplative and slow. Alberto Manguel, Zena Hitz and Alan Jacobs underline this idea in their respective books.
The saddest irony is that the only beautiful libraries left in India are private: inside eminent universities, convents or the houses of a few rich, obsessive bibliophiles. Public beauty, it seems, is no longer our concern.
We must reject the notion that treats reading as preparation for an exam or only as a bridge to a better job. To reclaim our intellectual prowess, we must begin by building these temples of solitude.
Until then, our libraries will remain what they are – long-ignored relics of a once enlightened past. And the tragedy will not be that India lacks beautiful libraries. It will be that India, the cradle of learning, has forgotten why beauty belongs to knowledge in the first place.
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