Rachna Books: Curation, Community, and Culture

An Integral Part of the City’s Culture

Curation is the most important. In times when books are being churned out thoughtlessly by the book industry like machine guns spitting out bullets, selection of books become important. How a bookshop is curated, which book stands next to which reflects the worldview and the politics of the bookseller.

While, community is one intangible element that builds over the years. We have been lucky to have a very strong community built around the bookshop over the years. By working as a caretaker of the place, opening the doors every morning, we have become that space, which our regulars have owned up as theirs.

As a bookshop, we have become an integral part of the city’s contemporary culture and an important cultural landmark in the mountains. Events helped build that for sure, but what people sense is the philosophy that the bookshop runs on, the causes it supports and stands for.

Engaged Community

A bookshop is only as good as the engaged community it attracts. The regulars then convinced me to open what would become Café Fiction. Then, travellers started to hear about our bookshop, hung out among books for hours and would tell us that it was a place they could live in forever. That’s when I decided to start the Bookman’s Bed and Breakfast. Besides hosting discerning travellers, writers, musicians and artists, we now also run a writer’s residency.

Events at the bookshop have been another way to engage the community. When I restarted the bookshop in 2001, I saw scope in trying new things to offer youngsters. One small event led to another and our community grew. Regulars became volunteers, supporters and torchbearers. Over the last two decades, we have curated music, art, theatre and shadow puppet shows, conversations and workshops, performances, exhibitions, screenings and our own film festival besides the obvious books-launches and readings. Our open mics have been a launchpad for many new writers from the region. which led to the most natural evolution– publishing. This is how we started Rachna Books and Publications in 2019.

Bookshop and Technology

As a bookshop, the use of technology is important for operations, discovery and outreach. Social media is a crucial platform for promoting writers, events, and books. Yet, an engaged bookseller’s biggest tool is the algorithms of the head, ears and heart. One must engage with the readers and patrons. One must keep one’s ears open to what the customers are looking for. And one must respect the new readers’ choices, and help them find the right book. My bookshop has become a place that youngsters visit to pose with books for their social media. The challenge lies in converting them to readers! I would say bookshops are important to social media, as much as the other way around.

Booksellers are Eternal Optimists

Everything seems to be geared towards making the running of a bookshop a defeated task. But booksellers are eternal optimists. From unethical practices, deep discounting to broken distribution infrastructure, we face them all. But our biggest fight is not about dwindling customers or losing readers to other technological distractions. Our biggest fight is against the publishing industry itself. Against its apathetic attitude to address issues, its lazy approach to selling books just over online portals and bookshops within arm’s reach from their office chairs. The day the industry sincerely admits that the system is broken will be the day we will start believing that a solution can be found.

Raman Shresta is a bookseller, publisher, inn-keeper and events curator at Rachna Books, Gangtok. Started by his family in 1979, he grew Rachna Books into a space for creativity and literary culture that has been an integral part of modern Sikkim’s cultural identity particularly for the youth. In addition to the Rachna bookstore, Raman runs the Café Fiction and the Bookman’s Bed and Breakfast in the same building. In 2019, he started Rachna Books and Publications. In 2023, he started a writer’s residency whose
first resident was French graphic novelist Simon Lamouret.