Bengaluru boasts of a thriving literary scene, producing a lot of the country’s best fiction with a network of bookstores and reading culture that enables this. While many of the city’s biggest bookstores are decades old, a small store has quietly made its way into the conversations of the city’s ever-bustling readership: Champaca Bookstore. As the city becomes familiar with the recently-opened Indiranagar branch, owner Radhika Timbadia reveals that the idea of another Bengaluru outlet was two years in the making.
Over the last six years, the cul-de-sac nook in Vasanth Nagar has become a quintessential part of the store’s appeal. As Timbadia explains, the decision to expand was born from logistical drawbacks. “We’ve had people struggle to come to our store and find parking. Being well-connected and close to a metro station, Indiranagar was a good option. We also wanted a slightly bigger space than our current 900 sqft one where we could display all our books,” she notes.
In contrast to more established bookstores where the availability of everything and anything is almost promised, Champaca has tried to prioritise quality over quantity. “We would like people to discover diverse authors, from different places, of different genders and having different stories. But along with diversity comes a strong idea of books that are also well-written,” explains Timbadia, adding, “We’re quite excited to make our history section more interesting. We have a special micro-history section, and will have changing displays for different topics as we go ahead.”
Not all of the journey has been sweet, with the Goa store, which opened just months ago, currently on a temporary hiatus, being located in Asagao and dependent on the tourist population. However, the greatest threat was at the very inception of the first store. “Our biggest period of adversity was early on. We had just been open for about 10 months and the pandemic hit. There were just three of us running the store for two years. We didn’t know if we’d survive it,” she confesses.
Timbadia, hopeful of the community that has organically grown around Champaca, refrains from complacency, fully aware of the challenges of running an independent operation. “We are still quite a small independent bookstore. Our new space is shared with three other brands, because as a bookstore, we still cannot afford steep rent. So I don’t know if we have made it,” she admits. Still, the team is committed to upholding an equitable reading culture. “It’s not enough to have a diverse curation, we also need to talk about it. So we constantly organise free conversations. We have always encouraged people to read,” Timbadia asserts.