House of poet Sankha Ghosh, who once rented a flat for his book collection, now a library

Explore the preserved home of Bengali literary giant Shankha Ghosh, now a museum housing his vast book collection.

The flat of Shankha Ghosh, one of Bengal’s tallest literary figures, gives a look as if he’s gone out for his evening walk and will be back any moment and maybe ask for a glass of water or a cup of tea.

The house, on the fringes of Salt Lake City, is preserved exactly the way its occupants — Sankha Ghosh and his wife Pratima — left it behind when they passed away, almost at the same time, in 2021; only that it contains more books now. By the time he was in the autumn of his life, he had gathered so many books that the house could hold no more and he had to rent a flat (first in Rajarhat and then in New Town) just to store the excess.

Today the books are back in his house — lifetime’s collection under one roof — with the house now becoming a museum, allowing fans and researchers to step in every Tuesday and Thursday evening to spend time with the nearly 20,000 books that the late poet either bought or was given.

“Not one book that came home was ever discarded or given away. Even when aspiring writers gifted him copies of their books, he made it a point to preserve them. He used to say, ‘It is not easy for a struggling writer to publish a book’,” the writer’s daughter Sravanti Bhowmik told The Hindu.

In terms of volume, Mr. Ghosh’s prose far outnumbers his poetry, and yet he was better known as a poet because his poems were immensely powerful, fighting inequality and creating social awareness. Born in 1932 in present-day Bangladesh, he restarted life in Kolkata as a victim of Partition — and poverty — in 1947, but prestige eventually came his way as his writing touched public consciousness: Sahitya Akademi award, Padma Bhushan, Jnanpith, to name a few.

He specialised in the subject of Partition and also on Tagore — now-rare editions of books by and on Rabindranath being quite visible in the library. There is also a glass case containing Mr. Ghosh’s handwritten poems, spectacles and small items of daily use; and another case displaying the prestigious awards.

“I never saw him sitting down to write at a fixed time or a fixed place. He wrote immediately when a thought came to him; sometimes on a torn piece of paper, sometime amidst a room full of people. When lines would be building up in his mind but not materialise the way he would like them to, he would go on long walks. He liked to walk, he walked a lot,” said Ms. Bhowmik, who taught at the Surendranath College for Women. She and her sister, Semanti Ghosh, are the only children of Sankha Ghosh.