User:Veinas/Book Wallah

A Book Wallah (पुस्तक वाला) is the Marathi language Word for a person who exercised a form of Book trading during the rule of the East India Company and the British India.

'Who are you?' 'Book-wallah, sahib.' The book-wallah was an itinerant pedlar of books who wandered from station to station throughout Upper Burma. His system of exchange was that for any book in his bundle you gave him four annas, and any other book. Not quite any book, however, for the book-wallah, though analphabetic, had learned to recognise and refuse a Bible.

The morning round of charwallah (tea vendor), shoeshine-wallah, fruit-wallah, raw-egg-and-vinegar mann-was over, and the evening round (most of these again, as well as the dhobi and the book-wallah( was not yet due. They all had their origins in far-off compounds and bazaars, and all came on bicycles, even the book-wallah, more sophisticated than the others, wearing a mauve herringbone tweed jacket, under which the tails of his white shirt hung down over his saddle. The astonishing case of books he brought on the bicycle offered a strange and exotic litery feast, mostly of an inflammatory character. The minor works of several major authors (if the titles seemed sufficiently promising) rubbed shoulders with lesser erotica in anonymous brown leather covers, in which the frank language of the barrack-rooms was consitently used, thruhg more acurrately applied, and as the stories ran their fanatic cours, with incredible frequency. As if Lawrence. Boccaccio and the anonymous works needed the balance of a scientific background, support was lent bay number of technical treatisses: Introduction to Sex, The Technique of Loe, Friendship and Marriage a casebook selections from Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Completing with these were political works by Indian authors: I Accuse England, An Indian Speak, Verdict on Beverley Nichols by K.N. Jog, and Why are You Here, Tommy? All these the book-Wallah would take back within a month. A five-rupee book could be returned, if unmarked, for three rupees, eight Indian annas.