Book Review
By Manoj Pande
Inked in India –
Fountain Pens and A Story of Make and Unmake
By Bibek Debroy with Sovan Roy
It might have lost its importance to the present generation, but the pen (and more specifically the fountain pen) was an essential part of our lives – as students and as grown-ups at work.
In an age when communication was through letters and notes, handwriting was a quality to be worked upon, and the nib of the fountain pen played an important part in shaping it. Calligraphy was (and is) an art form, so much so that the original version of the Constitution of India was handwritten by a calligrapher Prem Behari Narain Raizada who is said to have used 432 nibs in the process.
Commonplace once, many terms have lost their usage and slipped into oblivion. ‘Pen Friends’ have disappeared in the maze of WhatsApp and its ilk. ‘Penmanship’ is passe, ‘pen drive’ is in. Though I wonder how it got its name.
Nobody ‘writes’ letters anymore. Sentences are ‘keyed-in’ on the PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smart Phone. Font has replaced handwriting, endangering jobs of handwriting experts. E-Mojis have truncated word usage and AI looms ominously in the wings. Yet, many still love to sign off with a flourish – the most visible being Donald J Trump signing executive orders as President of the United States of America and showing them off to the assembled media.
Bibek Debroy, who passed away on 3 November 2024, had authored ‘Inked in India’ with Sovan Roy as the co-author, a fascinating history of the fountain pen manufacture in India. An accomplished economist, who headed the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister at the time of his untimely demise, he has very nicely interspersed the economic policies of those times in the book as it moves on from one pen maker to another spanning different parts of the country.
In the Introduction to the book we learn that, both, he and Sovan Roy were fascinated with and were collectors of fountain pens, exchanging their surplus pens with each other. In fact, Sovan Roy had earlier written a book, titled “Radhika Nath Saha: Unsung hero of the Indian Fountain Pen”.
The first chapter covers a wide spectrum of history of writing instruments and inks. We learn that the Magna Carta was written in 1215 with a quill pen made from the feather of a large bird, probably a goose. So, also, for the Dead Sea Scrolls written much earlier with a quill. The chapter ends with an anecdote from Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography about how he got a thrashing from his father for taking away his fountain pen.
The fountain pen, with its capacity to store some amount of ink was an improvement upon the conventional dip pens. Though inks had existed since long, a fountain pen required ink that would not clog and ensure smooth flow. The first Indian producers of fountain pen ink were PM Bagchi and Company of Calcutta. Dr Radhika Nath Saha, a medical doctor invented a tubular feed fountain pen and set up the Luxmy Stylo Pen Works in Benares. He obtained 14 patents on fountain pens. The book mentions that Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Rajendra Prasad and Maulana Azad possessed Luxmy pens.
In 1933, there were 12 nib manufacturers in undivided India spread from Calcutta, Bombay, Lucknow, Agra and Gwalior to Comilla (now in Bangladesh), Sialkot, Lahore and Gujrat in the Punjab province (now in Pakistan). Many traders were importing fountain pens and selling them since the demand for fountain pens had increased after universities had been set up in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras and later in Benares (BHU) and Hyderabad (Osmania).
Many dealers later on became manufacturers. A big list of the different pen manufacturers in the first half of the twentieth century, (when we were still under British rule) makes for a fascinating read, especially the anecdotes on how such enterprises came into being. Sadly, most of these companies no longer exist.
Dr BR Ambedkar was fond of fountain pens and apart from books had a collection of many high- quality fountain pens. The book mentions that he used a Wilson pen to write the draft of the constitution, before it was handed over to Raizada.
Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, preferred the dip-pen instead of the fountain pen though he was not against the use of steel nib. But he did possess at least one fountain pen made by Ratnam Fountain Pen Works, Rajahmundry (in present day Andhra Pradesh).
I learnt this when I was posted in South Central Railway, Secunderabad. I now possess one such pen with a unique feature – my name is inscribed on the nib. This prompted me to get one made for my dear friend Anil Mangla, with his name on the nib. Though not as slick as the gift of a Senator President that he had given me years back, it was still a return gift of sorts in the same coin!
The Swadeshi movement influenced ink manufacture too. Some brands like Chelpark and Camlin do exist today, but there was a multiplicity of brands then – Minister, Krishna, Koel, Key, Sailor …. The ‘Horse’ brand produced by Dandekar and Company of Bombay was later branded as ‘Camel’ and became Camlin in 1946. And in 1953 the Chellaram family collaborated with Parker to form Chelpark. Interesting, isn’t it? Especially for a pen aficionado.
In these times when Tariffs and Trade Agreements occupy the minds of many, it may be useful to read Chapter 5 – “The Autarky Fetter: the 1950s and 1960s”. In hindsight, a trade agreement with China in October 1954, when both nations were beginning to industrialise, dealt the death knell for the fountain pen industry in India. It permitted the import of Chinese pens into India and not vice versa, even though the Indian pen industry was of an earlier vintage. Surprisingly, at the same time there were severe restrictions on the import of fountain pens from the rest of the world. Though this chapter is basically about fountain pens and inks, it also a critique on the economic policies and attitudes of the then policy makers. It does get boring at times, considering the abundance of names, but the chapter is nonetheless educative.
Arrival of the ballpoint pen almost killed the demand for the fountain pen industry, struggling already from various controls and restrictions. Easy to use, economical and less cumbersome, the ballpoint became the preferred writing instrument pushing the fountain pen to the margins. Obviously, many manufacturers closed down. Even today, it is top end models like Mont Blanc and its ilk which fetch buyers, the populace having shifted to the ball pen and (now) the gel pen.
For its small size (169 pages) with 3 Appendices, the book packs in a lot of information. It takes up a subject very few think about. Part nostalgia, part historical and even a part critique of the economic policies of those times, it makes for interesting reading, especially for those who have and still use a fountain pen, albeit less frequently.
The book carries photographs of different brands of fountain pens, which would gladden the heart of anyone who loves writing with a fountain pen, as I do. And for the record, the draft of this piece was also written with a fountain pen before keying it in on my laptop.
(A former Member of the Railway Board, Manoj Pande now lives in Dehradun.)
