There was a time when going to Sector 17 meant dressing up a little. Before the malls, before the multiplexes, before smartphones became the place where we carried our newspapers, books, photographs and conversations, Sector 17 was Chandigarh’s great meeting place. Families came here on Sundays, students wandered about after college, government employees stopped for a cup of tea and, somewhere amid all that movement, stood a quieter institution — the TS Central State Library.
Established in 1955, when Chandigarh itself was still finding its feet, the library grew alongside the young city. Those who knew Sector 17 in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s will remember a very different pace of life. He later served as Jawaharlal Nehru’s first private secretary and spent 17 years in the Planning Commission, contributing to the making of India’s early Five-Year Plans. Sector 17 has changed its rhythms.
Because the silence was comforting, others came looking for a particular reference book and stayed. For many old Chandigarh residents, the four-storey library is not just a building. It is a memory. There was time to browse a newspaper, time to search a shelf, time to sit through an afternoon with a book. The library offered plenty of all three. Students came carrying notebooks, fountain pens and the particular nervousness of examination season. Some occupied the reading room for hours, surrounded by books and the occasional whisper. For generations preparing for school and university examinations, competitive tests or simply trying to cultivate the habit of reading, the TS Library became part of their routine. And then there were the librarians. In the pre-Google age, the librarian was the search engine. The quiet authority of the librarian was part of the library experience: a reminder that books had their own order and that finding something worthwhile sometimes required patience. But the two letters in its name — TS — carry a story much larger than the building. The library was named after Tarlok Singh, one of the most remarkable civil servants and economists of early post-independence India. His life was closely linked with the enormous task of rebuilding a country shaken by Partition. As Director-General of Rehabilitation, he helped oversee the resettlement of around half a million displaced families. He was also the only civil servant to receive all three Padma Awards. It seems fitting, then, that a public library in Chandigarh should bear his initials. Tarlok Singh belonged to the generation that believed in building institutions for a new India. Chandigarh itself was born from a similar optimism — a city conceived after Partition as a new beginning, planned with wide roads, open spaces and public institutions meant to serve its citizens. The TS Library became part of that story. Ask an older Chandigarh resident about it and the memories are rarely about architecture. They are about people. A father bringing his children to introduce them to books. A college student discovering a favourite author. A government employee reading the morning paper. A teenager sitting in the reading room long after the original reason for coming had been forgotten. The familiar faces at the circulation desk. The hush that descended when someone accidentally spoke a little too loudly. Outside, Chandigarh kept changing. Inside, the essential rhythm remained the same: find a book, find a chair, turn a page. But perhaps that is precisely why it matters. It reminds us of a Chandigarh when knowledge was something you went looking for — physically, patiently and sometimes serendipitously. The city has grown older. Its children have grown up, moved away and returned with children of their own. Yet the TS Library remains, holding within its walls something that cannot be digitised so easily: the memory of Chandigarh learning, one reader at a time. And somewhere in that silence, if you listen carefully, you can almost hear the turning of pages from another Chandigarh. [email protected] (The writer is a freelance contributor)
You could walk in with a vague question — “Do you have something on this subject?” — and there would often be someone who knew which shelf, which catalogue, or which reference section might hold the answer. Today, when an entire library can fit inside a phone and information arrives with a tap, the old TS Central State Library can seem almost from another era.
