Invisible Shankar

Book stores, both brick & mortar and online, clearly don’t want to get drawn into the latest cartoon controversy. The response from some of the leading chains, on whether the sale of Shankar’s books had been affected by the recent furore over his Nehru and Ambedkar cartoons drawn in 1949, was a combination of “no comment”, “no enquiry” and “no stock”. The usually co-operative online book retailer, Flipkart, refused to share any data or even indicative information on the matter. Another leading nationwide book chain, Landmark, which operates both online and offline stores, said it had not noticed any surge in demand or enquiry for Shankar’s books after the recent controversy. A salesperson at Children’s Book Trust, in the same building that houses Shankar’s International Dolls Museum and Shankar’s Academy of Art, claimed that it had not stocked Shankar’s books for quite some time!