Pride and Reclamation: Why Punjabi-Language Preservation Matters

When I stepped into India Bookworld in Surrey on a warm spring afternoon, co-owners and husband-and-wife duo Rajwant Singh Chilana and Amrit Kaur Chilana were chatting with a longtime customer.

“She’s been shopping with us for 20 years now,” Kaur Chilana told me before leaning forward with a smile. “And she’s only ever wanted to read love stories.”

For the last three decades, the couple has learned the interests of countless readers, taking on the tedious but satisfying task of tracking hard-to-find yet beloved books in Punjabi, Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Bengali and more, for customers and local institutions like libraries, schools and prisons.

They’ve operated in their current storefront since 2014. The shop is in the York Business Centre, a central hub for the working-class South Asian community in Newton, the heart of Surrey. York Business Centre is a sort of sibling hub to the neighbouring Payal Business Centre, a major retail mall boasting 57 shops for the South Asian community and beyond.

There’s comfort in hubs like York and Payal Business Centre, not only because of local access to culturally specific clothing, food, jewelry and more, but also because many have experienced major life milestones there. It might be the place where your close family member got married or where you shared a warm meal with an old friend. Within a one-kilometre radius of India Bookworld, you’ll find restaurants, Indian clothing stores, notaries, law firms, a gurdwara and everything in between.

India Bookworld’s sign is mounted above an unassuming doorway between a banquet hall and a phone repair store. Inside is a sea of densely packed, rigorously organized shelves boasting bestsellers; books on astrology, cooking and Punjabi history; and translated novels and children’s books.

The couple owns one of over 150 independent bookstores across the country, filling a gap in access for people who have struggled to find books that are representative of their unique cultural histories and mother tongues.

Informed by their combined experience in libraries and education, Singh Chilana and Kaur Chilana have devoted their lives to supporting local writers, providing resources for Punjabi-language preservation and, most importantly, helping people feel seen through the books they source from across the South Asian subcontinent.

According to Statistics Canada data from 2021, 128,000 people in Surrey speak one of several Indo-Aryan languages, including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri and more, as their mother tongue. About 83 per cent of them are Punjabi speakers.

Research has shown that mother-tongue language fluency tends to decrease dramatically with each passing generation after immigration. Noticing this trend within Punjabi-speaking communities, local scholars and advocates began pushing for more educational resources to support young immigrants. They wanted to provide pathways for future generations to retain a connection with and a working knowledge of their ancestral language.

This work is especially important for newly landed immigrants as they adjust to life in Canada, and seek comfort and connectivity in works by authors who speak and write in their mother tongue.

Lack of access

When Singh Chilana and Kaur Chilana arrived in Surrey in 1991, they noticed it was difficult to access South Asian books, particularly Punjabi-language ones.

Singh Chilana holds a master’s degree and a PhD in library sciences. Before coming to Canada, he spent 16 years as a lecturer, assistant professor and librarian at the University of Delhi. He is the author of 10 books, many of which aim to centralize access to cultural knowledge. When he arrived in Surrey, he started working at public libraries across the Fraser Valley. Meanwhile, Kaur Chilana’s language skills and experience in education landed her a job as a multicultural worker with the Surrey school district.

“At that time, we didn’t have many Punjabi- or Hindi-speaking librarians in public libraries. So I used to help them in developing a good collection for fiction and non-fiction,” Singh Chilana said.

With more and more Punjabi-speaking immigrants settling in Surrey, Kaur Chilana was told that children were struggling in school without Punjabi resources. From there, she and her colleagues began campaigning for the Ministry of Education to build out Punjabi-language programming in public schools.

“When I worked as a teacher’s assistant, they asked me to translate something into Punjabi for their Punjabi-speaking students,” she explained. “But there was no Punjabi-English dictionary here, in all of Surrey.”

Noticing this lack of access to culturally relevant books, Kaur Chilana brought up the idea of opening a small, independent bookstore to her husband.

“I said, ‘You have so much experience as a librarian, why don’t you start a business here?’ So he went back to India and brought one suitcase of books, and that’s how we started,” Kaur Chilana said.

By 1993, just two years after moving to Canada, Singh Chilana and Kaur Chilana were receiving orders from schools and libraries across the Lower Mainland for books in various South Asian languages, including Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu and more. At the time, they were running the bookstore, then called Asian Publications, out of their home. With the help of launching a website and local ads in the newspapers, their customer base grew.

In 2014, the couple retired early and opened the India Bookworld storefront as it stands today. Over the years, they’ve helped people from all ages and walks of life find the books they need.

Tracking down hard-to-find books for customers is their favourite part of the job. “It puts a lot of pressure on our brains. Sometimes books are out of print, you cannot order from India because it’s not available. But still we try,” Singh Chilana said.

However, it’s difficult for an independent bookstore to sustain operations in this landscape. Shipping costs have increased and the couple is currently facing a rent increase that will soon force them out of the space they have been operating in for the last decade.

“Customers don’t understand how much effort we are paying and how much money we need. We are spending all of our pension on the business. It’s not like a kapda [clothing] business or other businesses; we don’t make any money.” Kaur Chilana said.

Preserving culture, building community

Through their work, the couple has seen readers through hardships and significant life changes, and fed local curiosities with books that can be difficult to find elsewhere. The moment of joy and relief customers express when they receive the exact book they’ve been searching rigorously for is a part of why they keep doing the work.

Together, they proudly recounted stories of helping young folks whose grandparents want to learn enough English to make their day-to-day lives easier, international students indulging in Punjabi poetry, chefs wanting to discover new recipes, and researchers interested in exploring ethnoreligious histories from across the subcontinent.

In this way, India Bookworld acts as a site of cultural preservation and community building, supporting folks in different seasons of life while helping them to access the information they seek, in their desired language.

Shopping independently and requesting that local libraries stock books in South Asian languages, they say, is a way to support their efforts. Despite the challenges, Singh Chilana and Kaur Chilana are passionate about continuing to curate a collection of books that supports the needs of the community and is reflective of their diverse cultural backgrounds.

Lately, topics like Sikh history, Punjabi poetry and language books for children are especially popular. More than anything, they are keen on continuing to help people and preserve Punjabi language and culture through books.

“It’s the service aspect that we love, and providing knowledge. It’s not about the money for us,” Kaur Chilana said.

Next to her, Singh Chilana nodded his head in agreement. “We are helping our community, particularly the Punjabi community, [and understanding] what they want to read, what they don’t want to read,” he said.

“That makes us happy.”