Reviving the library period: a tradition worth reclaiming
For generations of students who walked through the corridors of Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School, the library period held a particular kind of magic. It was a weekly window away from chalk dust and arithmetic drills, when rows of dog-eared storybooks, borrowed encyclopaedias, and the hush of a shared reading hour shaped the way an entire cohort thought about the wider world. Many alumni look back on those forty-five minutes as the moment they first encountered Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, discovered a love of science fiction, or quietly finished homework they had been avoiding all week.
That quiet ritual has largely faded from classrooms across India, replaced by digital screens, smart-class modules, and packed academic schedules. Yet the case for bringing it back has never been stronger. Alumni scattered around the world, from Kolkata to Melbourne, often recall their school library as the place where reading became a personal pleasure rather than an enforced chore, and many wonder whether a new generation of students is missing something quietly irreplaceable.
What the library period actually looked like
In its classic form, the library period was a single slot in the weekly timetable, usually between forty and sixty minutes, when an entire class moved as a group to the school library. The teacher in charge often sat at a corner desk, occasionally taking attendance, but the real authority rested with the librarian. Students wandered between shelves, signed out a book against their names, and settled wherever they found space: on wooden benches, on the carpet, or perched on window ledges overlooking the playground.
There was an unspoken etiquette. Whispered exchanges were tolerated; full conversation was not. Returning a book late invited a gentle scolding from the librarian, who knew every regular by name and reading preference. The collection itself was rarely extensive, yet it felt boundless to a fourteen-year-old: a translated Tagore anthology beside an old edition of Treasure Island, a stack of General Knowledge digests, and at least one battered atlas whose pages always seemed to fall open at the map of Africa.
For shy students, the period offered something rare in Indian classroom life: permission to be alone without it being interpreted as misbehaviour. For the more outgoing, it became a social hour of borrowing, lending, and arguing over which Mulgutkar detective story was the best. The format was deceptively simple, but its effects on reading culture were profound.
Why it mattered for students
Reading for pleasure, without the pressure of an exam syllabus, builds a vocabulary, an attention span, and an imaginative flexibility that rarely develops through textbooks alone. Cognitive scientists in Melbourne and elsewhere have repeatedly shown that voluntary reading in adolescence is one of the strongest predictors of adult literacy, empathy, and even career mobility. The library period, by removing grades from the equation, let students form a private relationship with books that survived long after they left school.
The social dimension mattered just as much. Borrowing a book that a friend had recommended created a thread of conversation that could stretch across terms. Discussing a story during the lunch break gave quieter students a ready-made topic to bring to the playground, an underrated benefit in any school setting. Alumni who went on to careers in teaching, law, and medicine often trace their lifelong reading habits back to that one protected hour each week.
There was also an element of discovery that the modern curated internet rarely offers. A child who reaches for a book by accident, because it is the closest one on the shelf, may stumble on a genre or author that a search engine would never have suggested. The library period normalised serendipity in a way that algorithm-driven content cannot replicate.
How the tradition slowly disappeared
The decline did not arrive with a single decision. It crept in through timetable revisions that needed extra mathematics slots, through the introduction of computer periods that absorbed the same time slot, and through school inspections that rewarded visible academic outcomes more than quiet reading habits. By the late 1990s, many institutions across West Bengal had quietly shelved the dedicated library hour, leaving access to books as something students had to seek out on their own, usually outside school hours.
The COVID-19 years accelerated the shift. With libraries closed for long stretches and students glued to online classes, the very idea of a communal reading space lost some of its practical relevance. Even after schools reopened, many administrators treated library time as a casualty of the pandemic rather than a tradition worth restoring, prioritising remediation and catch-up learning instead.
The cost of this drift is now visible in surveys of adolescent reading in Australia and elsewhere, where screen time has overtaken book time for many teenagers. Alumni who remember the library period often speak of it with an edge of regret, not because the school years were hard, but because something genuinely valuable was allowed to slip away without much protest.
Australian reading culture and the local parallel
Australia offers a useful point of comparison. The State Library of Victoria in Melbourne runs sustained reading programmes for school groups that closely echo the spirit of the old library period: a protected hour, a curated collection, and a librarian who treats young readers as people rather than future exam scores. The national Australia Reads campaign and local initiatives such as the Indigenous literacy projects in regional New South Wales show that the country's public library network still believes deeply in the value of unstructured reading time.
Australian publishing has also leaned into the cultural moment. Author tours by writers like Tim Winton and Markus Zusak routinely fill school libraries in Perth, Hobart, and Brisbane, drawing crowds of teenagers who otherwise might not pick up a novel. Booksellers such as Dymocks and online platforms like Booktopia have built strong school-order businesses around the idea that reading for pleasure deserves its own infrastructure, exactly the philosophy that once underpinned the BRKM library period.
There is also a practical lesson in how Australian schools handle community-funded reading corners. Many independent and government schools now accept alumni donations to refresh library shelves, naming reading bays after graduating batches. The format mirrors what a revived BRKM library period could become: an alumni-supported reading hour where each new class inherits the curated generosity of those who came before.
How BRKM alumni could bring it back
Reviving the library period does not require a building programme or a new wing. It requires a timetable decision, a refreshed collection, and a committee willing to shepherd the initiative. The BRKM Reunion committee already coordinates educational support, study materials, and donations for current students, and a renewed library hour would slot naturally alongside these efforts.
A pilot programme could begin with a single section, perhaps the present Class VIII, holding one forty-five-minute slot every fortnight in the school library. Alumni could contribute by funding new titles, sponsoring a librarian's stipend, or simply volunteering to read with students during the period. The model could expand batch by batch, with annual reports tracking how many books were borrowed, how many students returned for a second visit, and how reading habits shifted across the year.
Crucially, the revival should be framed as cultural, not remedial. The point is not to improve exam scores, though that may follow. The point is to give today's students the same unhurried hour that alumni remember with such warmth, and that alumni considering attending a first reunion in decades often mention as one of the defining memories of their youth.
Building reading habits that last beyond school
Even the best library period will not produce lifelong readers on its own. It needs to be paired with home habits, parental modelling, and easy access to books outside school hours. Alumni living abroad, particularly in Australian cities such as Sydney and Adelaide, can support the cause by sending back boxes of lightly used novels, organising virtual read-aloud sessions, or sponsoring library cards for families in Baranagar who might not otherwise buy new books.
Local partnerships also help. Bookshop chains in Melbourne have run successful "buy one, donate one" schemes for overseas school libraries, and similar arrangements could be negotiated through Indian distributors. Alumni associations in suburbs with strong South Asian communities, including Parramatta and Clayton, often know exactly which publishers are willing to extend discounted rates to charitable causes.
The deeper goal is to seed a culture of reading that survives the school years. Alumni who grew up with the library period often became the adults who filled their own homes with books, who took their children to weekend libraries, and who quietly passed on the pleasure of a quiet afternoon with a novel. That kind of inheritance is what the tradition was really about, and what a revived library period could offer to a generation that has not yet discovered it.
Recommendations for bringing the library period back
- Pilot a single library period per fortnight in one class section, with a clear protocol for borrowing, returns, and librarian oversight.
- Curate a refreshed collection of around two hundred titles each year, blending Bengali classics, Indian English fiction, and recent award winners from around the world.
- Invite alumni to sponsor specific shelves, reading corners, or annual book budgets, mirroring the donor-naming model used by many Australian independent schools.
- Track engagement with simple metrics: number of books borrowed, repeat borrowers, voluntary book reviews, and student-led reading recommendations.
- Pair the in-school period with a take-home library bag system, so students can continue reading outside the dedicated slot and develop a habit rather than a one-off memory.
- Organise an annual alumni author hour where former students who have published, written, or edited anything return to the school library to share their work with current students.
- Connect the revival to the broader BRKM Reunion network, so alumni attending gatherings can donate books directly and see the library period in action during school visits.