Mumbai Bookies

India’s largest reading club

The revolution will not be spoken. It will be read.

It began with a handful of us on the grass near Churchgate, early enough that the city was still deciding whether to wake up. Now a few thousand people arrive every Sunday, find a place to sit somewhere Bombay usually keeps shut, and read without saying a word for two hours. Books are coming back, and they are coming back like a tide nobody thought to stop.

ParksOld librariesFactoriesBeachesChurchesHeritage monuments

Hundreds of Mumbai Bookies readers gathered together holding books

Where we actually sit

The city keeps opening its doors

There has never been a regular spot and there never will be. Every Sunday we borrow a room the city walks past without looking, or a stretch of sand at low tide, and for two hours it belongs to whoever turned up carrying a book.

Readers filling a South Bombay park in the early morning

Parks

Where all of this started. South Bombay green at eight in the morning, while the traffic is still thinking about it.

A century-old reading hall filled with silent readers

Old libraries

Rooms built a century ago for exactly this, and they have been waiting a long time for a morning like it.

Readers seated inside a stone industrial interior

Factories

Mill floors that spent decades under noise, handed over to a few thousand people who came to make none.

Hundreds of readers seated on a Mumbai beach at sunrise

Beaches

Books held open against the wind while the tide goes out, which is harder than it sounds and worth every minute.

Readers on a staircase inside an arched heritage interior

Churches

Buildings raised around silence, lending their silence out to a few thousand strangers who came looking for some of their own.

A crowd of readers on the steps of a colonnaded Mumbai monument

Heritage monuments

The landmarks everybody photographs from outside, opened up for a morning where nothing happens at all.

Every door here was opened for Bookies only.

Each venue is arranged with whoever holds the keys, one conversation at a time, and most of them have never lent the place out for anything remotely like this. There is no ticket to buy. There is a list, and you get on it by asking.

Coming along

Come once, and the door stays open

One form, five minutes, and you never fill it in again. From then on the venue and the time reach you before every sitting. We keep the location off the internet because that is the condition most of these places set, and it is the reason they keep saying yes.

  • Your name and WhatsApp number
  • Which Sunday you can make
  • Your nearest railway station
  • Three sentences on who you are
  • What you are reading right now

There is no fee and nothing owed if you never come back. Come once and find out what two silent hours do to you. Your card will be waiting when you arrive.

About us

A reading club with the talking taken out

Nothing is assigned and nothing gets checked. You bring the book you are already halfway through, you find a spot on the floor or the grass or the steps, and for two hours the loudest thing in the room is paper.

We started on 1 September 2024 with one sitting in one park. It costs nothing and it is open to anybody who genuinely wants to read. Whatever conversation happens will happen afterwards, over tea, and only if you feel like staying.

The team

Pritesh Singh, Gargi Sandu and Shantanu Naidu with an award for Mumbai Bookies

Three people started Mumbai Bookies on 1 September 2024 with a single sitting in a park and no particular expectation of what would follow. It has not stopped since.

  • Shantanu Naidu
  • Gargi Sandu
  • Pritesh Singh

A Sunday, hour by hour

What actually happens

You arrive and the talking stops

People come in from Vasai and Dombivli, an hour and a half each way, to sit somewhere quietly with a book.

Two hours

Phones face down, spines cracked open, a room full of strangers all travelling somewhere separately.

Card stamped, tea poured

The silence lifts and the place fills with voices, recommendations changing hands, and the slow discovery of who has been sitting six feet away all morning.

It carries on

The groups keep going between sittings, mostly about what people just finished and what they are about to start.

Every Bookie gets one

The library card

A physical card, handed over at your first sitting, stamped in ink every morning you turn up.

The stamps add up to something real. The more of them you collect the more comes back to you, and that card is the only ledger we keep.

Fill one and you are holding proof of a habit you rebuilt by hand, which is worth considerably more than a streak on a screen.

Mumbai BookiesLibrary card

Name

Member since

✓
✓
✓
✓

One stamp per sitting. More stamps, more rewards.

Sittings so far

What a few thousand silent readers look like

A large crowd of Mumbai Bookies readers
A reader close up with an open book
Hands holding an open page
A reader under heritage stone columns
Readers seated together on stone steps
Readers in a brightly painted room
A crowd of readers seen through a bandstand arch
A stack of donated books
A reader under an umbrella on the beach
Readers filling a grand columned hall
Hundreds of readers on the sand
A tower of donated books
Readers arriving with books
Readers against an old stone wall
A sitting seen from above, filling a street
Readers along an arched colonnade
Books being handed out from crates
Readers on wide stone steps
Readers seated on the floor of a domed hall
A crowd on the steps of a heritage building
A large indoor sitting

The Bookies line

Bombay is reading again, and it is doing it without saying a word.

How far this has travelled

The count so far

145K

Followers on Instagram, where every sitting is announced.

@mumbaibookies, checked Sept 2026
1,000+

Readers on the Mumbai rolls, up from a single weekly sitting.

Malayala Manorama, Feb 2025
7,000+

Books collected and passed on to school libraries.

Malayala Manorama, Feb 2025
3

Cities running their own sittings, with four more opening.

Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru

What happens to the books

The books do not stay with us

Every drive fills crates that leave the park on the same morning they arrive. They go into classrooms across Mumbai, carried and sorted by the same people who spend their Sunday mornings reading in silence, and they stay on those shelves long after we have gone.

Seven thousand books have moved that way so far, and the drives are still running.

A tower of donated books at a Library Building Drive

Library Building Drive, collection morning

Crates of donated books sorted in the park

Sorting the crates before they travel

Volunteers carrying a Library Building Drive box

Boxes leaving for the schools

School children reading around piles of donated books

School children choosing from the pile

School girls picking books from a crate

First pick of the new arrivals

A volunteer reading with a young child

Reading with the youngest ones

A volunteer handing books to a school boy

Handing the shelves over

Two school children at a newly built classroom bookshelf

A classroom shelf, newly filled

Elsewhere

Bookies in other cities

The format travelled on its own. Same two hours, same silence, their own rooms and their own lists, each city running its own account.

Mumbai

@mumbaibookies

Where it started

Pune

@pune_bookies

Follow for sittings

Bengaluru

@bengaluru_bookies

Follow for sittings

Opening next

Delhi

Coming soon

Chennai

Coming soon

Kolkata

Coming soon

Hyderabad

Coming soon

Written about

The press pile

Mumbai Bookies took the sitting to Tata Garden as an official Mumbai LitFest session Literature Live!, Nov 2025 Beach Bookies: the club moved a whole morning of silent reading onto the sand Curly Tales A thousand Mumbai readers and 7,000 books donated on to school libraries Malayala Manorama Why the club exists: reviving the reading habit against a collapsing attention span The CSR Journal Named as one of the formats young Indian reading communities are copying The Better India