Motilal Banarsidass

• 1. Introduction

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  Motilal Banarsidass began in 1903 as a single bookshop selling Sanskrit texts in Said Mitha Bazar, a market in Lahore. Its founder, Lala Motilal Jain, opened the shop with 27 borrowed from his wife's savings, money she had earned through knitting. He named the business after his eldest son, Motilal Banarsidass Jain, who would later take charge of it himself.

  More than a century later, that small shop has grown into an Indian academic publisher known for scholarly work on Asian religions, Indology, and Buddhology. Its catalog now runs from ancient Sanskrit texts to modern reference dictionaries.

  How did a business built on borrowed knitting money survive the partition of a country, and go on to earn a national honor? And what does it take to keep printing century-old scholarship, volume after volume, for more than a hundred years?

• 2. Origins In Lahore

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  Lala Motilal Jain descended from a family that had served as court jewellers to Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Amritsar. In 1911, the business opened a second location in Mai Sewan Bazar, Amritsar, placed under the supervision of his son Lala Sundarlal Jain.

  In 1912, Banarasidass died unexpectedly, leaving Sundarlal Jain as his only surviving brother. Sundarlal closed the Amritsar branch and moved back to Lahore to run the family's business alone. He was soon joined by a young nephew, Shantilal Jain, who had just finished school and would eventually become the company's chairman. A printing unit followed soon after, giving the family firm its own presses just as the twentieth century's upheavals were about to test it.

• 3. Partition And Rebuilding

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  In 1937, the firm opened a branch in Patna at the suggestion of Rajendra Prasad. During the Partition of India, a riot burned down the original shop in Lahore, and the family fled to India.

  The family first stayed in Bikaner and Patna before settling in Varanasi in 1950, where it opened a new shop in 1951. In 1958, it shifted its base again, this time to Delhi. Today, it remains one of the few large publishing houses anywhere in the world to operate its own in-house printing unit. Within decades of settling in Delhi, the man who had joined the firm as a schoolboy in Lahore would be recognized nationally.

• 4. Recognition And Leadership

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  In 1992, Shantilal Jain received the Padma Shri from the Government of India. It was the first time that honor had been given for community service through publishing.

  In 2003, the company marked its centenary with a function in Chennai. There, the Kanchi Sankaracharya, Jayendra Saraswathi, honoured three Sanskrit scholars: R. Balasubramaniam, B.M.K. Sharma, and K.V. Sharma.

  At a separate function in Bangalore, the Governor of Karnataka, T.N. Chaturvedi, felicitated centenarian Sudhakar Chaturvedi along with S.M.S. Chari and B.K. Krishnamurthy of Hyderabad. The astrologer B.V. Raman was honoured posthumously at the same event.

  Today, Shantilal's eldest son, Narendra Prakash Jain, widely known as Prakash, runs the business together with his four brothers and their sons. Their mother, Leela Jain, serves as the company's chairperson. None of those honors would exist without a catalog large enough to earn them, built volume by volume since its founding.

• 5. A Library Of Scholarship

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  The business now carries a turnover of about 5-6 crore, with roughly 75 percent of that coming from exports. Its catalog covers history, culture, arts, architecture, archaeology, language, literature, linguistics, and musicology. It also includes titles on mysticism, yoga, tantra, occult practices, medicine, astronomy, and astrology.

  Among its landmark projects is the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume series edited by the scholar Max Müller. It was originally published by Oxford University Press and is now reprinted by Motilal Banarsidass. The Mahapuranas run to 100 volumes in the house's edition, and the Manusmriti fills 10 volumes alongside a Sanskrit lexicon.

  The Ramcharitmanas appears with both Hindi and English translations. The Bibliotheca Buddhica runs to 30 volumes across 32 parts, edited by Sergey Oldenburg and Fyodor Shcherbatskoy. It was originally published in St. Petersburg and is now reprinted by the house.

  The house also publishes a multi-volume Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies. Further research comes from the Indian Council of Historical Research, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. All of that scholarship has to be sold and shelved somewhere, and the house keeps its full stock in one place in the Indian capital.

• 6. The New Delhi Shelves

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  The company's main office sits at A-44, Naraina Industrial Area, Phase-1, New Delhi-110028, where it houses around 30,000 titles of Indological literature.

  Among the named series on its list is Indian Kavya Literature by A.K. Warder, planned for 10 volumes with 7 already published. Also on the list is the 5-volume History of Indian Philosophy by S.N. Dasgupta.

  Ram Sharan Sharma contributed two titles to the catalog. Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India reached a fifth revised edition in 2005. His other book, Sudras in Ancient India, a social history of the lower orders, was reprinted in 2002.

  Its Buddhist Tradition Series, edited by Alex Wayman, spans 30 volumes. The Lala Sundar Lal Jain Research Series, edited by Dayanand Bhargava, carries the name of the family's own founding generation, with 10 volumes already published. Even the reference tools on the shelves carry names of their own. Sanskrit grammars by S.C. Vasu and M.R. Kale sit alongside dictionaries by M.M. Williams and Apte, the reference works generations of readers have relied on.