The Higginbothams story: How a sea cadet from Kerala set up India’s oldest book chain in 1844

In the mid-19th century, Madras’ Mount Road resembled a “brooding, sleeping English market town” for much of the workday, wrote Alister Macmillan in his book. But in the evening, it would burst into a riot of colours as Indian workers emerged from the surrounding establishments – “women selling betel nuts and various sweetmeats, swarajists in their plain attire, other men in fashionable Punjabis”.

It was here on Mount Road that in 1844, Abel Joshua Higginbotham found spare office space and established Higginbothams, which is today India’s oldest bookstore. All of 25 years old then, Higginbotham could have scarcely imagined that his creation, with the branches that followed, along with the allied businesses of printing and publishing, would spread so widely.

Unhappy seaman

Higginbotham was born in 1819 in Cannanore, now called Kannur, in Kerala. His father, Joseph Higginbotham, who died a year later, served in Bangalore as part of the 69th regiment, whose Indian sepoys had rebelled in the 1815 Vellore mutiny. Like the army official and later historian Mark Wilks, who purchased a cadetship in the East India Company’s armies, Joseph Higginbotham too may have belonged to the middling levels of landed gentry in England, who had no option but to seek a living either as merchant or soldier in India. Wilks and the Higginbotham name would soon be connected in other ways as well.

Higginbotham’s mother died when he was 12 and he was taken in the care of missionaries of the Church of Scotland. His obituary, written soon after his death in 1891, states that he had two careers before he went on to become the owner of the bookstore. One was that of a seaman, an occupation he took up after he completed school. The vagaries of the sea, and the rough life, evidently didn’t appeal to him. When he tried to abandon his ship and return to India, he was caught and compelled to serve out his apprenticeship. A myth or two soon grew, including the fact, as some later somewhat-incomplete accounts have it, that he had been a stowaway, trying to steal his way into a seaman’s career.

After this short-lived, unhappy sea career, Higginbotham turned to managing a bookstore run by Methodist missionaries. It was here he discovered his love for books. He recognised that he had the skill to talk about books and the resourcefulness to track down rare, in-demand works.

How it all began

In 1840, a cousin persuaded the 21-year-old Higginbotham to attend the services at the Methodist chapel in Madras’ Black Town, the term used to describe the area where Indians lived. The Wesleyan Methodist Mission had been active in Madras since 1817. In time, Higginbotham came to be associated with the mission’s activities, helping at their schools and managing the bookstore in the chapel’s basement. His dedication to the store, which largely sold religious works, was soon evident. But the Mission saw it as a losing proposition. In 1844, when they decided to shut the store down, they offered Higginbotham the option of buying out the stock on reasonable terms. He did.

Higginbotham moved with his books to Mount Road. The store no longer exists, and at that time it looked very different. An article that appeared in 1904 in the Publishers’ Circular mentions that the first bookstore “occupied half the width of the entrance of the present premises”. Yet, in a few years, Higginbotham’s ability to source books, to talk about them with ease and erudition, and to see the potential in advertising in newspapers paid off.

Lord Charles Trevelyan, who was governor of Madras for just over a year starting from March 1859, wrote about the store in glowing terms to Thomas Macaulay, member of the East India Company’s governing council in London. It was, he said, one of “the many elusive and indescribable charms of life in Madras City”. In the 1860s, substantial renovations were made to the store by John Law, a well-regarded builder and architect. In 1875, Higginbotham and Co. were made bookseller and stationery supplier to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) when he visited India.

Around this time, Higginbothams was publishing its own books as well: classics in ancient Hindu law and other notable works such as Sketches of South India by Mark Wilks, Colonel Todd’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Francis Buchanan’s Mysore, Canara and Malabar, ‘Blunt Spurs’ The Griffin’s Aide de camp or Treatment of Horses in India (an important subject for the army) and others.

Higginbotham too was on the rise: civic officials sought him for his knowledge. In 1889-’90, just before his death, he served as Madras’ sheriff.

Legacy endures

Earlier in life, Higginbotham had lost two children in their infancy. Of his six children who survived, one of his daughters, Isabel, married James Perrat Nicholas, who, with his brother, set up the first photo studio in Madras and in Ootacamund. Higginbotham’s oldest son, John Joshua Higginbotham, was a writer in his own right, though he modestly called himself a “compiler” when his book, Men Whom India Has Known, was published by Higginbotham and Co. in 1871. The book covered a period of nearly a century and more, describing several East India Company officials (Warren Hastings, Lord Wellesley and others), rulers in India such as Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, and gave details on the controversial corruption case against Raja Nandakumar. This was a case that divided British India in the early 19th century: Nandakumar, an associate of Warren Hastings’ opponents, was accused of counterfeiting documents and executed on Hastings’ orders.

John Joshua Higginbotham died in Bangalore in 1874 when he was only 29, dashing any hopes that Higginbotham would have had of seeing his son succeed him. His daughters were never really involved in the family business and it was only in the mid-1880s that Higginbotham’s younger son, Charles Herbert Higginbotham, joined the family firm. For seven years in the 1880s, Charles Herbert Higginbotham had also been lawn tennis champion for South India, an annual tournament held in Madras.

With Charles Herbert Higginbotham at the helm, the bookstore scaled further heights. Higginbothams was already the city’s go-to place for books, stationery and related supplies. In 1904, as the store completed 60 years, it moved to its present impressive premises on Mount Road. Another store was opened in Bangalore and Higginbothams bookstalls were set up in stations serving the Madras and South Indian Railways. The printing operations too expanded considerably. As Macmillan writes in Seaports of India and Ceylon, the portion behind the store had printing equipment of every kind and employed around 200-300 people.

Passing the baton

Charles Herbert Higginbotham kept up his father’s publishing interests. Some of the first curry cookbooks in India were published by Higginbotham and Co., including Sweet Dishes; A Little Treatise on confectionery and entremets sucrés by Arthur Robert Kenny-Herbert, who also wrote on cookery using the pseudonym Wyvern for the Madras Mail. Other vital books that Higginbotham and Co. published included Henry Cunningham’s Laws of Evidence and illustrated guides for the Madras and South Indian railways.

By 1912, the printing concern with its extensive interests in stationery and engraving became Associated Printers (that included Higginbotham and Co.). In 1924-’25, according to the historian S Muthiah, John Oakshott Robinson of Spencer’s, a well-known department store, bought over Madras Mail, Higginbothams and Associated Printers to form Associated Publishers (Madras). Charles Hubert Higginbotham died in 1930. Following a merger in 1949, Associated Publishers became part of the Amalgamations group, the Chennai-based business conglomerate.

With its illustrious 174-year-old history Higginbothams remains a legend, a clearly-recognisable landmark at several railway stations and cities. At a time when brick-and-mortar bookstores are struggling for relevance, locked in battle with e-commerce giants, Higginbothams continues to be a draw, luring customers with the passion for books that bewitched its founder two centuries ago.