Discovering some vintage Indian fountain pens in Gaya, Bihar

Plato 14 kt gold nib pen



Indian Waterman Cap and Body engraving



Indian Pilot Capped

Dear friends…

This time around, I am writing about some FP discoveries that I made in the pilgrim town of Gaya in Bihar, India…Gaya is Shruti’s hometown and I was visiting her parents and I was there for a week…ok, before going there, FP buff that I have become now, I was wondering whether there would be some shop in this town that would have some FPs…I wrote to my good friend (and fellow FPN-ian) Hari, informing him that I would be going to Gaya and that I’d be on the lookout for FPs there…promptly, in his next mail, he sent me the address of a pen shop in Gaya…

It was with a great deal of scepticism that I went to this shop, Sainani Pen Corner, on the third day of my stay in Gaya…I imagined it to be a big shop, bustling with customers, and would have undergone changes and would now be selling Indian Parker Vector FPs and left over Camlin FPs, the ubiquitous FP brands that one commonly finds in Indian stationery shops… if I was not on the lookout out of the car window, I would have missed it, the look of the shop turned out be an anticlimax…it was slightly more than a hole in the wall…what could I find here?

Anyway, Shruti and I went to the small counter and there was this man (Anjani Kumar Sainani)…I asked him whether he had any fountain pens…he gave me a recent model called Montex…I asked whether he had any ebonite old FPs…I think, that cooked my goose…he realised he had a mad FP fan…he said that he used to have such pens in the past and maybe one or two are still left over and that he’d have to search…the shop was stacked till the roof with old dusty cardboard pen boxes…he then proceeded to show me some really old Indian steel nibbed FPs…names like Kingson, Olympic, Wilson … I had heard of Wilson, who used to manufacture FPs in India with their HQ in Bombay…I asked him the prices of these pens and he told me that the price list is with his brother and that he’d let me know…and all these were steel nibbed ones…he told me he also has Swans and Waterman and Pilot gold nib pens…and that he’d have them in the shop in a couple of days…and asked me to come back two days later…and then he showed me a brand called Plato…with 14 kt gold nib…it was really good looking, red in colour with a broad band on the cap…vintage… almost 40 years old…and the price he quoted was too much…I didn’t have the heart to buy the pen, though good looking, at that price…that day, I could buy only a Kingson FP, as that was the only FP that he was able to quote any price…in the evening, I called up Hari and told him about my visit and the pens that I saw and the prices that were quoted…my heart was really after the Plato G-Nib pen…Hari told me that the Wilson steel nibs were ok, but the price for the Plato was way beyond even the most inflated rates that anyone would quote…and Hari also requested me to buy spare specimens (if available) of any pens that I bought or saw…and Hari, ever practical, also asked me photograph the Plato gold nib pen, even if I didn’t want to purchase it…this was real good advice…with Hari’s various advices in mind, I went there two days later, with hope in my heart and a reasonable amount of money in my wallet…

I had kept aside a couple of Wilson and Olympic FPs earlier, and when he saw me, he took them out and told me the price…I was stunned…it was too much…he then showed me Swan (Cambridge) steel nib FPs and an ebonite Wilson…and a mottled orange flat top/bottom Wilson (this looks like ebonite, but I am not sure), also steel nib…I was sorely tempted…but the price he was quoting for these steel nibbed FPs was too much…once an FP addict, always an FP addict…with a heavy heart, I started selecting the proffered pens…he had two mottled orange and two zany designed Wilsons…I took them all…he had two Swan Cambridges…I took them too…and the Wilson mottled brown ebonite, he had only one…I took that…so, I had purchased 8 pens, along with the Kingson, two days back…I mentally counted the money I had and decided that I couldn’t afford the Olympic FPs…then I remembered Hari’s advice on photographing the G-Nib pens, and I asked him to show me the Plato…and wonder of wonders…apart from Plato, he proceeded to display some more G-Nib pens…an Indian Pilot GN, an Indian Waterman, and another Plato GN with piston pump filler…I was stunned…I have posted the photo of the shop and I think you can understand my reaction on seeing these pens…but the price that he quoted for each of these was astronomical…he was not willing to even reduce 1 rupee…therefore, buying them was out of question…so, following Hari’s advice, I managed to photograph them in their various poses…and have posted them here…

But the bigger and important point is that at one point in time in the 1960s, international pen makers like Pilot and Waterman and Swan had set up shop in India and were manufacturing these pens in India…and they were manufacturing machine made gold nibs here in India… and many old timers have said that they were using these pens, albeit steel nibbed ones, in their school and early college days…it also speaks a lot that an obscure shop in an out of the way town like Gaya has old stocks of these pens…and as Hari said, during one of our ‘pen-cussions,’ the Sainani Pen Corner must have had its glory days…but, all that is history now…these pens are no longer manufactured here and all that we have are some left over FPs and these photos…

I thank Hari wholeheartedly…as you can see, he has been with this episode right from the start…giving me the name of this pen shop to offering various suggestions during the purchase and discovery of these pens, and finally for uploading all these photographs, so that I could post them…you can see all these photos at www.fountainpennetwork.com in the pen photography forum…

This post is written and photos are posted, more with a sense of history than anything else…a kind of glorious chapter in the history of Fountain Pens in India…

I hope this entire narrative was not too tedious for your reading pleasure…

Thanks…

Jayasrinivasa Rao