The joy of getting inked with a fountain pen

Like most Indians of a certain age, writing with a fountain pen was a rite of passage to adulthood. My mother remembers her father gifting her a red-and-black Sheaffer pen after her matriculation examination. My sister and I both used my grandfather’s green and black pen as a “lucky" pen during examinations. But also like most Indians, it has been years since I used one.

The Pen Mahotsav in Kolkata (held in April) wants to change that. Kanwrite is one of 25 plus stalls at this year’s edition.

“The fountain pen is almost going extinct. The younger generation only knows ball pens. We are trying to change that," says Subrata Das, one of the conveners of the fountain pen exhibition.

Many of the fountain pens on display are clearly trying to entice younger users. They are in bright candy colours—pink, blue, black and grey checks, multi-coloured. There are inks in snazzy jungle shades. Elephant is purple, gorilla is red and turtle is turquoise. There are rare collector pens, pre-owned like Waldmans made in Germany since 1918. And there are luxury pens like a special edition Hero fountain pen with 18k gold nibs, 30 diamonds in three circles on its cap symbolising the past, present and future of the company and 90 zircons, one for each year of its existence.

But it still feels like a quixotic venture, trying to turn back time in an age of use-and-throw ball pen convenience. “Forget ball pens and gel pens, the newer generation is forgetting to write at all, they just type," says Chawm Ganguly, a fountain pen enthusiast who is chronicling one of India’s most famous pen-and-ink brands, Sulekha.

Sulekha was started in what is now Bangladesh in 1934 by brothers Nanigopal Maitra and Sankaracharya Maitra answering Mahatma Gandhi’s call to create swadeshi ink. In time they become one of India’s biggest ink manufacturers along with Chelpark. In the 1980s they even got a tender to produce ink in Africa. It wasn’t just pen and ink. Sulekha produced glue, stamp pads, naphthalene, even cleaning supplies. In the late 1980s, Sulekha shut down as much for economic reasons as for political reasons in West Bengal under communist rule. By the 1990s, fountain pens themselves started falling into disuse around the world.

When Kaushik Maitra from the Sulekha family went to do his PhD in Canada in the 2000s, his grandfather asked him to come home and see if he could give the family business one last shot. He returned, and revived the company by diversifying into solar panels.

Ganguly, who had been collecting pens for over 30 years, and more importantly collecting the backstories behind brands like F. M. Gooptu’s Perfection pen and R.N. Saha’s 14 fountain pen patents in the early 1900s, remembers telling Maitra, “Sulekha is known for its ink. Gandhi himself inspired it. It’s not known for phenyl. You should make ink and fountain pens again."

However Gandhi was not a fountain pen advocate, according to the book Inked in India: Fountain Pens and a Story of Make and Unmake (2022) by Bibek Debroy and Sovan Roy. Gandhi looked upon them as a modern luxury. In 1932, he wrote, “Nobody in the Ashram should need a fountain pen" advising everyone to use reed pens or dip pens. Even as late as 1947, in his Advice to Students, he wrote, “Learn to do with a pen-holder and ink costing two annas, instead of a fountain pen costing ₹50." But he also recognised that he had become a “lone voice" in his insistence that reed pens were best for Indian scripts.

Oddly, the same digital age that helped make fountain pens obsolete also works in its favour. Fountain pen enthusiasts, a passionate but tiny minority, can now find not just community online, but also rare pens and customers.

Dhruva Jain, 25, has a collection of vintage pens dating back to eye-dropper days—he’s never counted but says it’s probably over 20,000. He recites the names of classic pens with the wide-eyed reverence many reserve for classic cars—Parker 51, Sheaffer No Nonsense, Mont Blanc—though his personal favourite is “the underrated S.T. Dupont, far more appealing than a Mont Blanc." When he talks about it, he waxes lyrical—“it’s super wet, really smooth, gets you hooked."

The other factor that helped fountain pens have a mini-resurgence was the covid lockdown. No one at the Pen Mahotsav can pinpoint why, but many agree business picked up after covid.

“I think people had time to ponder and explore," says Tarun Awasthi of Kanwrite. “There’s a different pleasure in writing with a fountain pen. I think it releases stress somehow."

“Some people wanted to go back to a more analogue life. They introduced their children to fountain pens," says Ganguly. “A schoolteacher called me from Bengaluru asking me to send 70 pens for her students. She said they had forgotten to write properly during the lockdown."

“Also, people started talking more about sustainability," says Subrata Das. “Those ball pens are use-and-throw unlike fountain pens with their ebonite bodies."

Of course this is still a tiny minority. Even the Hero pen distributor at the Pen Mahotsav sheepishly admits he uses a gel pen because it’s convenient. And Indian pens had long been neglected and priced out of the market thanks in part to a lopsided trade agreement with China and the licence raj, writes Debroy in the book. Chinese pens flooded the market while iconic Indian pens like Wilson started by two brothers from an orphanage struggled. At one time the joke was Indian pens were more fountain than pen.

Now even as things are looking up, it’s tough making fountain pens, says Harsh Gagwani of Click pens, another family owned company making 25,000 pieces a month. “Pen-making is a very handcrafted process. It requires special skills in turning, hammering, buffing the nibs. It’s hard to train people in a market where people don’t want to stick to one kind of job."

But the pen manufacturers of India still sound upbeat. The enthusiasm of people like Ganguly persuaded Sulekha to return to the business of pens and ink in 2020. This time they started telling the forgotten stories of India’s inks and pens, stories of ink like Firinghee ink, Swadeshi black and a Jamini Roy ink series. They set up stalls at Kolkata’s book fair which were mobbed. The first time around, Ganguly says, it might have been nostalgia. But the next year he noticed a lot of young people.

“It’s too early to call it a turnaround," says Ganguly. “But this is a product that was deemed dead."

The likes of Kinsuk Poddar, a pen collector at the Mahotsav, are helping keep it alive. I see him discussing the pros and cons of a Visconti pen at the fair.

When I ask him about his love for pens, he says, “I have a sweaty hand and it’s not easy with a fountain pen. But I actually like the stain it leaves on my finger. It’s like the remnant of something done."

Faced with such passion for an ink-stained finger, I couldn’t help but buy my first fountain pen in decades, a burgundy Kanwrite Heritage with black edge and a medium nib.

Now I just have to put pen to paper.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against. Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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