Takshashila · Ahmedabad
Opening the Doors
A Bookstore by Sanjay Raval · 2015–2018
તક્ષશિલા — A Place of Learning
A two-storey bookstore that put Gujarati literature back at eye-level — opened in Ahmedabad in 2015, expanded to Chandkheda, and quietly closed in 2018 when its founder turned his full attention to Skill City.
The Idea
In a market where regional languages are usually a single shelf at the back of the store, Takshashila inverted the geometry. Gujarati books took the front; English, Hindi and the other languages filled in around them. It was a small statement, but a deliberate one — that you could build a serious bookshop in Ahmedabad in your own language, and people would come.
Two storeys of carefully chosen titles. A reading area that wasn't a café pretending to be one. Authors visiting often. Children allowed to sit on the floor with whatever they had picked up. The kind of bookshop a city remembers long after the shutters come down.
Two Stores · Three Years
Opened in Ahmedabad as a two-storey, full-service bookstore with a Gujarati-first inventory — a small but pointed bet on the city's appetite for its own literature.
A second store opened in the Chandkheda area, extending the experiment to a second neighbourhood and bringing Gujarati books closer to the suburbs that loved them most.
Both stores wound down as Sanjay Raval committed full attention to Skill City — a decision to focus, not a failure of the model. The stores closed with their reputation intact.
From the Shelves
Storefronts at night. Stacks before opening. The small, careful objects that made the bookstore feel like a bookstore, and the corners where people quietly fell in love with reading again.
That same belief — that there is dignity in working in your own language — now lives inside Skill City, where Gujarati is the medium of every classroom.