Anke Gowda (Pustaka Mane) Height, Age, Wife, Children, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Anke Gowda

• Anke Gowda was born in the farming family at Haralahalli village of Pandavapura taluk of Mandya district in Karnataka.

• Books were scarce in the village and even from his childhood, Gowda was drawn towards books.

• He started reading Swami Vivekananda‘s works from class IX. He had not had a great deal of access to books and this led him to think about making access to books easier.

• He did farm work and had to juggle his books with his farm job and even use his food money to buy books.

• Upon completion of school, he became a bus conductor. At around the age of 20 years, as a working bus conductor, he gradually started collecting books and thus the seeds of Pustaka Mane were sown.

• He also served as a security guard, for a brief period. He was asked to quit his job by his previous teacher who had heard that he had left the college, and asked him to go back. Gowda followed the advice.

• He graduated from Maharaja’s College, Mysore with a B.A. degree followed by a M.A. in Kannada literature.

• His teacher K. Anantharamu told the class, “Never ask for bribes be good to the neighbourhood and develop good habit.

• This stuck with Gowda, and he became a serious book collector thereafter. After getting some jobs from the Co-operative Sugar Factory of Pandavapura, he joined them as a time keeper and served for almost three decades.

• He used nearly 80% of his income during this time period for the purchase of books. He earned a little extra money from working as an insurance agent and keeping cows and selling their milk.

• Over the years, he has been attending 37 Kannada Sahitya Parishat conferences, and getting books at a discounted price.

• With the accumulation of the collection, space became a problem. Gowda stored the books in big metal trunks initially and later he put up shelves at home.

• When the house was full, and he had approximately 50,000 books in his possession, he went to his friends who introduced him to a liquor baron of that time who was building a temple in Pandavapura and he received the help from the liquor baron.

• Khoday personally visited and saw the collection. Gowda did not ask for financial assistance, but for a building that he could use to house the books.

• Khoday agreed, and provided funding for a massive purpose-built structure.

• Later, a local legislator took then Chief Minister H. D. Kumaraswamy to the library, where he signed the necessary cheques to construct two more buildings linked to the initial one.

• Anke Gowda also donated his own house in Mysuru to help the library grow and utilized his post retirement pension of Rs 40-45 lakh for this purpose.

• He retired and after that, he, his wife Vijayalakshmi and son Sagar moved into the library. The couple rests on the ground and cooks in a tiny area of the building.

• Pustaka Mane (House of Books) library is located in Pandavapura municipality and occupies an overall built-up area of almost 1500 sq. m.

• It remains open throughout the week, for extended periods of time.

• The shelves are stocked with books and there are books on the floor. Estimated 800,000 books remain in sacks outside to be unpacked.

• Gowda continues to add to the collection by buying and donating items.

• Every day Gowda personally cleans, sorts and maintains the collection along with his son Sagar.
  

  Anke Gowda in his library

• Together, they help organise the ever-expanding collection under the auspices of Anke Gowda Jnana Pratishthana Foundation.

• This covers an almost 200 year period of publications, from 1832 onwards. It includes science, technology, literature, mythological, philosophy, and religious texts.

• The collection comprises of more than 5000 dictionaries, 35000 international magazines and 2500 Kannada magazines.

• There are good collections of books on the Mahabharata, Jainism, Buddhism and Christianity as well as several thousand titles on Mahatma Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita.

• Other collections include rare manuscripts, old newspapers of the 1800s and documents of the era of the Mysore dynasty.

• The library has books in over 20 languages including Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and English. Rare editions of the Bible are also in the collection.

• In 2026, he received the Padma Shri award in the Unsung Heroes category from the Government of India for his efforts towards the promotion of literacy and learning.

• Anke Gowda, accepting the award, said it was “a mix of happiness and responsibility”.

• Post winning the award, he said that he constructed the library to help the children of the village and the students appearing in various competitive exams, and books are his breath and his responsibility to preserve it for the next generations.

• He has appealed to the government to provide better financial assistance to enable the library to expand further.

• He states that he has done his part, but is not able to run it on his own so he hopes the government and public will carry on.