The main aim of this chapter is to articulate the relationship between literary catalogs and their creation of readerships, especially when the said relationship is mediated by the state. I propose that the catalogs of national, and by extension world literature become politically and ideology inflected, sometimes through facilitation, other times through obstruction by the state and its ancillaries. I further argue in this chapter that through differentiations of the native and the foreign, the indigenous and the migrant—often propagated through majoritarian myths of national origins—the state functions to privilege certain languages and literatures over others by claims of ownership of certain literary traditions and rejection of others. In addition, the chapter also provide examples of ways in which populist conflations of the indigenous with the original are offered resistance. To this end, the chapter I want to draw attention to three “bibliographic” moments in the changing pact with books of the Indian reading publics: late nineteenth, mid-twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.