Preservation of Documents

Where is our equivalent of the Magna Carta? What’s the oldest available copy of the Bhagavad Gita? Come to more recent times: while First Folio editions of Shakespeare’s plays are lovingly preserved in a number of collections in the Western world (and I have personally experienced the magic of touching a copy with my own hands), Kalidasa’s masterpieces have been allowed to crumble into dust, so that all we have of perhaps the greatest litterateur of our civilisation is estimated to be less than a tenth of his priceless oeuvre.

The university and its library are, globally, the steward of historical documents. The largest and most valuable library collections are traditionally public libraries, like the US Library of Congress or university libraries (Harvard University houses the largest such collection, with 73 libraries and over 18 million volumes). And yet, in India, universities, much less well endowed, pale by comparison.

When I was working on my doctoral thesis, I found the University of Syracuse’s library had a better collection of original material on Indian foreign policy than any Indian university did (thanks in part to being headed by an Indian librarian, the legendary Gurnek Singh). Maintaining a large university library is resource-consuming endeavour (Harvard’s libraries have a budget of several hundred million dollars), and India’s public universities (which tend to be the pre-eminent universities in India, unlike in the US where private universities with large endowments tend to dominate) do not have the resources needed to maintain and grow such huge collections.