The Khuda Baksh Oriental library |
Maulvi Muhammad Bakhsh
perhaps always knew that he wanted to leave behind a library for
posterity. Presumably taken by the advances in printing culture in
the lower Gangetic belt and resigned to the gradual decline of the
landed gentry in Patna, he struck upon the idea for a collection of
great manuscripts that could be viewed and used by all. Before his
death in 1876, he left the solemn task to his son, Maulvi Khuda
Bakhsh, after preserving a collection of 1400 manuscripts himself. A
noted scholar in Arabic with a great love for Persian and Urdu, Khuda
Bakhsh invested all efforts into realising the idea of the grand
public library.
Khan Bahadur Khuda Baksh |
From Sarkar’s
description of the man, one finds an image of a serious scholar
committed to preserving the knowledge of his time, influenced
strongly by a colonial modernity and its spill-over effects. The
huqqa-smoking bibliophile now rests in a grave on the premises
of the library, oblivious to the generations who have gained from his
efforts. His son, Salahuddin Khuda Bakhsh, who took over the reins of
the library after his death, was thankfully a similarly dedicated
bibliophile. What many don’t know is that he is most famous in
literary circles for inviting a fatwa from a fringe Muslim
seminary in Patna because he took on a translation project of Joseph
Hell’s book ‘Arab Civilisation’ in 1977 from the Jamia Milia
Islamia in New Delhi. The scholar Girija Kumar has argued elsewhere
that this effort was just another instance of Salahuddin’s attempts
to engage with texts that were critical of orthodoxies in Islam.
Criticism and reasoned well-knowing debate was the underlying force
behind his intellectual drive and it shows amply in the collection at
the Library.
If the rich history of
the library’s fountainheads is alluring, then the range of
collections that the library holds should surely make you jump.
Classics from Urdu, Persian and Arabic along with travelogues and
rare copies of controversial publications are strewn across the
shelves at the Khuda Baksh Library. Sample this: the Jahangir Nama, the
Sirat-i-Firoz Shahi, a huge range of publications on Tibb
(medicine), translations and original drafts of many biographies
(Tazkira) and books numbering more than two hundred and fifty
thousand. Biographies were of extreme importance to both Khuda Bakhsh
and his son, as a result of which, one sees the vast number of
biographies, both translated as well as the original versions in the
library. Similarly, memoirs and travelogues like the Ibrat Namah
and the Masir-i-Talibi, providing rich accounts of a different
time on the continent, are now freely available for students and
lovers of history and literature.
Forceps from the era |
Today, the looming
building of the Khuda Bakhsh Library has undergone several changes.
Many of its collections have been digitized and available for perusal
on its website. Many scholars from Patna and the rest of the country
have benefitted hugely from these efforts in the last few years by
the National Mission for Manuscripts and the administration of the
Library. Works on the Safawis (the Safavid Empire) and the
Qajars, preserved in the Library, have now helped write broader
connected histories of Islamic scholarship across the breadth of
Asia.
The library, over the
years, has managed to gather around itself a milieu of academic and
cultural efforts that help in its sustenance. Its assemblage of
various historic scientific instruments as well as its collection of
vivid Patna Qalam paintings are the result of careful patronage and
dedicated endeavours to preserve the traces of a complex past. Such a
past defies many of our assumptions about the development of cultures
and their continued sustenance. If you like to allow yourself the
luxury to sit and delve into a different time and think through it,
the Khuda Bakhsh Library is one of those places that affords you the
luxury to do so. And if you still haven’t made up your mind, let’s
just say that a look at the centuries-old and vastly famed ‘deer
skin’ leaf of the Qura’an should be an ample reward for taking
the road to Bankipur in Patna.