A whole new meaning to "The world is a book..."

The Khuda Baksh Oriental library

If you have the slightest interest in the magnificent contributions and the complex developments in the world of science, philosophy and medicine in the last few hundred years in South Asia and its surrounding regions, you might want to take a look at the trove that is the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna. Often just called the Khuda Bakhsh Library, the residents of Patna have prided themselves over its existence for years. The library has seen the city grow and change around it since the close of the nineteenth century even though the library was conceptualised much before that by Maulvi Muhammad Bakhsh. 

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

Khuda Bakhsh was perhaps the best person to set up such a library, if one is to go by Jadunath Sarkar’s description of him as the greatest authority on Islamic bibliography at the time. Having been a lawyer at the Nizam’s court, his knowledge of the different legal strains and schools of law in Islamic jurisprudence as well as the great debates in Islamic philosophy at the time, was extensive. All in all, he made sure he expanded on his father’s collection of manuscripts sizeably from the original 1400 manuscripts in 1876 to the 5000 documents by the time of his own death in 1908. 

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

The Yunani Tibb system of healing and medicine that underwent thorough changes with the introduction of colonial knowledge on surgery and pharmaceuticals would probably have lost a large part of its own scientific history had it not been for the preservation of documents in the Khuda Bakhsh Library. The efforts here are parallel to those made by the famous Hakim Ajmal Khan in then Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi as we now know it.

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.