Treasure trove of manuscripts

Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna

Want to read Bhagwad Gita in Urdu? Or want to have a glimpse of Timur Nama? Or, for that matter, Shahnama of Firdausi? Or just want to leaf through the autographs of Humayun and Jehangir? To satiate any of such unfulfilled desires, just visit the historical Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, situated close to the banks of Ganga in Patna.

A unique repository of about 21,000 Oriental manuscripts and 2.5 lakh printed books, written in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Sanskrit, Turkish, German, French, Russian and Japanese languages, Khuda Baksh Library has placed Patna on the international intellectual map. Acclaimed worldwide, it has over 300 miniature paintings representing the Mughal, Central Asian, Turkish and Rajput schools. 

It's precisely this historical significance because of which Mauritius Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam or APJ Abdul Kalam always include this place in their itinerary whenever they visit Bihar.

The genesis

The library, now 122 years old, had a small beginning. It emerged out of a collection of Maulvi Mohammad Bakhsh, a man of letters and law, who had a great passion for books. Md Bakhsh had collected 1400 manuscripts during his lifetime, with which he set up a modest library, the Kutbkhana-i-Mohammadia.

Before the bibliophile passed away in 1876, he handed over the small collection to his illustrious son Khan Bahadur Khuda Bakhsh, who was a government pleader of distinction in those days. Before death, the senior Bakhsh expressed the wish that Khuda Bakhsh should enrich the collection further and transform it into a public library.

Khuda Bakhsh lived up to his father's expectations, enlarged the collection and converted it into a private library in 1880, which had 4,000 manuscripts. Later he dedicated the library, located within his residential premises, to the people of Patna, which was formally inaugurated by Sir Charles Elliot, Governor of Bengal, on October 5, 1891. It was then called Oriental Public Library.

“Khuda Bakhsh remained the secretary of the library for the rest of his life, with a small break (1895-1898) when he remained at Hyderabad as Chief Justice of the Nizam's High Court,” Imtiaz Ahmad, the Director of the prestigious library, told Deccan Herald.

Following the death of Khuda Bakhsh, his descendants managed the affairs of the library for decades. But as a tribute to its founder, the Government of India, thorough an Act of Parliament, renamed it as “Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library” in 1969.

Since then, the library has grown by leaps and bounds. It now has a collection of 21,000 manuscripts - in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Pushto and over 250,000 printed books, old and rare as well as recent. Just click the mouse of the computer in the library room and you can get access to Mughal Imperial Library, Diwan-i-Hafiz (15th century) or Kishkindha Kanda (Ram Charitra Manas) or Dr Rajendra Prasad, Correspondence and Select Documents, by Valmiki Choudhary, or the Urdu version of Jaswant Singh's book Jinnah: India -Partition, Independence.

“The library has also published 36 volumes of descriptive catalogues of its manuscripts collection in English and four volumes of hand lists of manuscripts (both in Persian and Arabic), together with one volume of manuscripts in Urdu,” says Ahmad, himself an eminent scholar.  “The library has catalogued its entire books and periodicals in computerised format. This can be accessed by the readers LAN within the library. It has also been partially uploaded on the library’s website www.kblibrary.nic.in.  The
entire catalogue is expected to be available online by year-end,” Imtiaz Ahmad says. 

Khuda Bakhsh had made a strict rule that the manuscripts would never be taken outside the library. An exception had to be made to this rule in 1911, when King George V and Queen Mary, who, upon their arrival in Delhi, expressed their desire to see the two well-known manuscripts, the Shah-nama and Jehangir-nama. In compliance of their wish, both the books had to be taken to Delhi. These manuscripts were duly returned, bejewelled further, with the autographs of the King and the Queen.  
 
The list of eminent visitors to the library is unending. At least six Viceroys including Lord Elgin (1895), Lord Curzon (1903), Lord Minto (1906), Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, four Presidents and one Prime Minister of India, several ministers, foreign dignitaries and scholars from all over the world have visited the library.

One of the richest repositories of the intellectual and cultural heritage of South and Central Asia, the library promotes research activities in certain specific areas such as Islamic Studies, Arabic, Persian and Urdu literature, Comparative Religion, Tibb (Unani medicine), Tasawwuf (mysticism), History of the Islamic lands, Medieval Indian History and Culture and the Indian National Movement.

“In fact, when the great upsurge occurred, Khuda Bakhsh was barely 15 years old. The mutiny disrupted his schooling, but he pursued his education later. After he completed his studies, he began his career as a peshkar. He eventually became the Chief Justice at Hyderabad Nizam's High Court,” said Ahmad.