Widener library, Harvard University’s pride, is surely one of the most enduring memorials any mother has constructed for a lost child. As you climb its stairs, pass its imposing columns and enter the main door, you are poignantly reminded of this great institution’s origins. Eleanor Elkins Widener had the library constructed in 1915 in memory of her son, Harry Elkins Widener, who perished aboard the Titanic and was an enthusiastic book collector. The Widener is now one of the world’s great libraries, comparable to the Bodleian, the British Library or Bibilotheque National.

I recently re-visited the Widener after a gap of three years. The library was originally constructed by one of America’s first African-American architects Julian Abeles, and has undergone a major renovation since I last visited it. Now it looks more expansive, and offers extraordinarily plush reading rooms full of natural light. While entering the Widener a week after the attack on the library of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, it was difficult not to ruminate about what this great storehouse of knowledge represents.

It certainly requires extraordinary ambition to create an institution which aspires to possess all thought that can be made available in print. Admittedly, it is an enterprise sustained by vast resources. Even so, the ambition itself is ennobling in more ways than one can list. Who knows for what purposes the library will be used? What ideological causes it will serve? What humanity it will inspire? What madness might its contents incite?

Although immeasurably useful, a library cannot be instrumental to serve any specific purpose or cause. It insistently transcends all of them: a library will provide a refuge for Karl Marx, as much as for Aurobindo Ghosh. Entering a library like the Widener is always a thrilling and humbling experience. The visitor is likely to be excited by something on every second shelf, serendipity will lead you to books that you didn’t believe existed. And yet every minute you are likely to feel humble and inadequate. There are few institutions that can elevate and humble you at the same time. A great library is one of them.

Libraries of this scale are not so much an act of human conceit as a wise insurance policy. Whatever the venality and barbarism of human beings at any given moment, whatever lapses of memory or sins of ignorance we fall prey to, so long as libraries survive there is hope. Even a few surviving copies of Plato and Aristotle could rescue Europe from the dark ages. This is perhaps why ancient kings, in India and elsewhere, ennobled themselves by patronising collections of books and manuscripts.

Nor is it an accident that barbarians ransack libraries first. It is the surest way of erasing humanity itself: its memories, hopes, aspirations, achievements and even its errors. The Alexandrian fantasy, as it is known, after the great library founded by Ptolemy II in 286 BC in Alexandria, and which it is said took six months to burn, was perhaps the most extraordinary way of expressing human aspiration.

So perhaps Eleanor Elkins grasped a profound truth: a library would be a truly enduring memorial to her son. And this is a truth we tend to forget too often. The hooligans who ransacked the Bhandarkar Institute; the benighted state of Bihar that has virtually no public libraries left; the unconscionably appalling state of our university libraries; the wilful destruction of collections in possession of the state; the neglect heaped upon tens of thousands of manuscripts, only underscore the peculiarity of Mrs. Widener’s gesture.

The University of Beijing recently received a $20 million (Rs.90 crore) gift from a Hong Kong based businessman, just for its library. How does a culture acquire the extraordinary ambition to discern the creation of a great library as an achievement more ennobling than almost anything else? How do we acquire the determination to preserve human ingenuity in this form, with all its achievements and follies? How do we create a culture where a book is not a problem, but a source of hope?

In India, the paucity of good libraries is striking. The issue is not lack of money. In many cases there is willful determination to destroy even whatever little there is. I have seldom encountered staff in university libraries who do not regard books as a problem. University administrators seem to believe that you can build great universities without great libraries. One seldom meets philanthropists who believe that a library might be a worthwhile bequest.

There are of course some private collections in India which are well preserved. But these tend to be what might be called ‘sectarian’ libraries, a collection of books on Jainism, or Tantra and so forth. But as useful as these are, they in some ways subvert the very meaning of a library. A general library is a peculiar place, without authority. High philosophy and low jokes, sound science and quack recipes are all marked by a call number, as if saying to the reader: you shall decide what is important. There is no prima-facie authority determining that a particular type of knowledge is important. And in a way the great public libraries, the New York Public Library or the British Library, served as vehicles of democratisation: they gave countless readers access to knowledge of their choice.

Perhaps more than dams, or technology, if libraries had been designated the temples of new India and made to proliferate across towns and cities, who knows how different the cultural and political history of modern India might have been. India may be shining, but it is doubtful whether it can ennoble itself without the free, disinterested comforts of a nationwide chain of libraries. Only through its library network can individuals, or nations, get to know themselves. 

 

(Pratap Bhanu Mehta is professor of philosophy, law and governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)