Unpacking the Library

Introducing libraries in South Asia

Many scholars have spent long hours in South Asia’s libraries, from grand institutions like Kolkata’s National Library and Mumbai’s David Sassoon Library to smaller collections belonging to local literary societies or individual collectors. Our own work in libraries has provided numerous moments of frustration and elation, along with surprising juxtapositions that unsettle assumptions about scholarly and popular audiences in contemporary South Asia. Sometimes, these libraries look less like libraries and more like bookshops, or else like a few cabinets in a home, a shrine or a temple. For instance, visitors to one of the richest Urdu collections in Lucknow pass a dealer in used plastic barrels and climb a flight of stairs above a bicycle repair shop to a tiny room where the owner corrects poetry, discusses medicine and sells Xeroxes of old mystery novels, film magazines and agricultural manuals.¹ Meanwhile, the scholars who flock to Patna from around the world in order to consult rare manuscripts at the famous Khuda Bakhsh Library rarely come into contact with a very different group of readers in the same compound. In the next building over from the main reading room, local visitors read newspapers and crowds of students sit cramming for exams, grateful for a rare quiet space open to all.² Such unexpected encounters have challenged us to rethink libraries’ publics in modern South Asia and made clear that libraries are crucial social spaces for the cultivation of knowledge, local cultural projects and national politics. And, increasingly, many libraries are not physical places at all, but websites like Rekhta and the National Digital Library of India.³

Libraries have been loved by many in South Asia. R.K. Narayan affectionately evoked the pleasures of their ‘faint aroma of gum and calico’ and the textures of their book-bindings, and the writer and activist Mridula Koshy has extolled the liberatory potential of a new library movement like the one that brought thousands of libraries to Kerala in the early twentieth century.⁴ Academics, too, often express their fondness for libraries in book acknowledgements and social gatherings, yet, curiously, they have largely overlooked them as objects of inquiry. Beyond occasional laments for the decrepit state of libraries in contemporary South Asia, scholars have paid little attention to the libraries that make this research possible and that cater to patrons’ needs for scholarly study, daily entertainment, exam preparation, and social and political debate. A handful of scholars have indeed examined libraries in South Asia. Some of their works, especially those written by librarians themselves, have concentrated on institutional details, while a few have explored libraries’ roles as social and intellectual institutions.⁵ However, in comparison to colleagues working in other parts of the world, South Asianists have by and large shown little historical or ethnographic interest in libraries.⁶ Neither individual institutions nor larger trends, like the library movements of the early twentieth century, have received much scrutiny. Even the pioneering librarian S.R. Ranganathan, considered by his contemporaries and heirs in the profession to have been responsible for ‘a revolution in library theory and practice’, has attracted scant notice from South Asianists.⁷ This lack of interest in libraries is all the more surprising since scholars of the region have written extensively on the history and politics of archives and museums, as well as on innumerable other aspects of knowledge, circulation and publics.⁸

Any discussion of libraries in South Asia would be incomplete without an examination of the place libraries occupy in popular imaginations around the world, as well as their historical role as symbols of both state power and resistance, exemplified by the proliferation of volumes on the destruction of libraries and books.⁹ Libraries have always been potent spaces for political imagination and struggle. As political and religious authorities have built libraries, so too have they frequently destroyed them. In recent times, libraries have been targets of political attack, but they have also occupied a prominent place in protests against governments and become powerful symbols of shared humanistic values. The Saeh Library in Tripoli, Lebanon, was set ablaze in January 2014, seemingly in response to rumours that its founder, a Greek Orthodox priest, had criticised Islam. In response, locals launched a campaign to defend the library as a site and symbol of their shared humanity, raising funds through Facebook for rebuilding and restoration efforts. When a local news channel interviewed people involved in the campaign, they spoke of their desire to show their city’s true face as one of tolerance, love and coexistence.¹⁰ In August 2018, floods ravaged Kerala and over two hundred libraries were destroyed. In response, members of the public turned to crowdfunding to rebuild the libraries and replace the damaged books.¹¹ During the 2013 anti-government protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, makeshift libraries occupied a prominent place. Encouraging colleagues to contribute, one publisher spoke of books as ‘one of the essentials of the resistance’.¹² At least fifteen other publishers heeded the call, with private individuals contributing as well, and a library was established in Gezi Park. From Hong Kong to Baghdad and New York to Istanbul, libraries have become one of the defining elements in protest movements.¹³

In India, there was an outpouring of outrage and disbelief after police violently stormed the library of Jamia Millia Islamia in December 2019 during protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. In violating the neutral space of the library, it seemed to many that the state had crossed a new boundary. As protestors created their own makeshift libraries on footpaths around the university, they aligned themselves with other protest movements around the world that have recognised the relationship between books and dissent.¹⁴ If a library is a protean space where all kinds of materials are read, it is also frequently vulnerable. In the face of threats, whether from insufficient funding, fires, floods or police forces, these pavement libraries demonstrate that the library need not be bound to buildings but rather to publics who value the written word. Reading takes time; it demands slowness, the ability to sit for extended periods and focus on one thing.¹⁵ Slow reading can be a subversive act in a smartphone-saturated world. The appeal of the library, of protestors setting up sidewalk libraries, of communities gathering together around libraries is not due to a mere appreciation of books. Rather, it is the belief that without them, humans will lose their way. Thus, intentional pavement libraries point passers-by to the possibility of deep engagement and dialogue across ideologies.

Objectives of this special section

In his study of ‘bibliomigrancy’ in East and West Germany during the Cold War, B. Venkat Mani observes that ‘books are hardly innocent bearers of stories’ and that libraries do not constitute a ‘neutral space’, but rather are ‘rife with…historical contingencies that condition accumulation and classification, circulation and distribution’.¹⁶ Building on this call to follow the stories that books bear and the historical contingencies that libraries have witnessed, this special section examines the forms that libraries have taken, and the social roles they have played, in modern South Asia.

The genesis of this special section lies in our sense that, by understanding libraries’ social and material specificities, we can better understand the cultural and intellectual histories that they have helped catalyse. In other words, we seek to interrogate the centrality of libraries in the production of scholarly knowledge about South Asia and their simultaneous marginalisation as subjects of that scholarship. We have particularly endeavoured to examine how the materiality of libraries and their textual contents have shaped the larger political, social and philosophical projects associated with them. We hope that this group of studies on a range of libraries makes a strong case for scholarly engagement with libraries, not only as crucial sites to conduct research, but also as contested political and philosophical spaces in modern South Asia.

An inquiry into library history is especially timely now due to extensive efforts to digitise library collections in and from South Asia. Digitisation efforts by universities, Rekhta, Google, Adam Matthew and others provide the hope of wider access to library materials on a global scale. At the same time, though, they threaten to undermine local accessibility as librarians and patrons worry that digitisation will be used to justify library closures. Libraries centred around languages that are less commonly read, or otherwise marginalised, are particularly vulnerable. By bringing together papers on topics ranging from colonial-era manuscript collections to South Asian collections in contemporary universities in the United States, and by addressing both the movements of books across national borders between India and Pakistan and the transformation of physical texts through digital technology, we hope to encourage more of our colleagues to turn their attention to these essential institutions of intellectual life.

We are not proposing a unified theory of libraries in South Asia. As a number of the articles in this section discuss, it is often difficult to make out the boundaries separating libraries from archives, bookstores and other kinds of collections. For us, though, the elements—not uniformly present—that make libraries distinctive and productive sites of enquiry include their construction around materials positioned as texts; their disposition toward use by publics, however defined, that are broader than the scholarly and official publics that frequent state archives; and their temporal orientation toward the works of the past on the one hand, and to future growth and circulation on the other. Therefore, each of the articles in this special section explores the tension between libraries’ aspirations towards growth and their role as repositories of contested textual pasts. To put it another way, how do libraries unsettle assumptions about the differences between scholarly and popular publics in South Asia in ways that studies of archives alone cannot?

A central paradox tackled by each of the articles is the simultaneous cultural importance and institutional neglect of many libraries in contemporary South Asia. Certain libraries have become culturally significant sites claimed by actors ranging from the East India Company to the post-Partition nation-states of India and Pakistan. The political valence of these institutions is suggested by the widely reproduced photograph that seems to show the librarian B.S. Kesavan in the act of dividing the collection of the Central Secretariat Library in Delhi into stacks labelled ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’.¹⁷ However, most libraries in contemporary India, Pakistan and Bangladesh suffer from inadequate funding, political indifference and declining readership. This neglect is exemplified by the library of the Idara-e Adabiyat-e Urdu in Hyderabad, India, discussed in Cerulli’s article. This institution contains a collection of Urdu and Persian manuscripts from the Deccan, along with rare printed materials of influential literary figures in twentieth-century Hyderabad. Despite these rich and varied textual collections, it has struggled to remain open and has become financially dependent on calligraphy training and irregular state support.¹⁸ Elsewhere, formerly vibrant institutions like the Saulat Library in Rampur have fallen derelict, or else they have vanished entirely, as in the case of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu in Patna.¹⁹

Finally, this special section explores the ways in which the construction, administration and disposition of libraries are inherently political projects. In her study of Tamil textual cultures, Bhavani Raman challenges the framing of vernacular archives as a separate sphere of cultural autonomy and resistance to the workings of colonial knowledge projects by tracing how ‘the most quotidian register of daily office work’ interconnected ‘the colonial state archive and vernacular language and writing practices’.²⁰ Building on Raman’s encouragement to avoid conceptualising vernacular archives as a ‘separate sphere’ from colonial projects, a number of the articles here demonstrate how vernacular libraries, often constructed and maintained beyond the ambit of the colonial or post-colonial states, were nonetheless deeply enmeshed in varied state projects.

The papers and further questions

This special section begins with two papers concerning manuscript collections. In ‘Plunder and Prestige: Tipu Sultan’s Library and the Making of British India’, Joshua Ehrlich examines the eighteenth-century library of Tipu Sultan, which was first amassed and then dispersed through looting and warfare. Anthony Cerulli approaches manuscript collections from a different angle in ‘Archival Aesthetics: Framing and Exhibiting Indian Manuscripts and Manuscript Libraries’. In this essay, Cerulli turns from his usual practice of analysing the contents of Sanskrit manuscripts to reflect instead on the aesthetics of manuscript libraries, which he has documented through a photographic project he calls Manuscriptistan.

Three papers centre on institutions that emerged from the heated linguistic politics of late colonial North India. In ‘Bound for Home: Books and Community in a Bihari Qasba’, David Boyk documents the roles played by a collaboratively assembled Urdu library in the lives of the residents of Desna, a qasba or small town in Bihar. Andrew Amstutz, in ‘A Partitioned Library: Changing Collecting Priorities and Imagined Futures in a Divided Urdu Library, 1947–49’, details the contestations over the fate of the library of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu after Partition. In ‘The Hindi Library and the Making of an Archive: The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan from 1911 to 1973’, Aakriti Mandhwani shows how the Sammelan carefully constructed both an archive and a library for Hindi, making sure to keep the two distinct.

The final two papers of this special section turn to collections outside the terrestrial limits of South Asia itself. As Aamir Mufti has pointed out in a memorable description of the British Library, one of the legacies of colonialism is that many of the most remarkable repositories of South Asian books lie outside the subcontinent.²¹ In ‘The Books in the Bunker: Global Flows of Meaning and Matter in Academic Assemblages’, Gwendolyn S. Kirk investigates the profusion of Indian books shipped to United States institutions under Cold War-era initiatives. Many of these volumes formed the basis for the development of South Asian Studies in the USA, while others lay undisturbed and unread for decades until changing circumstances brought them to cataloguers’ notice. Finally, in ‘From South Asian Print to the Digital Archive: The Quest for Access and Sustainability’, C. Ryan Perkins discusses the digital repositories that are increasingly indispensable for readers around the world, both inside and outside the academy. He draws out surprising parallels between contemporary debates over digitisation and older negotiations around lithograph printing in colonial India.

As Mani observes in his study of German book culture, ‘libraries are both imaginary collections and real spaces’.²² In order to better understand the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ potential of libraries in modern South Asia, we now turn to some brief comparative reflections on the libraries under study. By considering these libraries as a group, we can better assess the significance of some of the connections among the seven articles. In noting these connections, we acknowledge the unrepresentative nature of the libraries studied here. Nonetheless, we hope that the study of this group of libraries will be generative for future scholarship. Manuscripts constitute an important element in at least four of our libraries: Tipu Sultan’s contested collection, the institutions pictured in Manuscriptistan, the partitioned library of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu and the collecting practices of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan. These institutions reveal a central question of libraries in modern South Asia: Why are handwritten manuscripts, which often are challenging to read for many library patrons, such valued texts in modern South Asia?

Three of our libraries also contained important vernacular print collections that were established during the contentious language politics of the early twentieth century: those of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in Allahabad, the Anjuman Al-Islah in Desna and the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu in Delhi. Each of these libraries of vernacular printed texts became important spaces for competing nationalist language politics in northern India from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1950s. Despite representing opposed linguistic-political agendas, two of these bodies, the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, shared similar origins, institutional structures and ideological goals. More broadly, the individual institutional histories of the libraries themselves unsettle simple associations with larger imperial, national or linguistic projects and instead reveal complex relationships to larger political formations and social developments. In the case of the Anjuman Al-Islah in Desna, the library was the origin point for a madrasa and student group, not the other way around. For their part, the leadership of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan viewed their library as a moral alternative to the post-colonial Indian state and its advocacy of Hindi, despite the Sammelan’s active involvement in the early post-colonial Indian state’s language debates and policies.

It would be possible to group the libraries examined in this special section into those containing handwritten manuscripts and those devoted to printed books. Building instead on the blurring of the boundaries between different textual technologies in a number of the articles, we argue that important similarities emerge across this diverse group of library institutions. For example, Perkins uncovers similar publishing and financial challenges faced by a prominent Urdu author in the late nineteenth century and digitisation projects in the twenty-first century. Building on this chronological juxtaposition, both Ehrlich and Kirk address the global circulation of books from South Asia in the early nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, respectively. Despite dealing with different time periods, types of texts, and empires, the changing conceptualisation of the Indian subcontinent through the collection of libraries is central to both of their articles. Moreover, many of the libraries showcased in this special section embraced collecting priorities at odds with the assumptions of either contemporary readers or later scholars. For example, the Anjuman Al-Islah in Desna focused on collecting periodicals at a time when most libraries focused on manuscripts and printed books.

In turn, libraries have repeatedly been divided and dispersed in moments of political crisis. In his analysis of the material and ideological forces that shaped the division of libraries and books between East and West Germany, Mani argues that ‘the political division of the country was reflected in the splitting of the national bibliography’.²³ Here, too, we see the subdivision and relocation of collections as part of larger political transformations in the subcontinent, whether in the eighteenth-century manuscript collection of Tipu Sultan or the twentieth-century libraries of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu and the Anjuman Al-Islah.

The articles collected here represent only a few ways of historicising our understanding of libraries, but they prompt a number of larger questions. How can libraries unsettle assumptions about the relationships between scholarly and popular publics in ways that other kinds of archives cannot? How do we make sense of the distance between the cultural significance attached to many libraries in post-colonial South Asia and their institutional neglect by states and other patrons? How can thinking about libraries contribute to broader discussions of accessibility and equity in South Asia and around the world? How do the complicated historical trajectories of libraries present new perspectives on the empires, nation-states and political projects with which they were associated?

Many libraries in South Asia look quite different from those discussed here: newspaper reading rooms run by clubs or political parties, for instance, or video lending libraries, or else street-corner shops selling photocopies of textbooks or pulp novels. Our hope, however, is that the approaches taken here will inspire inquiries into familiar libraries as well as unconventional institutions, and that scholars will come to see libraries not as mere warehouses for the texts they depend on, but as participants in social contestations and the imagining of alternative political futures. In the well-known essay to which we have gestured in our title, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things’.²⁴ Perhaps libraries have the potential to renew not only the old, but the new as well.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. David Boyk, ‘A Lettered Life: The Literary Existence of a Second-Generation Library Owner’, The Caravan (Aug. 2012), p. 8 [https://caravanmagazine.in/lede/lettered-life, accessed 8 Feb. 2020].

2. David Boyk, ‘Home in the Hinterland’, Los Angeles Review of Books (3 Oct. 2014) [https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/home-hinterland/, accessed 10 Feb. 2020].

3. See Rekhta [https://www.rekhta.org, accessed 8 Feb. 2020]; and National Digital Library of India [https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in, accessed 8 Feb. 2020].

4. R.K. Narayan, ‘On Libraries’, The Hindu (23 Sept. 1951), reprinted in N. Ravi (ed.), The Hindu Speaks on Libraries (Madras: Kasturi & Sons, 1992), pp. 92–4; and Mridula Koshy, ‘Open Books: Why India Needs a Library Movement’, The Caravan (June 2017), pp. 76–82 [https://caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/india-needs-library-movement, accessed 8 Feb. 2020].

5. Donald Davis, ‘The Status of Library History in India: A Report of an Informal Survey and a Selective Bibliographic Essay’, in Libraries & Culture, Vol. 25, no. 4 (Fall 1990), pp. 575–89; Donald Clay Johnson, ‘Ahmedabadi Philanthropy and Libraries’, in Libraries & Culture, Vol. 31, no. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 103–12; Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Lisa Klopfer, ‘Commercial Libraries in an Indian City: An Ethnographic Sketch’, in Libri, Vol. 54, no. 2 (June 2004), pp. 104–12; and Lokranjan Parajuli, ‘Where Interests Collided: Examining the Conflictual Relationship between the Nepali State and Its Citizens through the History of Public Libraries’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 5 (Oct. 2019), pp. 954–70.

6. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); S.D. Chrostowska, ‘Shelf Lives: On Nostalgic Libraries’, in Public Culture, Vol. 28, no. 1 (Jan. 2016), pp. 9–21; Alice Crawford, The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Dee Garrison, Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Brendan Luyt, ‘Colonialism, Ethnicity, and Geopolitics in the Development of the Singapore National Library’, in Libraries & the Cultural Record, Vol. 44, no. 4 (2009), pp. 418–33; and Brinkley Morris Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

7. George Roe, ‘Challenging the Control of Knowledge in Colonial India: Political Ideas in the Work of S.R. Ranganathan’, in Library & Information History, Vol. 26, no. 1 (Mar. 2010), pp. 18–32; and Jesse Shera, ‘S.R. Ranganathan—One American View’, in Wilson Library Bulletin, Vol. 37, no. 7 (Mar. 1963), pp. 581–2. Ranganathan’s ‘five laws’ (the first of which is ‘books are for use’) are widely known by librarians throughout the world.

8. For recent work on archives, see Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). On museums, see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (eds), No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015). On the history of the book, see Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007); and A.R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012). On manuscript cultures, see Nile Green, Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books, and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (New York: Routledge, 2006); Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); and Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). On print publics, see Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Boyk, ‘Collaborative Wit: Provincial Publics in Colonial North India’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 38, no. 1 (May 2018), pp. 89–106; Francis Cody, The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jennifer Dubrow, Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018); Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Robin Jeffrey, ‘Testing Concepts about Print, Newspapers, and Politics: Kerala, India, 1800–2009’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 68, no. 2 (May 2009), pp. 465–89; C. Ryan Perkins, ‘From the Meḥfil to the Printed Word: Public Debate and Discourse in Late Colonial India’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 50, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 2013), pp. 47–76; and Rashmi Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

9. See Susan Orlean, The Library Book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018); Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015); Fernando Báez, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, Alfred J. MacAdam (trans.) (New York: Atlas & Co., 2008); Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Lucien X. Polastron, Livres en Feu: Histoire de la Destruction Sans Fin des Bibliothèques (Paris: Denoël, 2004); Fatima Qaziha, Asnadi az Taraj-e Kitabkhana-e Saltanati (Tehran: Sazman-e Asnad va Kitabkhana-e Milli-e Jumhuri-e Islami-e Iran, 2011); James Raven, Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Marek Sroka, ‘The Destruction of Jewish Libraries and Archives in Cracow during World War II’, in Libraries & Culture, Vol. 38, no. 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 147–65. There is even a children’s book that documents how, in January 2011, thousands of Egypt’s library workers and students joined hands around the Library of Alexandria to protect it. See Karen Leggett Abouraya and Susan L. Roth, Hands around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books (New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 2012).

10. Sandi Hayek, ‘Tarabalis…Maktaba al-Sa’eh Afzal Mama Kant’, Almodon (3 Jan. 2015) [https://www.almodon.com/society/2015/1/3/%D8%B7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%B3-%D9%85%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%A6%D8%AD-%D8%A3%D9%81%D8%B6%D9%84-%D9%85%D9%85%D8%A7-%D9%83%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AA, accessed 17 Feb. 2020]; ‘Maktaba al-Sa’eh wa al-Taharruk al-Madani’, MTVLebanonNews (5 Jan. 2014) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt291rXlyqU, accessed 17 Feb. 2020].

11. ‘Turn the Page: Kerala Rebuilds Libraries Destroyed in Floods Using Crowd Funds’, The New Indian Express (11 Nov. 2018) [https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/nov/11/turn-the-page-kerala-rebuilds-libraries-destroyed-in-floods-using-crowd-funds-1896771.html, accessed 17 Feb. 2020].

12. ‘Publishing Houses to Unite in Gezi Park to Distribute Major Resistance Material: Books’, Hürriyet Daily News (4 June 2013) [https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/publishing-houses-to-unite-in-gezi-park-to-distribute-major-resistance-material-books-48234, accessed 29 Feb. 2020].

13. Zeynep Tufekci, ‘Why do Protest Camps Have Libraries?’, ideas.ted.com (13 June 2017) [https://ideas.ted.com/why-do-protest-camps-have-libraries/, accessed 1 Mar. 2020].

14. Nilanjana Roy, ‘Protest and the Pavement Library’, The Financial Times (9 Jan. 2020) [https://www.ft.com/content/c87301f2-307c-11ea-a329-0bcf87a328f2, accessed 8 Feb. 2020].

15. For an analysis of Gandhi’s publication of Indian Opinion and his inculcation of slow-reading practices, see Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press.

16. B. Venkat Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 4, 16.

17. Anhad Hundal has pointed out that this library’s collection was not in fact partitioned, although others were, and that the photo seems to have been staged for the benefit of the Life magazine photographer. See Anhad Hundal, ‘Getting the Picture: The Mystery of an Iconic Partition Photograph’, The Caravan (Sept. 2016) [https://caravanmagazine.in/lede/getting-the-picture-iconic-partition-photograph, accessed 9 Feb. 2020].

18. See Aihik Sur, ‘Guardians of the Urdu Art of Calligraphy Wait on Telangana Government to Fulfill Its Promises’, The New Indian Express (25 Aug. 2019) [https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2019/aug/25/guardians-of-the-urdu-art-of-calligraphy-wait-for-government-to-fulfil-its-promises-2023982.html, accessed 16 Feb. 2020].

19. Razak Khan, ‘The Case of Falling Walls: Politics of Demolition and Preservation in Rampur’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XLIX, no. 20 (17 May 2014), pp. 25–8; and Sheezan Nezami, ‘Once a Rich Urdu Library, Now a Den of Gamblers’, The Times of India (30 July 2015) [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Once-a-rich-Urdu-library-now-a-den-of-gamblers/articleshow/48287713.cms, accessed 9 Feb. 2020]. See also C.M. Naim, ‘Disappearing Treasures: Public Libraries and Urdu Printed Books’, in Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol. 26 (2011), pp. 53–63. Although India’s Urdu libraries are hardly unique in facing financial difficulties, their condition is particularly precarious because of the extent to which state support has been withdrawn since the pre-Partition era.

20. Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 18–9, 201.

21. Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 41–6.

22. Mani, Recoding World Literature, p. 36.

23. Ibid., p. 188.

24. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, Harry Zohn (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 61.