Tomes from the past

Pradeep Kanna
Nov 5 · 3 min read

The Theosophical Society building on West Perumal Maistry Street hides a quaint little library that was established in 1883

Amidst the cacophony of traffic and people on the Masi streets around Meenakshi Temple, stands a 136-year-old structure. A handful of senior citizens occasionally drop into the Theosophical Society to read the day’s newspapers. But not many look into the rich collection that the otherwise neatly-arranged room holds.

Shelves inside contain several original government gazettes, notifications and bulletins, manuscripts, first prints of many old books from English classics to Tamil literature that are over a century old.

From Benito Mussolini’s My Autobiography (translated into English by Richard Washburn Child in 1924); A 1896 print of The Rationale of Mesmerism by A P Sennett; the Travancore archaeological series (published in 1912) by T A Gopinatha Rao, the then Superintendent of Archaeology of Travancore state; Creative India by Benoy Kumar Sarkar (published in 1937); The Lowell lectures on The Ascent of Man by Henry Drumond (published in 1896) and many such treasures are gathering dust here.

The place is called the Madurai Theosophical Society Free Library and Reading Room. The library started functioning on the same spot on January 14, 1883, when the Theosophical Society’s Madura charter was handed over to Sir Subbier Subramania Iyer, a legal luminary of those times, who along with Annie Besant founded the Home Rule movement. The Society was registered in 1900 and the library continued.

“Several freedom fighters visited during those years but unfortunately, its existence is erased from public memory today,” says R Krishnamoorthy, a retired professor and advocate who now manages the day-to-day affairs of the library. He estimates that there are around 5,000 books in the library, including many out of print rare ones.

With assistance from students of Madurai Kamaraj University, an attempt to digitise the library has been recently initiated. “The idea is to form an Online Public Acess Catalogue (OPAC) system so that more people become aware and interested in the collection we hold,” says Krishnamoorthy, who has been record keeping for more than two decades. “Not more than 20 people drop in to read the daily newspapers to keep themselves occupied,” he adds.

Krishnamoorthy says apart from those who love history, it would be nice if more students visit the library as it also stocks academic material useful for those writing public exams. “If we have more footfall, the place will also become livelier,” he hopes.

Preservation of old books is another aspect that needs to be looked into. “Preservation of archival material and manuscripts is important,” says Chennai-based architect Thirupurasundari Sevvel, who regularly conducts book restoration workshops at the Madras Literary Society, Chennai. “Not just a well-maintained building, there should also be proper arrangements for storage with inputs from architects, engineers and conservation scientists,” she says.

For instance, she mentions that from early 1800s to late 1980s, paper makers used aluminium sulfate, an acidic compound, in most printing papers. Printed documents from that period need to be dusted, de-acidified and fumigated to improve their lifespan. “But we are failing to prevent their decay and damage and in the process losing our literary wealth,” she says.

Krishnamoorthy has worries about internet. “It is sounding the death knell for our libraries. They are not just living storehouses of knowledge, but spaces that need to be experienced by humans. People should start embracing them again or else only an information outage will make them realise the importance of such institutions,” he says and cites the example of the world’s oldest library, the Al-Qarawiyyin, that was recently opened to public after restoration. “Located for over a millennium inside the Al Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco, it was only in 2012 that Canadian-Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni decided to give it a facelift,” he informs us. “We need to care about our libraries and more such efforts are required to revive old libraries,” he adds.

Mathematician Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan ( 12 August 1892–27 September 1972) is also known as the father of documentation, information and library science in India. His most notable contribution was the development of classification system and five laws of library science.

Originally published in The Hindu Metroplus (Madurai ): https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/tomes-from-the-past/article29859251.ece

Pradeep Kanna

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I'm just an old wine in a new bottle.

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