Tamil Nadu Agricultural University’s treasure house of rare books

Varsity’s archaic library houses as many as 50,000 rare books and journals; works under way to digitise select books

The archives section at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University Library which has rare books dating back to 17th century.

Deep inside the maze of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University’s (TNAU) century-old library, is a room labelled ‘Archaic library’. Among the 50,000 rare books and journals stacked on the dusty shelves of this room, is one published 334 years ago – ‘Horti Malabarici Vol I (1678)’. The hardback had broken from its spine and its 500 pages of Latin had fed countless silverfish. Even so, the book overwhelms for the sheer detail in its double-page sketches of Malabar’s indigenous flora. Each drawing is accompanied by the plant name in Latin, Arabic, Malayalam, the Brahmi script and occasionally, Portuguese.

The 12 volume series was the brainchild of the then Governor of Dutch Malabar, Hendrik van Reede. Fascinated by the plants in the land he ruled, he recorded nearly 750 finds with a team of over 100 local physicians, illustrators, translators and botanists. Today, his work is revered by botanists for being the first scientific documentation of the area’s flora, by historians for its narration of the sociocultural milieu then and by linguists for the earliest prints of the Malayalam script. TNAU possesses the very first edition of this seminal work.

The other treasures in the rare books and journals collection include 30 books from the 17th Century, 150 from the 18th Century, 2,300 from the 19th century and 50,000 between 1900 and 1950. Of these, 83 of the earliest books have been digitised using high-resolution cameras that capture even the detailing of Hendrik’s illustrations. Thus while readers today cannot physically turn the pages of Hendrik’s work without crumbling them, they can zoom in on the illustrations, ‘bookmark’ pages and even ‘favourite’ chapters of its virtual version.

The process of digitisation has been encouraged by grants from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), under which TNAU operates. ICAR hopes to create EGranth, a virtual library, from the collections of the 40 State Universities under it. Thus digitisation began at TNAU in 2007. Currently, digitised books are available only to TNAU’s students but in the next phase of EGranth’s growth, they will be available nationwide, through ICAR.

The books for digitisation are chosen by the various heads of TNAU’s departments, says librarian C. Prema. “We’ve picked books that are either important works which are no longer in print or those that are relevant to today’s syllabus,” says A. Vadivel, professor of soil science at TNAU.

Books on the history of agricultural subjects are especially popular for digitisation since current editions leave out the details adds Mr. Vadivel. Among these is Motilal Kashalchand Shah’s ‘The Principles of Agriculture for India’ (1888) – one of the first books in English on local agriculture by an Indian. The library’s copy contains a note from Motilal’s wife, in a calligraphic hand, dedicating the book to TNAU in memory of her late husband.

However, Indian authors are few in a collection overrun by the British. Bound by ropes and stacked on the floor for digitisation, are a series of over 35 books called the ‘Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma’. The series was begun in 1881 on the suggestion of a group of British scientists including Charles Darwin. TNAU and West Bengal University of Animal & Fishery Sciences in Kolkata are the only universities that possess the complete series, nationwide.

While most of the books digitised are agriculture-specific, the ‘Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 1903-05’ and ‘The History of Ancient India’ by R. C. Dutt (Price – Rs. 5) have found their way in. Hidden somewhere between the cobwebs and the dust of the books yet to be digitised, lie Volumes III, IV and VII of ‘Castes and Tribes of Southern India’ (1909) – E. Thurston and K. Rangachari’s controversial work which marked the beginning of Indian anthropological studies. As the edges of Thurston’s entry on tribal Kota women powdered into my palms, author C. S. Lewis’ advice came to mind: “If we had to choose between reading old books and new books, it should be the old ones we choose. Not because they are better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.”

July 3, 2012

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/article3596727.ece