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Amitava Kumar's Bombay-London-New York : of Mughals and their book of auguries
In my hometown, Patna, also in Bihar, there is a general consensus that culture, like the surrounding economy, lies in ruins. And yet a visit to the Khudabaksh Library reveals another world, distant from the cramped, dusty streets outside filled with rickshaws and cars with loud, blasting horns. A librarian, his right hand shaky, pulls out a book on medicine that was written 2000 years ago. The book is titled Kitab-ul-Hashaish. The edition the librarian holds in his hands is from the 13th century. The book was translated from Greek to Arabic by the order of Haroun-al-Rashid; it carries beautiful illustrations painted with herbal and mineral colors that still appear clean and bright. The librarian is old; his spectacles sit crookedly over his bulging eyes. He wants to show me ancient paintings of war scenes, where, he says, "no two faces are
alike." He keeps using the phrase "hidden treasures." There are 22,000 handwritten books in this library; about 5000 to 70000 of them are rare manuscripts.
A well-known historian, Surendra Gopal, accompanies me on my visit to this library. Gopal tells me that the library was gifted to the government in 1891 and is today "the richest manuscript library on Islam in the world." When I hear this, I am only conscious of the wretchedness of the streets outside. A stone's throw away is the Patna Medical College and Hospital where I had been treated and operated upon when I was a boy. My mother, too, was a patient there. Later, my sister worked in its wards as a doctor. Medical procedures in the hospital were sometimes performed by the light of lanterns and torches; when it was raining, dying ants would crowd in and settle down on the open wounds
during operations. Even during the day, stray dogs pulled at patients' bandages. Patna is a place where rats carried away my mother's dentures.
The librarian at Khudabaksh has taken out from his safe another book. He tells me that it is a priceless book of poems by the Persian poet Hafiz. The book was presented to the Mughal ruler Humayun by the emperor of Iran in the 16th century. The Mughal rulers used the book to read omens, of shakun: they would turn to a page and try to foretell the future from the words there. Humayun's son, Akbar, was emperor when his son Jahangir, banished to Allahabad for his philandering, sought the help of the book to divine his future. The lines that the young prince came across were: "Ghan-e-garib! wa mehaat chun barnametabun / bashar-e-khud rawwem washaher yaar khud bathan" ("If it is intolerable for you to live in the foreign land / Then you
should return home. You will be emperor.") In the margins of the book, Jahangir had written that he was in Allahabad and had been perplexed; he returned home to Fatehpur Sikri on reading the augury, and a few days later following his father Akbar's death, was crowned emperor.
The librarian's dark finger hovers over the lines that the emperor had inscribed. The page is filigreed in gold, the bare portions stained with age. I want to touch the page myself. I ask the librarian's permission, and when he says yes, I gently place my index finger where the emperor has signed his name.
The librarian and the historian talk for a long time. I do not want to leave the library. It is hot outside--the temperature has exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The librarian, who knows Urdu, Arabic and
Persian, is reciting poetry. The words were written in the 19th century by the last Mughal governor of Bihar. The historian, Gopal, mentions his name. I ask the librarian to repeat the lines. The poet was addressing the deer in the forest, saying to them what they know, that Majnun (from the famous 12th century Persian love story of Layla and Majnun) has died. But what the poet wants to know from the deer is what has passed over the wilderness, how the forest has suffered. The librarian is a man of courtesy, what is called tahzeeb in Urdu. When I am leaving his office, he gestures toward Gopal and says, "he is a museum of knowledge. There are very few people left like this in Patna." Patna is the wilderness; people like the librarian recall Majnun, who has departed.
Gopal has been affected by the
conversation about Patna and the loss of cultural institutions. He says that there is a complete absence now of those kinds of conversations, which he feels are essential to civilized life. He is nostalgic about his youth in a young India. The historian is burdened by his memories. He talks about the lack of funds, the theft of public money, the closing of colleges and libraries.
I think of the librarian with his unsteady hand, lovingly laying out the volume that was brought from Iran to India by Humayun. The acquisition of those books was a part of a process of trade and conquest, tied to commerce, to the sale of both precious and ordinary goods. But, that was not all. There are other truths about books, too, like the words written by a reader in the margins of the text, about his hopes and fears, and the unknown. Books contain auguries of the future and
melancholia about the past. They haunted by the marketplace, but, at the same time, they embody subtle complexities of memory and desire, which cannot be neatly or fully regulated by the marketplace or, for that matter, the rulers of nations and corporations.
Writers bear witness to this uneven battle of forces too: It is part of the reality of the writer's work---struggling every day with the worldliness of the word. Writers are caught in the contradictory tasks of building imaginary worlds that are removed from everyday life and, at the same time, establishing how the imagination is not detached from the quotidian world but very much a vital part of it. To realize the truth of that condition is to know that books not only offer refuge from the world, but also return you to it.