National Librarians’ Day
By Dr Sanjeev Chopra
The Doon Library and Resource Centre celebrated the National Librarians’ Day on August 12th with a tribute to the doyen of Library Science in the country, Padma Shri awardee SR Ranganathan.
Dr BK Joshi, the Chairman of DLRC, described him as an ‘accidental librarian’, because although his core subject and interest was mathematics, perchance the ‘additional responsibility’ to set up the library in the University of Madras soon became his core interest and passion (if not obsession)! He was instrumental in developing his unique Colon Classification system for libraries in 1933. This was adopted by the BHU when it was established by Madan Mohan Malviya, where he joined as a Professor of Library Science. However, the National Library of India has preferred to continue with the Dewey Decimal system of classification. The Aligarh Muslim University follows the Universal Decimal classification. The American Centre libraries in India of course follow the US based Library of Congress classification. In fact, the general lament in library circles is that, if a ‘system of classification’ is also a kind of soft power, then India ought to have put its weight behind the Ranganathan format. However, this is the subject of a larger debate, and your columnist is not an expert: suffice to say that whatever the system of classification, it is the librarian who makes all the difference. She helps the reader/ researcher find the right set of books, and more than that, creates the right ambience for delving deeper into the subject.
In the course of preparing my keynote address for the occasion, I started reflecting upon my own interface with libraries at various points of time in my life, beginning from the small children’s library at the BSF Welfare Centre, Jullundur (as Jalandhar was then known), in the late sixties. We had the Hindi pictorial magazines Chandamama and Champak, as well all of Enid Blyton – from Noddy books to Secret Seven and Five Find Outers. As kids, we absorbed, relished and enjoyed both genres – which were as different from each other as chalk and cheese, for the lead story in Chandamama was always about Bikram and Baital, and their unending conversation, or about the legends and myths from the Mahabharata peppered with stories from Tenali Rama and the wit of Birbal, in contrast to the lives of the upper middle class English kids in boarding schools who came home for vacations to solve mysteries about thefts of antiques and disappearing pets. It was easy to get transported to these very different worlds! As I grew older, it was the Illustrated Weekly of India, Femina, Life, Time, Newsweek, DharamYug which caught my attention.
By the time I was thirteen, I started enjoying the visits to the school library, read up on the ‘classics retold’ for children: from Kalidas and Rabindranath Tagore, on the one hand, to Shakespeare and Dickens, on the other. Russian stories were a hit because the Soviet Union really subsidised its literature, especially books for children and youth in English and Hindi. Unfortunately, there were hardly any books in Punjabi for children. During my senior secondary years, I visited the school library quite often, because this was also the space which doubled as the activity room where we selected poems for elocutions and speeches for declamations. I was fascinated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and it was my ambition to possess a personal copy when I could afford it. As Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon just a few years ago, there was an obsession to go through large format books which captured the pictures of Apollos and astronauts.
The college libraries, both, at DAV College and Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jullundur, were dull. Books were kept under lock and key, and the librarians were obsessed with guarding their treasure, rather than opening them to the readers. They may have read the five principles of library science – books are for use, every reader has her own book, every book has her reader, readers’ time is precious, and that a good library is always evolving — but they observed these mostly in breach, and the college managements were mostly indifferent.
Fortunately, there were three very good libraries where one could browse books on the shelves and get up to four copies issued. The first of these was the Desh Bhagat Yadgar Hall – a memorial to the freedom fighters of the Ghadar movement, and the Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU) study centre in their extended campus. This is where I would sit down to read, and feel grown-up, for one could engage in conversations with other users – mostly researchers, faculty members and journalists. Then there was the District Library, which had just opened up, and at the time of inauguration, all of us who were regulars at the GNDU Study Centre, were invited to the programme, where the Deputy Commissioner asked us for suggestions on what books we would like to have in the library! Boy, this was like being on Cloud Nine!
I must also mention that the Press Information Bureau and the Lok Sampark Vibhag of the Punjab Government also maintained reading rooms for accredited journalists where all newspapers and journals, including Times Literary Supplement, Time, Newsweek and The Economist were available. One read just about anything and everything; truth be told, before the advent of the semester system, an undergrad programme was generally quite relaxed. If one studied seriously from end-January through early-April, one could come out with flying colours!
At eighteen, I joined JNU and saw that the history section itself had more books than all the books in the libraries back home. But while every book that we required for our modern history course was available there, I enjoyed going to the Nehru Memorial Library (now the PMML). The canteen was better and there was the occasional conference where ‘chai-samosa’ was on the house! Later, when I joined the School of International Studies (also at JNU), I took up the membership of the ICWA and IDSA libraries both in Sapru House on Barakhamba Road.
Later, I joined the Times of India (ToI) as a trainee journalist and I took to their library as a fish to water. ToI would get so many book review copies and we were encouraged to pick up any publication which took our fancy. This library had newspapers and magazines from across the world. I got most of the material for my civil services preparation from this library.
The library where I have spent the most time as an IAS officer is of course the Gandhi Smriti Library at the LBSNAA. During my Robert S McNamara fellowship year 1998-99, I was a Deputy Director and preparing a monograph on the role and potential of agricultural cooperatives in mitigating conflict in South Asia. As the Director from 2019 to 2021, I was there at least three days a week researching books on the states of Bharat. This is also the library from where I picked up over a dozen books on Lal Bahadur Shastri for my current work.
Before I close, I would like to mention three other libraries. The National Library at Kolkata, the Cornell University library system and the Merton College library at Oxford. The National Library has great potential but has been ‘headless’ for long stretches in the last decade. This has a direct impact on the ‘connect’ of the reader with the library. Cornell has great libraries, and the well-appointed, wall-to-wall carpeted graduate study rooms with high-speed internet, and the luxury of having shelves to stock your books and papers. And finally, the library at Merton College which has opened its doors every single day (except during the long Christmas break) from 1374! I was there at the turn of the millennium as a Twenty First Century Trust Fellow.
This column has focussed on ‘physical’ libraries – books on shelves – but we are now moving to digital libraries. I am happy to share with our readers that one of the first and most meaningful collaborations of VoW is with the National Digital Library of India, based out of IIT Kharagpur, which helps readers access books anytime, anywhere on any of their devices. And the NDLI, or for that matter, any digital library is open on Christmas, Diwali, Guru Purab, Eid and Holi — even on our Independence and Republic Days!
Sanjeev Chopra (born 3 March, 1961) is a retired IAS officer of the 1985 batch, from Kapurthala, Punjab. He is a resident of Dehradun. He is a former Director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and has written a book, “We, the People of the States of Bharat: The Making and Remaking of India’s Internal Boundaries”, published in 2022. He is now the patron and honorary consultant to a literary festival, the Valley of Words International Literary Festival, held annually in Dehradun. Chopra has held the Hubert H Humphrey Fellowship (Cornell), the Robert S McNamara Fellowship (World Bank) and positions at Royal Asiatic Society, London, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (Harvard).
