Invaluable print heritage

The Roja Muthiah Research Library is a treasurehouse of rare books and manuscripts. ELIZABETH ROY has a look at the collection and writes.

ROJA MUTHIAH Research Library has soul. Way beyond Mogappair you turn off the road into untamed wilds, dotted by square houses. There are no roads, nothing to show direction except the sun's trail across the sky and the odd crow flying northward. That's where the impeccably maintained 5,600-sq. ft. RMRL greets you.

RMRL's director Theodore Baskaran and the 25 professionals who run the place present a relaxed and democratic atmosphere of sharing and collective responsibility. While rare books purr in crowded lines, beyond the glass walls the staff are busy like little ants at their computers, cataloguing, indexing, microfilming, at preservation techniques or simply making sense of what was printed 200 years ago. The oldest work in the collection, Kandhar Andhadhi, was published in 1804.

A more comprehensive look at RMRL begins with the extraordinary story of Roja Muthiah Chettiar, "an eccentric bibliophile", who lived in Kottaiyur, near Karaikkudi. He earned a living as a painter of signs and spent all his earnings collecting all the published material (most of it in Tamil) that he could lay hands on. He collected them, he bought them (many times in multiple copies of 3 or 4), he exchanged them. Over 40 years he built himself a collection of 100,000 rare books, journals, newspapers...He gathered thousands of pamphlets, notices, letters, invitations and other single sheet material. He also had a most singular collection of matchboxes and the rarest of stamps and coins.

When the collection inundated his house he rented other houses, garages, all kinds of places. Whenever there was a need for money there were dealings with antiquarians and universities abroad. (He sold them only copies) Today the University of Michigan alone has a collection of 120 books that Roja Muthiah sold them. At other times he would sell a couple of his coins or stamps from his philately collection. He would carefully follow advertisements for stamps to complete "sets" and knew which philatelist in England needed which stamp! At one stage he threw open his collection to scholars. He called it "India Library Services". For a small amount you could stay there for a few days and consult the place. That's how Baskaran first met him, when he was searching for material for his book on Tamil Cinema.

I encountered a small portion of his collection when I visited him in his modest home in Kottaiyur. He sat outside under the shade of a little tree while his house stood thick with his collection and an oppressive pall of gammaxine. A year later in 1992 I heard that he had died of slow gammaxine poisoning.

His family decided to sell the collection. Scholars from the University of Chicago who had used it and Indian scholars like A. K. Ramanujan and C. S. Lakshmi who were in the US at the time talked to the university's South Asia Research Library outfit about saving the collection. And the University of Chicago decided to buy it. Baskaran talks about the deal, "Even while they were negotiating, they had decided that it would remain in Tamil Nadu to form the nucleus for a research library for Tamil Studies. They looked for an organisation that would understand it, take care of it and carry on Roja Muthiah's project of making it available to scholars. They zeroed in on MOZHI, in Chennai - a Trust which was started to develop resources for Tamil language and related culture, Tamil society and Tamil history." RMRL opened in 1994.

P. Sankaralingam and S. Ramakrishnan, both trustees of MOZHI began work on their dream with collaboration from James Nye, director of South Asian Bibliographic Wing of the University of Chicago. Sankaralingam became RMRL's first director. A friend offered to build a space which would temporarily house the library.

Sankaralingam devised a system for creating machine-readable catalogue both in Tamil and Roman script. UNESCO provided the software and they continue to update the skills of the staff. Unfortunately Sankaralingam passed away in 1997.Baskaran who had just retired as Chief Post Master General was a close friend and a trustee of MOZHI and a Social historian. He took over as director.

Baskaran categorises the collection into religious literature contemporary literature and popular entertainment forms. "It includes unorthodox collections: books that do not find a place in any library, drama scripts going back to 1883, political pamphlets, a wide collection of erotic literature in the Tamil tradition...We also have a number of magazines which no other library has, the magazines that poet Bharathi ran. They are very important from the point of view of literature and of political history. There are political pamphlets of the early 40s when the Dravidian movement began. 'Cinema Ulagam', the very first cinema magazine and 500 other copies of different cinema magazines. They were dismissed by most people as plebeian preoccupations. Posters and graffiti reflect the political concerns of the people."

Roja Muthiah picked up interesting letters as well, "We have a letter from Kalki written to Ariakudi Ramanuja Iyengar - four pages on Tamil Isai. That letter became a crucial document because everyone was sniping at Kalki and suddenly this document came up that he was really in support of Tamil Isai."

Roja Muthiah collected wedding invitations, invitations for house warming ceremonies, puberty ceremony. These broadly categorised as single sheet material are all sitting in sealed boxes waiting to be catalogued.

"A wedding invitation during the war years has a postscript,' send your ration material well ahead - arisi paruppu." A drama notice of 1889 says, "panchamars (Harijans) and lepers not allowed." These document the concerns of sections of society at certain periods of time. Now with all the emphasis on subaltern studies, Dalit studies, women's studies, they have become absolute treasures." So far they have catalogued 50,000 books and the catalogue is available on-line. Every article in the magazine collection is indexed. They hope to finish the work over the next couple of years. For example, if you want to know how the donkey was used in Tamil Nadu, in seconds you can reach it subject wise or author wise.

Wellcome Research Institute for the History of Medicine in England was particularly interested in this single largest collection on indigenous medicines, especially Siddha. With their help RMRL's staff were trained in state of the art technology in microfilming. A subsequent project made it possible for them to acquire the entire Siddha section on microfilm, while generating an income for RMRL. Every book will eventually be on microfilm and with installation of a microfilm scanner, any page from any book will be made available on-line. It has become a professionally equipped digital library.

"We also have an acquisition programme. One of our aims is to make the Roja Muthiah collection the nucleus and build a collection around it, extending it. Amazing collections are now being handed over to us." Among the collections received are those of A K Ramanujan, Indologist Gift Siromoni's consequential work on Kolam and the language of the Narikuravas. Milton Singer's complete collection of South Indian Studies.

RMRL has an ongoing project with the Ford Foundation. They collaborate with Tamil Nadu State Archives and Maraimalai Adigal Library to microfilm the rare books. RMRL gets to keep a copy, the collaborating library keeps one and the hard copy goes back on the shelf. There are other libraries and organisations both in the country and abroad that RMRL is currently working with.

In the meantime, back home the team is busy at work, causing newer and newer ground swells. And maybe as per the MoU, "the entire collection along with all the infrastructure developed during the project period will be ceded to MOZHI, once the present project objectives are achieved." When the dust settles, all that remains for tomorrow will be an invaluable print heritage.

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