Borges’ Paradise

In the year 1 B.P. (1 Before Pandemic, or 2019 in other words) I was in Buenos Aires and a visit to  El Ateneo, a spectacular bookstore there reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges’ quote, “I had always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library“.

Over the last year or more, I have been visiting libraries in many cities – ostensibly for archival work, but truth be told, mainly to grab slices of paradise on earth. As Amir Khusrau might well have said, “Firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast: hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast.”

The reading room of the Widener library at Harvard (on the left) is one such, a source of equal parts bliss and solace. The peace that emanates draws large numbers of readers – and has done ever since it was built in 1915 as a memorial to Harry Elkins Widener’07 by his mother. Poignantly, she and her maid survived the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, while he, his father, and his valet drowned.  Built in a period of less than three years, this monumental library is the fulcrum of the university, and one of its early denizens was DD Kosambi (the subject of many a post on this blog, and one of the reasons for me to visit there in the recent past) who mentioned it often and in various contexts. Preparing for an exam as a sophomore, on the 22nd January 1927, DDK  asks, “Why is it that a paper that can be completely solved within thirty minutes in the Widener reading room takes all of three hours in an examination hall?” Further evidence of the magical properties of libraries!

I spend a little more time at the Pusey and Houghton libraries – these are right next to the Widener, but they contain much of the archives I need to consult: letters, diaries, documents from a century or more ago. And learning how to use them is an education in of itself, the discipline goes well beyond speaking in hushed tones. Not being able to carry in any pen or paper, for instance, and not handling more than one document at a time, resting valuable books in foam wedges (the image above is from some commercial site) so as to preserve the binding… One has to learn to be careful, and also to be caring of this valuable heritage. Which, clearly, much of it is.  The Pusey, named for an earlier President of Harvard, contains all the papers of the University, while the Houghton, which was built in the 1940’s, houses rare books and manuscripts.

The trouble with ferreting around in archives is that one file leads to another, and to another, and before one knows it, one is down some deep rabbit holes… Which is one reason that last month I landed up at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, looking at some correspondence between Kosambi and Robert Oppenheimer.

The library of the IAS is not very large, being so much more specialised than a University library. As it turns out, Oppenheimer’s papers are in the Firestone Library at Princeton University next door, but at some offsite location so I couldn’t get to see them. The archives at the IAS are a treat as well, leading to a day well spent in these environs. Many of the Indian visitors to the IAS in the early years (1940’s and ’50’s)  were somehow connected with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research – Bhabha, Kosambi, Chandrasekharan – and this was a time when the physical library was seen as crucial to building up any academic institution. Ironically, the realisation that with the passage of time, the volume (and weight) of journals and books in a growing library would become too large to be sustained — leading to the digitization of all journals, beginning with JSTOR — would start at Princeton. Mercifully, while digitial libraries have largely addressed the issue of access to scholarship, they have not obviated the need for the physical library for those that need the space to feel and smell paper books.

The TIFR library, in 1981 when I first went there, was pretty much as good as any other library in the world in terms of what it contained in physics and mathematics. What was an endearing feature of the mathematics books at least was the purely alphabetical mode of shelving – none of the Ranganathan colon classification or the Dewey decimals that plagued most other libraries. One found Weil close to Weyl (if not next to each other) and Hardy and Hilbert not too far from each other as well, so the chances of serendipity were very real, leading to another set of days well spent or happily wasted, depending on how one looks at it.

The most difficult part of my moving to JNU was having to give up the TIFR library: this was before the internet or email was widely accessible, so also well before PCs and scanners were ubiquitous, and well before the  digitization of journals was a twinkle in anybody’s eye. In 1986, the JNU library system was to put it mildly, in shambles. The new library building had been constructed (a visibly leaning tower, I think) but the fire-safety issues had not been sorted out for one thing, so moving the existing collection there was going to take time. The architecture was not, again to put it mildly, book friendly, especially given Delhi weather, the heat and the dust. To add to which, there were no books in physics or mathematics given that the School of Physical Sciences was just starting then. I had to go to the Indian Statistical Institute down the road from time to time, and to the Delhi University library at least once a month, graduate students in tow, to see what the latest issues of Physical Review Letters might contain. I don’t remember the discomfort or the irritation – those were happy times in their own way.  Now renamed the B R Ambedkar Central Library, the JNU Library is visibly struggling – the collection is not growing, the premises are poorly maintained, the staffing is inadequate – sure ways to kill the lifeline of a university. Still,  imperfect as it is, it serves a purpose – for many this is a site of imagined opportunities.

For the past year I have been ensconced in the Prime Ministers Museum & Library, earlier the NMML (NM for Nehru Memorial) several times a week. Their archives of modern India are superb in terms of depth and breadth of content and while the  delivery is not quite at the level that  libraries in the US are able to provide, it is not far behind. I can carry in pens and books, and cannot take any photographs, for instance, and all requests for photocopies need to be done on paper (mercifully not in triplicate) but it all works well enough. This is a national resource of inestimable value and we do need to give it the funding it requires with few  questions asked.

And in all this, I have become deeply aware of the cognitive generosity of librarians. Many members of this tribe take it as a given, that they have a social responsibility to enable those that come into a library, to find what they seek or more often, to find what they need to seek, even if they do not immediately know what they are looking for. So often I have found that an archivist or librarian I have approached has ordered resources for me, sometimes gone out of their way to search for the things I needed, without themselves being interested in the questions that drove me there. Philosophers and psychologists do point out that we all have a cognitive generosity through which we all share information about ourselves, but this is a little different – for most librarians, the nature of the question is in of itself not very important; what is more important is that they will do a lot to help you find the answer, even if it means stretching their own resources and without being even remotely interested in whatever the topic is.  I have seen this happen at the Widener, at Firestone, at PMML, at JNU and at other libraries across the world, and have been struck by how genuine this generosity is.

I could go on reminiscing about the different libraries that I have been fortunate enough to spend time in, their architecture, their holdings, and the librarians who have helped me, but that will have to wait for another day. At this time the role and nature of libraries is changing, and it serves us well to remember that the context of the Borges quote, while evoking the imagery of a bibliophile’s Xanadu, is in fact bittersweet. In 1955, when his vision was failing, he was made the Director of the National Library of Argentina, prompting him to say

“Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I could barely make out the title pages and the spines. I wrote the Poem of the Gifts which begins:

No one should read self pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony
Granted me books and blindness at one touch.”

Today all of us carry devices – our smartphones – that put us all in the centre of millions of books in various languages, but the screens are small, needing some effort to see the titles, and more effort to read them, so the splendid irony persists.

Perhaps we need haptic devices that will remind us more accurately of why mankind invented the physical book, why we need libraries to go to, and why we revere Gutenberg. One of the bibles that he printed is there in the Elkins Room at the Widener, and during each visit I do go by to see it and to remind myself that this is, in my own imagination too, paradise.

The Widener Memorial Room (image taken from Harvard Library website).

26 Pieces of Silver

One of DD Kosambi’s last articles was a paper submitted to Scientific American entitled Scientific Numismatics, that was published in Volume 214 of that journal in February 1966. In this short article (10 pages in all) he summarises his main contributions to numismatic metrology, especially in relation to the statistical analysis of hoards of old coins.

The gist of Kosambi’s arguments is that with increased circulation and usage, the average weight of a coin will decrease, and with increased usage in transactions, the spread in the weights of a group of coins of the same denomination will increase. His publications on these matters date back to the 1940’s. As he says in his autobiographical note, Steps in Science, he took up this problem as a way of learning statistics! Not able to make much headway with analysing examination marks in the Indian system, he turned to the statistical study of punch-marked coins. He noted that “not all coins issued at the same time are used in exactly the same manner. Therefore, the effect of circulation is to decrease the average weight but also to increase the variation”.   On how these observations have influenced Indian historiography, there is more, much more, in his various articles on the subject, but that is grist to another mill.

In 1929 DD Kosambi (or DDK) graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College.  He had been admitted to Harvard in 1924, but had taken what would now be called a gap year, leading to a “mid-year” graduation, a short note on which appeared in the New York Times on March 4. In any case, DDK was considered a member of the Class of 1929 and the yearbook mentions some of his academic honours, but is missing his photograph.

Also in 1929, in the Annual Report of the Fogg Museum, the Director includes a list of GIFTS AND PURCHASES, wherein he acknowledges receipt of a set of 26 silver Indian Coins from Kosambi: 

Both the Director as well as the Curator of the Fogg Museum wrote letters of thanks to DDK and these are among the Kosambi papers in the PMML archives so it clearly meant a lot to him, but for whatever reason he does not mention these coins again in any of his writings.

When I first learned of this a few months ago, the donation seemed both exceptional and very generous. DDK was not yet 22 years of age and had gone through Harvard on a shoestring budget. He was also one of the few overseas students there at the time and his social profile was quite different from the few other students who had made gifts to the museum. Exactly what induced him to make this donation to the Fogg remains unclear, and the few accompanying documents in the archives at Harvard are sparse on details.

An additional complication emerged: the coins have, in the words of the Museum staff, been unlocated since the early 1970s. Unlocated has a complicated connotation so more about this elsewhere, but in short the coins could not be physically examined. There was some other information available, but the actual coins are now not available to view.

Further correspondence, and a visit to the Fogg, threw up some more details.  I had conjectured that the coins were likely to be from either  Portuguese India (of which he was then a citizen) or British India (where the family was then living) so it came as quite a surprise to me to learn  that the records at Fogg indicated that these were “26 Indian silver coins from date of Shah Jahan onward”!

This was more than just intriguing. Where did he get the coins from? And when? The two trips that Kosambi made from India were in September 1918 (when he was 11) and in early 1926, and a set of 26 Mughal coins, while not excessively expensive at the time, would still be outside the scope of what little is known about his father, Dharmananda Kosambi, and his financial conditions, especially as an indulgence. A little more sleuthing revealed that the coins had already been given to the museum as a loan perhaps in 1927, but they had briefly been misplaced and found again in 1928, but there are few other details. Are the coins all from one period? Since the note says “Shah Jahan onwards” it would suggest that they are from different Mughal mints, but one cannot tell for sure. There are tantalizing clues that these are mostly silver rupiyas, but at least three were of other denominations. This is also a mystery, since the Mughal mohur was cast in gold, and the dam in copper, and these coins are all classified as being silver.

The matter stands at this point now since the coins are physically not there. After donating the coins in February 1929 Kosambi returned to India in July that year and did not go back to the US till 1948. His first paper on the distribution of coin weights did not appear until 1940 – a paper in the journal Current Science (Bangalore) was followed up in a longer article in The New India Antiquary, vol. IV, pages 1-35, in 1941. But these are almost exclusively pertaining to the Taxila hoard and do not discuss Mughal coinage at all. Indeed, none of Kosambi’s articles on Numismatics do, and the papers that talk about silver coinage refer to other hoards. This is particularly strange since much more information is available on the economy of the Mughal empire. Indeed the only more modern coins that Kosambi refers to are British India rupees.

Some of these papers are well worth re-reading, not least for their acerbic wit. But more importantly, DDK notes in one of his articles, “I wish to point out the necessity of studying hoards of coinage as a whole and for every period if we are to reconstruct the lost economic and political history of our country from our unusually meagre and conflicting records.”

Whether or not the 26 pieces of silver – that almost surely was the first such hoard that he had had access to – triggered his interest in numismatic metrology, it is difficult to conclusively assert.  In the absence of any further information, it is perhaps wisest to  follow the caveat DDK gave in his superb 1941 article on the silver punch-marked coins of the Taxila hoard that were  described in a Memoir of the Archaeological Survey of India by E.H.C. Walsh. Kosambi says “It is unfortunate that this Memoir should be the foundation of the present study, because it is full of errors and oversights; in any case, it is the only description of large, approximately dated, hoards available to me, and I advise prospective readers to use it with caution and with my commentary on it”.