Of all the sights he had seen, what had impressed Sen the most? Going by the number of pages devoted, and the eloquence of the accompanying prose, it was none other than the hallowed precincts of the British Museum and its holdings, particularly manuscripts and papers relating to the early days of the British empire in India. On his last day in London, he could scarcely tear himself away from the British Museum, as he mourned the fact that he would never likely set foot in it again.
Earlier this week, I read Sen’s journeys, sitting, appropriately in the reading room of the Asian and African Studies (AAS) in the British Library, that last refuge of tired foot-soldiers of South Asian academia. Did it all begin with Sen/Shanne, I thought, this Pavlovian reflex of all South Asian academics to gravitate towards the AAS reading room at some point in their career, forever in search of a new manuscript or a new Raj document with confusing initials such as ‘IOR’ or ‘LP’ or appellations, such as Home Miscellaneous?
Given the regularity with which this summer ritual takes place, anthropologists may well be writing research papers on the annual migrations of this species. As part of this year’s flock, I have been displaying all the classic behavioural patterns — ordering up more manuscripts than I can read, drinking more coffee than is necessary, and running into more familiar faces in a week than I do in a year back home.
One of the great occupational hazards – or pleasures – of working in AAS is running into people who you have not met in years, or have successfully avoided for decades. It is a bit like Maddox Square in Kolkata during Durga Pujo: stand there long enough, and you will pretty much meet everyone you know.
But it must be said that the manuscripts are an unalloyed joy. If you have time on your hands, one of the greatest pleasures is going through the meticulous manuscript catalogues and ordering whatever strikes your fancy. Who would not want to see two letters, and ‘a lock of hair, believed to be of Raja Ram Mohan Roy’? I ordered up the item with trepidation, but was disappointed to find that it was not the original article, but a microfilm, as the original items were too fragile. In retrospect, it was just as well that the library did not issue the Raja’s hair to all comers. Remember Lord Byron’s boast of having stolen a lock of Lucrezia Borgia’s hair from a museum in Milan in 1816? Occasionally, one ends up finding more than what had bargained for. One of my colleagues at university, while looking for something completely different, came across an unpublished agricultural pamphlet by an ancestor, which no one in the family knew about. And for precisely this reason, there is no dearth of genealogy hunters – another identifiable species – in the AAS reading room, trying to find out what great-great-grand-uncle Horace had been up to in Landi Kotal during the Second Afghan War. Or what chutney recipe had been perfected by great-great-aunt Prunella in Abbottabad.
The ghost of empires past lingers like Banquo’s ghost in the reading room, and one half expects the many worthies whose likenesses adorn the walls of the AAS to break into life, and whisper their secrets into the ears of the readers below. Shhh, quiet in the library – the empire is researching back!
The writer is professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and director, Jadavpur University Press