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A library more accessible

EASILY ACCESSIBLE The Roja Muthiah Library at Taramani.

I'm delighted to find that the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) has moved from the almost inaccessible back of beyond in Mogappair to the more easily reachable outskirts of Adyar. It is now located on the Taramani technology campus, kitty corner from the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation. And the consequences of the move are already there to see with more researchers visiting it every day.

With almost its entire collection microfilmed and catalogued, and microfilming and cataloguing of numerous other private collections and rare books going on, the RMRL has turned to making itself better known by organising seminars and starting a lecture series. The first seminar held a few months ago was on Ethnicity and the next one is to be on Tamil numbers. The first talk the library organised was in February, with V. Sriram speaking on the Tamizh Isai movement. Dr. Suresh spoke in March on `Roman Contacts with India' and scheduled for April 20 is Dr. A. Srivathsan on `The Future of Streets'.

The nucleus of the library is the eclectic collection of Tamil printed material and letters that Roja Muthiah Chettiar of Kottaiyur (Chettinad) — who was in the sign-painting business — had squirreled away over the four decades before his death in 1992 aged 66. In his collection were over 100,000 items, some dating to as far back as the 1800s. The collection ranges from handbills, invitations and letters to newspapers, magazines and books, providing a rare insight into life in Tamizhagam and the countries wherever Tamils lived in the 19th and 20th Centuries, invaluable material for a researcher of language, literature and social history.

After Roja Muthiah's death, the fate of the library was a matter of serious concern, with local organisations looking more at what its price might be than the intrinsic — and incalculable — value of the material itself. It was in 1992 that C. S. Lakshmi, the Tamil writer Ambai — who had used the library in Kottaiyur for research on women in India — mentioned her concerns about the collection to A. K. Ramanujam during a visit to the University of Chicago. Ramanujam in turn got James Nye, Chief Bibliographer of the University's South Asian collection and a leading player in the Centre for South Asian Libraries — a consortium formed by North American University libraries and research institutions — interested in the collection. But, enunciated Ramanujam, no matter what help the American universities gave, the Roja Muthiah Library's collection must never leave India.

Taking the point, Nye raised a million dollars from several American foundations to purchase the collection, microfilm and catalogue it, and store it in Madras. Today, all that has been done, and most of the material can be accessed easily by the world's 60 million Tamils and others interested.

The strength of the collection is its Tamil material on classical literature, politics, indigenous medicine, folklore, religion, cinema, Nature and women's studies. It was 12 years ago this month that this material that Roja Muthiah offered only a few to get a glimpse at for a nominal fee (that included coffee, buttermilk and lunch) became available to a wider audience. Now, in Taramani, it is not only available, at modest fees, to a wider spectrum of researchers but also to the world.

S. MUTHIAH

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