The well-stocked library at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Ulloor, has just got richer.
Robin Jeffrey, Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, on Wednesday formally handed over his library of books on India and Kerala to the CDS. The personal collection, 400-book strong, will be maintained as a separate section as the ‘Prof. Robin Jeffrey Collection’, CDS director Sunil Mani told The Hindu.
Prof. Jeffrey, who has researched extensively on India and Kerala, became familiar to Keralites in the 1970s with his work ‘The Decline of Nair Dominance.’'
“'He did field work in Kerala during the 1970s and managed to collect a lot of historical material on different aspects of Kerala. And also on the historical aspects of other States, especially Punjab,” Dr. Mani said.
The collection was kept at Australian National University, Canberra, where Prof. Jeffrey had taught. It was brought to Thiruvananthapuram two months ago. The formal handover took place on Wednesday when Prof. Jeffrey arrived to deliver the tenth B.G. Kumar Lecture.
Literate in Malayalam
Prof. Jeffrey. who, with a smile, described himself as literate in Malayalam, attributed his decision to two factors: that many of the books were in Malayalam, and the CDS, unlike many similar institutions, had managed to build a well-stocked library over the decades.
“'I wanted them to go where Malayalam would be readily understood. I lived in Thiruvananthapuram in 1971. And that's when I did most of the research for the ‘The Decline of Nair Dominance.’ I first came to the CDS in 1974 and since then, whenever I was in Kerala I would drop in to meet someone or the other,” he said.
This is not the first instance of the CDS accepting a personal library. The institute, established by economist K.N. Raj in 1970, has in its proud possession the personal collection of Nicholas Kaldor, the Cambridge economist invited by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s to design an expenditure tax system for India. “That too is about 400 books,” Dr. Mani said.
The CDS library also boasts the personal collections of Joan Robinson, another noted Cambridge economist, and that of economists Sanjaya Lall, K.N. Raj and B.G. Kumar, who was an associate professor at CDS during 1990-93.
