Priceless editions of Urdu, Persian and English lie in neglect as no one cares to maintain a library that should have been a national treasure.

I have spent much of the past week digging through piles of books at the Saulat Public Library in the city of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh. I am looking for a single manuscript: Muhammad Sanaʾullah Panipati’s Khawass-i Hizb al-Bahr, an 18th century Persian commentary, written in Delhi, on the occult properties of a famous prayer formulae compiled by Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, the Maghribi mystic of the 13th century. It is, very likely, the only copy of the commentary in the world.

I know it is somewhere in the library because it appears in Abid Reza Bedar’s 1966 catalogue, but despite my excavations and those of Mazhar Muin Khan, the endlessly patient librarian, the manuscript remains hidden.

I am sure that Muhammad Sanaʾullah Panipati would have understood my search: just as words have occult sympathies with the material world, so too does this hidden manuscript exercise its power, drawing me to the library day after day although it remains unseen, buried beneath thick layers of dust, cobwebs and mouldering pages. As I dig through the stacks, I can’t help but call to mind the hadith qudsi: “I was a hidden treasure that loved to be known.”The disappearance of a single manuscript, though serious in itself, is part of a far larger problem at Saulat Library: one of India’s richest archives of Urdu, Persian and Arabic works, it has fallen into a state of absolute desuetude.

Founded in 1934, the library was once an important centre of political and social life for North Indian Muslims. In its heyday, famous visitors included Khalid Sheldrake (the British pickle manufacturer turned king of Chinese “Islamistan”), Sayyid Hashimi Faridabadi (author of a famous Urdu history of Greece), Khwaja Hasan Nizami (the great Chishti Sufi of Delhi), and the Agha Khan.

Besides 25,000 Urdu printed books – including the only known first edition of Ghalib’s 1841 Urdu diwan – the library holds hundreds of irreplaceable manuscripts: eighteenth-century Afghan chronicles, works on occult science, personal diaries of Rampuri notables, volumes of Persian poetry, and richly-illuminated Qurʾāns. It also holds a complete run of Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Persian newspaper Jam-i Jahan Numa, Muhammad ʿAli Jauhar’s Urdu-language Hamdard and English-language Comrade, as well as Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Tahzib al-Akhlaq.

Since the partition, when many of its leading lights moved to Pakistan, it has undergone a process of steady decline. A further blow came with the abolition of the privy purse of the Rampuri royal family, the library’s major patrons.

Given the working conditions, Mazhar Muin’s daily enthusiasm for our thus far thankless search is remarkable. But without some urgent action to preserve or at least digitise the collection, the loss to India’s intellectual history will be immense. In the words of Ghalib:

“nāla-yi dil ne diye aurāq-i laḳht-i dil ba bād
yādgār-i nāla ek dīwān-i be-shīrāza thā”

“The heart’s lament threw the pages of the heart’s fragments to the wind
The memorial to the lament was a single unbound book.”