An antiquarian book collector in Britain had announced his intention to part with a mind boggling collection of books, spanning 250 years of India's printing history, many of which dates back to the early 1700s, when the first printing press was set up in India.
However, neither has the government of India nor collectors in India have shown interest in purchasing the set of 125 books, assembled over three decades by John Randall.
Though Randall is keen to sell the collection to the Indian government so that they can be archived and preserved, he hasn't received any interest from them.
Randall told TOI in an exclusive interview that "a few individuals and only one institution in India have shown interest. The problem is I think that those who authorise funds don't understand its value. The individual prices of books total £600,000. The whole collection is available at £500,000".
"An individual who wants around half is a European collector. Although no firm offer has been made we are discussing around £300,000," Randall who will be n Mumbai from April 4-7, to look for buyers added.
Books printed in India are rare on the market - the Indian climate has not treated them kindly, and few copies were sent home to Britain. The books in this collection have been gathered
over a 30-year period. Most of them have been de-accessioned from libraries where they languished unread for a century or more.
Randall's enviable collection includes the first Biblical translation printed with an Indian font (1715), the first book printed in Northern India (1778), the Indian Gazette of 1783 - 65 issues of the longest running and most successful Indian newspaper of the 18th century, the first dictionary of Urdu (1787), Allan Octavian Hume's own copy of his Hindi translation of the Indian Penal Code (1861), the first Indian newspaper for women and first to be edited by a woman (1853), the first book on human anatomy in an Indian language (1849), the first ever book written on Darjeeling (1838) and the King of Oudh's dictionary printed on his Royal Lucknow Press (1822).
Graham Shaw, the former head of the Oriental section in the British library and an authority on the history of printing in India is helping Randall. Shaw told TO earlier that the 125 works span the history of print in India and exemplifies the vast range of published material produced over 250 years. The western technology of printing with movable metal types was introduced into India by the Portuguese as early as 1556 and used intermittently until the late 17th century.
"While printing in southern India in the 18th century was almost exclusively Christian and evangelical, the first book to be printed in northern India was Halhed's A Grammar of the Bengal Language - a product of the East India Company's Press at Hooghly in 1778. Thus began a fertile period for publishing, fostered by governor-general Warren Hastings and led by Sir William Jones and his generation of great orientalists. By 1800 Calcutta had more newspapers than London".
Randall told TOI earlier "I would like this collection to go to India as I do not believe many of these items have been preserved there. There is no museum or foundation focusing on the history of printing in India which has contributed so much to India as she is today".
"The first 32 issues of Gandhi's famous English language weekly launched in 1933 to promote his crusade against untouchability, to liberate some 40 million human beings from an intolerable yoke and to purify Hinduism, together with 21 issues from the second year. Many articles were written by Mahatma Gandhi himself while Rabindranath Tagore wrote poems on untouchability for most issues. Other contributors included B R Ambedkar and C Rajagopalacharia," Randall says.
Also included in the collection are 18 original posters from the freedom movement (1930), the first English language edition of Rabindranath Tagore's famous satire on education "The Parrot's training" (1930) and the original founding document for the college that later became Aligarh Muslim University (1873).
One of the gems in the collection is the first 12 volumes of the journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal founded by Sir William Jones in 1784, which holds the distinction of being the first learned journal ever published to be devoted specifically to Asian studies. It's wide-ranging contents dating back to 1788 reflects the aims of the Society to investigate "the history, civil and natural, the antiquities, arts, sciences, and literature of Asia", in an age of unbounded optimism.
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