APROPOS Mubarak Ali’s article ‘Knowledge is power’ (June 5), it is knee-jerk nationalism to claim that the British plunder of books was motivated by their desire “to deprive the Indians of their sources of knowledge.”

Tipu Sultan was killed in 1799. Fifteen years earlier, Sir William Jones and others had created the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and by 1800, another collection of manuscripts had been created at the College of Fort William. Yes, both were closed to Indians but their publications were not. And the collection of the Asiatic Society did become open to Indians by 1820s.

Let’s not forget that it was the college that published the best-ever edition of Mir Taqi Mir’s Kulliyats in 1811. And a fair size of collection of books from Tipu’s library were later donated to the Asiatic Society and are still there.

As for Dr Aloys Sprenger — his name was not Springer — he was sent to Lucknow way before the annexation of Avadh; the only volume of his famous catalogue came out in 1854. There is no evidence to my knowledge that he stole books from the collection.

In fact , he tells us about the nefarious habits of the librarians there: they used to steal and sell books put in their charge and replace them with cheap copies of other books. You see, the library was frequently checked only with regard to the number of books it contained and not with reference to their titles.

Hence the libraries’ countless copies of Divan-i-Hafiz. Sprenger’s small but valuable collection of Arabic, Persian and Urdu manuscripts is well preserved and easily accessible at Berlin.

The plunder of the Nawab’s books at Lucknow did happen in 1857, but a whole lot of them also ended up at Rampur and Patna. Incidentally, the foremost authority on Dr Sprenger is Dr Ikram Chaghatai of Lahore, who can better attest to the harm and the good done by the good doctor.

Scholars in South Asia have not lost all important material to write the history of the subcontinent. There is plenty still available, lying untouched in innumerable libraries. South Asian scholars have not fully used even the resources available to them at home. Where are the mediaevalists in Pakistan? Their absence is not due to any ‘academic hegemony’ of the West.

The blame lies on those who run the departments of history and Persian in Pakistan. I know of several good mediaevalists from Pakistan; they all studied abroad, and did manage to find a great deal in Pakistani archives beyond what they found in London.

C. M. Naim

Prof Emeritus

University of Chicago

Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2016