Ponniyin Selvan Varalaatru Peravai

website for Research oriented friends

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/about-rmrl.html#Heading2

An archive for Tamil studies


At the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai, the private hoard of
an unconventional collector of printed material of all sorts forms
the nucleus of a major research facility focussing on South Indian
studies, particularly the culture and soc ial history of Tamil Nadu.
S. THEODORE BASKARAN

THE value of private collections in preserving the print heritage of
the country has been recognised only in recent years, and there have
been several initiatives to make them accessible to researchers and
other scholars. These collections could provide a new dimension to
historiography, prove to be repositories of source material for
scholars, and enable us to understand society better.

Inside the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai. Keeping Muthiah
Chettiar's collection as the nucleus, the holdings of the library are
being expanded through additional acquisitions.

One such attempt is the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) in
Chennai, the lifetime collection of an unconventional bibliophile.
Established in April 1994, it is emerging as a major research centre
for South Asian studies, especially the social and cul tural history
of South India.

Muthiah Chettiar, a painter of signs, moved to Chennai from
Kottaiyur, a tiny village in the Chettinad region of Tamil Nadu, and
set up a sign board shop, Roja Arts. He had inherited from his father
a fascination for imprints and began collecting them. F irst he
bought books relating to art, particularly paintings, and gradually
his interest extended to other subjects. In Chennai he got to know
book dealers of the now defunct Moore Market, and was introduced to
the world of antiquarian books. He was also in touch with scrap paper
dealers, from whom he could get the magazines he wanted.

With business not doing too well in Chennai, Muthiah Chettiar moved
back to Kottaiyur. He hoarded his treasure there in a rented building
adjacent to his ancestral house. At the time of his death in 1992, at
the age of 66, his collection had grown to nea rly 100,000 items in
Tamil - books, journals and single sheet material such as drama
notices, some of them dating back to 1886. The collection covers the
whole gamut of Tamil culture and heritage, and the items span a
period of more than 150 years, the e arliest being a book, Kandar
Andhathi, published in 1804.

It was in 1975 that this writer first visited Kottaiyur and met
Muthiah Chettiar. By that time the fact that he had such a collection
was known to some researchers although none had any clear idea of
what it contained. Muthiah Chettiar called his collect ion India
Library Services.

For consulting his books he charged a modest fee - which covered
coffee and lunch as well. He would give books one at a time, and at
times one got to browse just two books in a day. I kept in touch with
him and met him wheneve r he visited Chennai. He was always concerned
about the care of the collection after his time.

C.S. Lakshmi (Ambai), the Tamil writer and scholar on women's
studies, visited Kottaiyur to use India Library Services for her
research on women in India. Much later, when she was at the
University of Chicago as a scholar-in-residence, she briefed South
Asia scholars there about Muthiah Chettiar's collection. The
university launched a global effort to save the material. It bought
the entire collection from the family. It had been decided that the
collection would remain in Tamil Nadu to form the nucleus of a
research library on South Indian studies, in collaboration with the
Chennai-based Mozhi Trust, an organisation set up to develop
resources for language and culture.

Muthiah Chettiar had all varieties of printed material covering the
whole gamut of Tamil culture and heritage.
An oleograph being retrieved from storage.

The trustees of Mozhi saw in the project scope to develop
systematically a comprehensive facility that would acquire all
varieties of printed material - both book and non-book - and conserve
them through preservation microfilming. James Nye, bibliographe r for
Southern Asia and Director of the Centre for Research Libraries at
the University of Chicago, and Cre-A Ramakrishnan, the innovative
publisher, along with P. Sankaralingam, Reader in the Library Science
Department of the University of Madras, went about the task of
1,110 specially designed cardboard boxes, was moved in five trucks,
to the library building at Mogappair in Chennai. Sankaralingam, who
took over as the full-time dire ctor of the library, emerged as the
man for the moment. His dream was to provide under one roof research
material and facilities for students of South Indian studies in
fields ranging from humanities to social sciences. He drew up a
project to catalogue and microfilm the collection. He set about the
task of organising shelving facilities, installing microfilm cameras
and creating machine-readable catalogue records compatible with major
international systems.

In order to orient the staff to preservation microfilming, a workshop
was conducted in Chennai by Julio Berrios, Chief of Micrographics,
Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Personnel from other
organisations involved in similar work, such as the Tamil Nadu
Archives, the Theosophical Society Librar y and the Library of
Congress division at the United States embassy in New Delhi also
participated in the workshop. (Sankaralingam passed away in 1997, and
this writer became the Director of the library.)

Printed material has a rather short lifetime owing to the high acid
content in paper. Acid reacts with the atmosphere and turns the paper
brown and brittle. If such material is handled frequently, it will
lead to further damage. So it is necessary to sto re the contents of
books in an archival medium. Worldwide, microfilming is the accepted
form of archival preservation as far as printed material is
concerned. If microfilm rolls are stored as per standards set by the
archival community, they can easily l ast for 500 years.

Researchers can access the contents of a book through