A rare kind of book club

Interest in Indian history is near universal, says Subbiah Yadalam, the founder of the Rare Book Society of India. Within minutes of his posting details about a new (old) book on the society’s vibrant, 50,000-member community page on Facebook, there are views and ‘likes’ from places flung as far apart as Uganda, the US and Slovenia, says Yadalam, who started the society’s website and Facebook page to connect with bibliophiles – especially those who share his passion for rare, out-of-print books – from all over the world.“There are viewers from 72 countries at any given time,” says the 52-year-old founder, who is as passionate about the power of sharing and social media as he is about rare books; his goal to make these books accessible to everyone through digitization and free downloads.
The obsession with rare books started a decade ago when Yadalam came across a book, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India, a scholarly and encyclopaedic tome by Edgar Thurston and Kadambi Rangachari published in 1909, at his club library. He found it fascinating and wanted to buy it from the club, which refused to sell it. But Yadalam had tasted blood and started hunting down old, rare titles at bookstores, auctions and online, starting with bibliophile KK Murthy’s Select, where serendipity – a quality abundant in that most gloriously anarchic of bookstores – played a huge role in helping him start his collection.
Today, while his personal collection of rare books on Indian history numbers around 175 titles, Yadalam also sources digitized versions from websites such as Gutenberg.org and Archive.org. The focus of his collection is books on Indian history, and he has created a digital library of hundreds of rare, out-of-copyright books on the subject, meticulously digitized to retain the look and feel of the original volume.Not just that, they are curated and tagged by subject; so if you are looking for books under the subject, say, ‘Pallava Expansion’, you would find posts on the website related to the topic along with URLs, using which you can download PDF versions of the books. There’s also an option to read them online.
“Many of these books could be considered as history, opinion or plain propaganda, but the aim is to show that there is no wasteful source in the study of history, there is only an added perspective,” says Yadalam. He’s proud of the fact that what started off as a group for rare book collectors has been transformed into a forum for history buffs, scholars and “the silent curious.”
Yadalam is fanatical about the need for us to go to primary sources to know more about historical events and personalities and form an objective opinion. The intermediation of historians, who always bring their own biases and slants into the interpretation, often results in a warped idea of history, he believes. “It is time for us to look at the reference sections of books and go read those books ourselves. Research empowers you, it makes you appreciate the fact that there are always many versions to the truth; that there is often no one ‘definitive version’. We need a society that can see layers and nuances, and this will only happen when we familiarize ourselves with the many versions of history,” he says.
Priceless Lit Treasures
* A quick look at just some of the books added to the digital library in the past month
* The Kitab-i-Yamini: Historical memoirs of the Amir Sabaktagan, and the Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazna’, translated from the Persian version of the contemporary Arab chronicle of Al Utbi by the Rev. James Reynolds (WH Allen & Co., London, 1858)
* Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Yogi Svatmarama, translated by Pancham Sinh (first published in Ajmer, 1915)
* The Yoga-System of Patañjali or The Ancient Hindu Doctrine of Concentration of Mind, Embracing the Mnemonic rules, Called Yoga-Sutras, of Patañjali by James Haughton Woods (Harvard University Press, 1914)
* Shiva Samhita: The Esoteric Philosophy of the Tantras translated by Srischandra Basu (published by Heeralal Dhole, Calcutta, 1887)
* Walden or Life in the woods by Henry David Thoreau (Published by Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1854)