[Reader-list] Urgent letter to MHRD for Nagari Pracharni Sabha

[Yousuf]

>From Prof. Vasudha Dalmia: <dalmia at berkeley.edu>

Dear friends and colleagues,
 
I am sending you this letter of protest addressed to Arjun Singh, Minister for Human Resources, with the hope that you will be willing to add your signature to it. It concerns the present state of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Varanasi.

There are several people amongst the Sabha’s present staff who are greatly distressed by its radical disintegration; the information below stems largely from them. It will seem credible to any one who has tried working in the Sabha lately.

There is some urgency to the matter, because from my own impression of the situation, the deterioration is rapid. Another kind of urgency has to do with the central government. It is unclear how long this coalition will stay in power. To another government, differently configured, many of us may not be interested in applying for help.

The bid for the preservation of the Sabha, as I see it, is not an antiquarian drive alone, but an effort to preserve a reservoir of data, which continues to be interpreted and re-interpreted in various ways to serve the needs of the present.

Please let me know as soon as possible whether you would like to join the signatories. Ideally, the letter should be sent off by early next week. The more widely spread the protest, the better. Krishna Sobti will be joining us, and various others to whom I have spoken informally.

All that is needed from you is one line confirming your assent and your present institutional affiliation.

There is good reason to hope that the media will take up the matter and that it will be investigated and further pursued.
 
With best regards,
 
Vasudha Dalmia
 
 
 THE LETTER:
 
To
Hon’ble Shri Arjun Singh
Minister for Human Resources Development
Government of India
Shastri Bhavan
Dr. Rajendra Prasad Road,
New Delhi 11 00 11
 
Hon’ble Shri Arjun Singh,
 
We write to draw your attention to the plight of Nagari Pracharini Sabha in Varanasi, an institution of national status. In more than a century of its existence, students and scholars from India and across the world have turned to it as a major resource for their work. It is now in a state of dissolution and we ask for your immediate intervention in its running and maintenance.
 
The foundational importance of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha (Society for the Propagation of Hindi, 1893) need hardly be stressed. Equipped with a library as early as its fourth year, the Sabha’s most important activity was the search for manuscripts in Hindi and Hindi-related languages. From 1896 on, the Sabha began to conduct a systematic search for old Hindi manuscripts. Their findings, enshrined in the voluminous Search Reports, have provided the very basis for the standard editions of major Braj Bhasha (Surdas and others), Avadhi (Tulsidas, Jayasi) and Khari boli poets and writers. Its research-oriented journal, the Nagari Pracharini Patrika, which also began publication in 1896, appeared for well over a century, first as a quarterly, and from 1907 as a monthly. The dictionary project, the focus of the second decade of the Sabha’s activity, lead to the publication of the eleven-volume Hindi Shabda Sagar (1929), still a dominant force in the world
 of Hindi lexicography. The first major history of Hindi literature, Hindi Sahitya ka itihas by Ramchandra Shukla (1947) originated as the preface to this dictionary. The key positions in the Sabha were held by luminaries in the world of Hindi letters. The Sabha became the prime repository for subsequent endowments of private papers and manuscripts and continued to make important contributions to North Indian literary and cultural history till well after independence.
 
The Sabha is now in a state of radical disintegration. The library is in a sad condition, a small cluster of students from the city work in semi-darkness. The entrance is blocked and the frequent electricity cuts plunge the building into further darkness. There is no generator to provide even temporary relief. There are no photocopying machines, computers or indeed air conditioning in the interest of manuscript preservation.

There is serious understaffing - where there were once fifty, there are now only nineteen. There has seen no pay increase in the last several years. The publications division is barely functioning. There have been no new publications in the past five years. The older stock is much depleted, whatever little activity there is now consists of reprints, that too in no systematic fashion, leaving many once-prestigious series incomplete, thus for instance the ‘Brhat Itihas’. The standard works of standard authors are barely kept in print, what appears is on poor paper and in poor print quality. The Sabha’s own printing press was sold off more than a decade ago; the money awarded for computerization by the central government not utilized to set up a new press.

The Sabha’s journal, once a respected organ of research, with a solid list of subscribers (2100) has now been reduced to a skeleton, light enough in content and layout to discourage even the most loyal readership (numbering 300 to 400). The monthly journal is still produced, to gather dust in the back rooms of the Sabha.

The Sabha always had a substantial budget. In 2003/4, it was awarded a further 93 lakhs to digitize the valuable journals and manuscripts in its possession. A NOIDA firm was entrusted with the task. Whatever the outcome of this project, no material is available for the use of the scholars. Some manuscripts and journals were apparently digitized, many were in a very fragile state, and have suffered serious damage as a result of these labours.

The foundation stone of the present building was laid by the Maharaja of Benares in 1902. The entrance, designed in the 1940s, was built with the intention of completing an urban ensemble that included the Kotwali, the Town Hall and the General Post Office. Today, the once gracious façade is entirely obscured by an ugly and uncompleted concrete construction, built by the former General Secretary of the Sabha. It is rented out to a row of shops facing the street.
 
The General Body has not met in three years, the names of the dead still figure on their lists, thus Ramanand Sagar, of the TV series fame. The Executive Committee, with its thirty-three members, many of them absent, meets in a desultory fashion, whenit is seen fit to call a meeting and does the work of several consecutive years in a single meeting. Of the office holders, many are titular, others ageing, ill or simply dead. The important posts are occupied by the family of the present General Secretary, who inherited the position from his father. He and his brother live and work in Delhi.

The sole occupants of the International Guest House, inaugurated by Vice-President Shankar Dayal Sharma several years ago, have been family members of the former and present General Secretary. It is also rented out to interested parties in the marriage season.

There is no report of the activities of the Sabha’s branches in Haridwar and Delhi, which occupy large and valuable real estate.
 
There is need for a complete overhaul of its present structure, and its regulation and supervision by the Central Government. The important posts in the Sabha need to be awarded on the basis of literary distinction as well as administrative skills rather than heredity.
 
We ask for your urgent intervention in this matter.
 
Signed