How a food crisis in India fed America’s library collections

In 1996, Ananya Vajpeyi, a story graduate student, discovered the famous South Asia collection of books at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library.

” I’ve spent day in some of the leading South Asia books of the world, at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia. But nothing has ever matched the eternal riches held at the University of Chicago”, Ms Vajpeyi, then a visiting teacher at India’s Ashoka University, told me.

The 132-year-old University of Chicago homes more than 800, 000 levels related to South Asia, making it one of the world’s top choices for research on the area. But how did a place where there is such a treasure trove of North Eastern writing?

The answer lies in a programme called PL-480, a US initiative launched in 1954 under Public Law 480, also known as the Food for Peace, a hallmark of Cold War diplomacy.

Signed into law by President Dwight D Eisenhower, PL-480 allowed countries like India to get US corn with local money, easing their international exchange problem and reducing US deficits. One of the largest consumers of this meal aid was India, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when it experienced severe food shortages.

Participating US institutions received the local coin money at no extra cost. These resources were used to purchase native books, periodicals, recorder records, and “other media” in many American languages, enriching collections at over two hundred universities. As a result, universities like the University of Chicago served as academic centers for South Eastern reports. According to Indian ancient laws, manuscripts were kept out.

According to James Nye, chairman of the University of Chicago’s Digital South Asia collection, “PL-480 has had amazing and unexpected implications for the University of Chicago and for more than 30 different US choices.”

Building a compelling collection series from South Asia was not a simple task.

In Delhi, in 1959, a particular team made up of 60 Indians was created. Primarily focused on picking up state papers, the project expanded over five years to encompass books and periodicals. By 1968, 20 US institutions were receiving supplies from the growing set, as noted by Maureen LP Patterson, a leading bibliographer of South Asian research.

In a paper published in 1969, Patterson recounted that in the early days of the PL-480, the team in India faced the challenge of sourcing books from a vast, diverse country with an intricate network of languages.

They needed the knowledge of book dealers with a track record of good judgment and efficiency. Given India’s size and the complexity of its literary landscape, no single dealer could handle the procurement on their own, Patterson, who died in 2012, wrote.

Instead, dealers were selected from various publishing hubs, each focusing on specific languages or groups of languages. This collaboration worked seamlessly, with dealers sending titles they were not certain about for approval. The final selection rested with the Delhi office, Patterson noted.

The program wanted to pick up a comprehensive collection of all-encompassing Indian fiction. Patterson wrote,” The policy netted a large number of detective stories and novels of no lasting value.”

In 1963, the option to buy books was narrowed down to “research level material,” and the intake of fiction in many languages was reduced by half. By 1966, more than 750, 000 books and periodicals were sent to American universities from India, Nepal and Pakistan, with India contributing more than 633, 000 items.

“We’ve sent works like History of India from 1000 to 1770 AD, Handicrafts in India, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psychoanalytic Study, and more,” a report on a meeting in an US library on the programme in 1967 said.

Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wonders if vast collections from the region in US and other Western libraries took away literary resources from the Indian sub-continent.

Founded during Cold War tensions and funded by PL-480, his university’s South Asia centre grew its library to more than 200, 000 titles by the 21st Century.

According to Mr. Michelson-Ambelang, the removal of books from South Asia through programs like PL-480″ creates knowledge gaps,” as researchers there frequently need to travel to the West to access these resources.

If all the books that were then purchased by US universities from India are still available there, it’s not clear whether or not. According to Maya Dodd, of India’s FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago’s library collections, all marked with the stamp saying “PL-480”.

” Books that were awarded through the PL-480 program are still popular in South Asia for the most part. However, keeping up with temperature and humidity levels is frequently difficult due to white ants, pests, and poor preservation. In contrast, most materials in the West remain well-preserved thanks to the preservation and conservation efforts in our libraries”, Mr Michelson-Ambelang says.

Another reason why Mr Michelson-Ambelang calls the Western libraries colonial archives “partly is because they serve academics, often excluding those outside their institutions. While librarians are aware of the barriers to sharing of South Asian materials, copyright laws only narrow these gaps.

So, what happened when the PL-480 programme ended?

Mr Nye says the end of the programme in the 1980s, shifted the financial burden to American libraries. “Libraries in the US have had to pay for the selection, acquisition, collection, and delivery of resources,” he said. For example, the University of Chicago now spends more than $100,000 annually on buying books and periodicals through the Library of Congress field office in Delhi.

Ms Vajpeyi believes the books-for-grain deal had a positive outcome. She studied Sanskrit, but her research in University of Chicago spanned Indian and European languages- French, German, Marathi, and Hindi- and touched on linguistics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and more. ” At the Regenstein Library, I never failed to find the books I needed or get them quickly if they weren’t already there”, she says.

” The books are safe, valued, accessible and used. Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve visited libraries, archives, and other institutions, and the state of our nation’s economy is generally dismal. They were frequently lost, neglected, or otherwise rendered inaccessible in this case.