How India’s Food Crisis Fed America’s Library Collections

In 1996, Anania Vajpayee, a doctoral student, discovered the legendary collection of South Asian books at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library.

“I have spent time in some of the leading South Asian libraries in the world, in Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia. But nothing has ever compared to the endless wealth of the University of Chicago,” said Ms Vajpeyi, a fellow at India University. The Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) told me.

The 132-year-old University of Chicago holds more than 800,000 volumes related to South Asia, making it one of the world’s premier collections for research on the region. But how did such a treasure trove of South Asian literature end up there?

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

PL-480, signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower, allowed countries like India to buy American grain with local currency, which eased the foreign exchange burden and reduced the U.S. surplus. India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages.

Local currency funds were provided to participating US universities at minimal cost. These funds were used to acquire local books, periodicals, gramophone records, and “other media” in several Indian languages, adding to the collections of more than two dozen universities. As a result, institutions such as the University of Chicago became centers of South Asian studies. (Manuscripts were excluded due to Indian antiquities laws.)

“PL-480 has had surprising and unexpected implications for the University of Chicago and for more than 30 other US collections,” James Nye, director of the University of Chicago’s South Asia Digital Library, told the BBC.

The process of building an impressive library collection from South Asia was not an easy task.

A special team of 60 Indians was formed in Delhi in 1959. Initially focused on collecting government publications, the program expanded over five years to include books and periodicals. Until 1968 20 US universities received materials from the growing collection, as noted by Maureen L. P. Patterson, a leading bibliographer on South Asian studies.

In a paper published in 1969, Patterson said that in the early days of PL-480, the team in India faced the challenge of finding books from a vast, diverse country with a tangled web of languages.

They needed the experience of booksellers with a reputation for being smart and efficient. Given the size of India and the complexity of its literary landscape, no single dealer could handle the procurement alone, wrote Patterson, who died in 2012.

Instead, dealers were selected from different publishing centers, each targeting specific languages ​​or groups of languages. This collaboration worked smoothly, with dealers sending in names they weren’t sure about for approval. The final choice remained for v Office in Delhi– noted Patterson.

The program sought to compile a comprehensive collection of Indian fiction in all languages. “Politics has produced an enormous number of detective stories and novels of no lasting value,” Patterson wrote.

In 1963 the choice for purchasing books was narrowed to “research material” – and the consumption of fiction in many languages ​​was halved. Until 1966 more than 750,000 books and periodicals were sent to American universities from India, Nepal, and Pakistan, with India transferring more than 633,000 units.

“We have sent works like History of India from 1000 to 1770 AD, Handicrafts in India, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psychoanalytic Study and many more,” – the report at a meeting at the US Library on the program in 1967 said.

Todd Michelson-Ambelang, a librarian in the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wonders if the vast collections from this region in US and other Western libraries have taken away literary resources from the Indian subcontinent.

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

Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that taking books out of South Asia through programs such as PL-480 “creates gaps in knowledge” as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources .

It is not clear whether all the books purchased by American universities in India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd of India’s FLAME University, many books currently unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago’s library collections, all of which are stamped “PL-480”.

“For the most part, the books that came through the PL-480 program are still available in South Asia. But preservation is often a problem because of white ants, pests, and lack of temperature and humidity control. In contrast, most materials in the West remain well preserved through the preservation and conservation efforts of our libraries,” says Mr. Michelson-Ambelang.

Another reason why Mr. Michelson-Ambelang calls Western libraries colonial archives “is partly because they serve scholars, often to the exclusion of those outside their institutions. While librarians understand the difference in access to South Asian materials, the laws on copyright restricts exchange, reinforcing these gaps.”

So what happened when the PL-480 program ended?

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

Ms. Vajpayee believes the book-for-grain deal has had a positive outcome. She studied Sanskrit, but her research at the University of Chicago spanned Indian and European languages ​​- French, German, Marathi and Hindi – and touched on linguistics, literature, philosophy, anthropology and more. “In the Regenstein library, I always found the books I needed or quickly got them if they weren’t already there,” she says.

“Books are safe, valued, accessible and used. I have visited libraries, archives and institutions in all parts of India and the history of our country is generally sad. Here they have been lost, destroyed, neglected or very often made inaccessible. “