This report covers R.’s late-1960s autobiography and his son’s 2001 biography. Topics include:
This installment covers R.’s late-1960s autobiography, and his son Yogeshwar’s [Y.] 2001 biography, which in my opinion are best digested in tandem. R. clearly describes his own overarching goals and state of mind during his formative years preceding The Five Laws; while Y. fills in the gaps about R.’s personal life, and clarifies some matters which R. elected to describe somewhat obliquely.
This is a large update (around 10k words), and I hemmed & hawed over the best way to format it. In the end, I decided to interleave material from the two books, as they cover overlapping time periods and Y. occasionally comments directly on R.’s autobiography. In my final work, this material will likely be distributed into the chapters covering each relevant topic.
This book is exceedingly difficult to track down,1 which is a shame because it includes a wealth of detail unavailable elsewhere. The only accessibly copy anywhere near me is at UC Berkeley – Luckily, UCB provides free reference access for visiting researchers, and the campus is only a half-hour bike ride from my place. At UCB, the Doe Library’s Gardner Stacks begin on the ground floor, and descend into four basement levels. With its brutalist interior design and hand-cranked compact shelving, the space feels like a PS1-era survival horror game.
R.’s autobiographical portion of this book was “published serially from 1963 to 1972 in the Herald of Library Science, edited by P. N. Kuala,” who contributed additional material in 1992. (Satija, 1992)
In classic R. fashion, the book is idiosyncratic in both structure and style. It’s split into three parts (A, B, and C) with lettered chapters and numbered subsections (e.g., AG3, BE8, etc.) Parts A and B are R.’s original text: Part A covers his career as librarian at the University of Madras [U. Madras], and part B covers his work with the Madras Library Association [MALA]. Part C was added by Kaula, and is a mix of narrative and appendices. It covers R.’s work after leaving U. Madras, provides more specifics on his legislative contributions, includes several helpful chronologies, and includes sketches of R.’s personal life – which is notably absent from the autobiographical portion. Kaula’s command of English is less assured than R.’s: His writing contains semi-frequent grammatical irregularities.
Stylistically, R. gives us a bildungsroman built around anecdotes; These are often framed around interpersonal interactions and typically result in an important learning. It’s written in the third person, nearly all names are initialisms (without a key), and dialog is formatted as follows:
BSR - How is it you have come to the Marina today? You seldom come.
PRA - (With a smile)--I would not have come without a purpose.
BSR - Tell us then your purpose.
PRA - (Turning to SSR)--Congratulations! You have been selected.
SRR - What! Have they already decided? Who told you? Is it PR?
We have a hard drive failure to thank for this biography written by R.’s son Yogeshwar [Y.]. Initially begun in the cohort of material for R.’s 1992 centennial, this crash erased the working files, causing him to miss his publishing deadline and leaving him with only a paper copy of the rough draft. After reading the other biographies produced in 1992, he noted the absence of material on R.’s personal life: “Whatever little that was presented about R’s private life was ‘second or third hand’ information, not always near the truth.” (Y., 20) When he returned to writing five years later, he shifted his book’s emphasis.
Even so, Y. struggled with disentangling personal elements from someone who’s life and work are so interleaved: “Can one write a personal biography of Mahatma Gandhi without slipping into Ahimsaa [ed. nonviolence] and Sataagraha [ed. comparable to civil rights campaigns in the US context] and the Freedom Movement in India?” Often, Y. is conceptually working backward, tracing the roots of R.’s Library Science influences from his culture, family, and “beyond-biology genealogy” in math, law, and education.
Described as one of the book’s “two foci,” Y. hopes to reinforce that R.’s tireless library work was, in essence, only a means to an end:
his main mission in life was to propagate his conviction that access to information was a main pillar to support a just society. Library Science was only an instrument he had developed for the purpose.
R.’s own works were divided roughly half-and-half between pure Library Science professionalism and his involvement in Education in general. To him, the main goal was ‘education for everybody,’ a process in which libraries could play a vital role… Whether in India or abroad, writing about him hardly cover this main goal of his and his contributions in that context. They are primarily concerned with only the ‘Library Scientist.’
Y. fills significant gaps relating to R.’s family history, upbringing, and role within his extended family structure. He this sources information from R.’s correspondence, but in the absence of much other documentation, relies on R,’s sister Aviam, “a treasure-house of information [who] had not committed much to writing.” (Y., 166)
“Around 1800,” there were two brothers living in Kottapada (“a small village in the Cauvery delta, near Karaikal and about 8km east of Ubhayavedantapuram”) who teamed up to “conduct business” with the British, with one staying in Madras. They used the money to buy “productive land holdings around the home base.” Over time, “the clan must have increased in size to a point when the holdings were decentrilised and the original economic strategy got dissipated.” The holdings were eventually split between two brothers: Purushottaman Nilakantan and Ramamritam Ranganathan, R.’s father.
Ramamritam “lived off the income from the agricultural land.” “[He] must have been quite erudite in the classics and used to hold discourses on the Ramayana. He was highly literate in Sanskrit and Tamil, as well as Grantham, a bridge-language between the two. He is reported to have been something like the wise man of the hamlet.”
R. was the eldest son and had two siblings, brother Natesan and sister Aviam, who “was born a few months after” Ramamritam’s death in 1898 (“probably of cholera”), when R. was six years old. Afterwords, the immediate family was looked after by R.’s mother Sitalakshmi and her two brothers Subbayyar and Kalyana Mama. Y. surmises that Sitalakshmi’s early widowhood may have led her to reaffirm her commitment to traditional values; But R. had benefit of both conservative and progressive cultural perspectives from his mother and grandmother, respectively. To skip ahead a little, Sitalakshmi opposed R.’s traveling overseas to the UK, because their sub-caste Vadama Ayyars (Brahmins whose “forefathers had immigrated from the North”) would be “contaminated” by crossing the sea. However, R.’s grandmother was more cultural aligned with “the people of Cauvery delta who had been [going overseas] for more than two thousand years;” and quoted counterpoints from the classics indicating its permissibility. (Y., 118)
But back to the matter at hand – R.’s family’s traditional structure mean that, at the age of six, as the eldest son he was “burdened him with the ‘captaincy’ of a family’, not unlike a child becoming the infant monarch just because the ruling king or queen had died.” (Y., 137) R.’s marriage to Rukmani was arranged in 1907, when he was 15 and she 11; The “arrangements” had been “made by ‘elders’ after elaborate and careful check-outs by matching horoscopes and so on.” Y. indicates they lived for many years “married in contract only,” before starting a “conjugal life” in “1917 or so.” There are few descriptions of Rukmani dedicated to text, and “apart from the letters [she and R.] exchanged, I know very little about her.” Y. suspects “her temperament must have been quite fiery, though probably only in privacy with her husband.” (Y., 168)
This joint-family living arrangement arrangement came with tensions, as implied by R. and Rukmani’s correspondence during his time in the UK. It seems Rukmani was chafing somewhat at “the irrational tradition of supremacy of the husband’s family, particularly of a mother-in-law over a daughter-in-law.” (Y., 128-129) Yet, the “cruel” traditional social attitudes toward widows – “personal tragedy converted by society into perpetual misery” (Y., 177) – rendered Sitalakshmi confined in many ways as well: “She had to spend the rest of her life with a shaven head and clad in the simplest white garb and the forehead smeared with ‘holy’ ash.” Visibly marked, her appearance in public was taken as “a bad omen,” “doom[ing] to failure” any errand in which she was the first person encountered. (Y., 176)
The situation apparently came to a head upon R.’s return, where Rukmani (who’d been staying with her parents in Tanjore) refused to accompany him back to Madras if Sitalakshmi remained in the household. R. took two days’ leave of absence – an unheard-of occurrence – to arrange for his mother to live with his brother instead, and pens a series of “frantic” letters to Rukmani. (Y., 163)
As part of this readjustment, he worked with a landlord to design a building in Triplicane capacious enough for several families, to accommodate a traditional joint-living arrangement – “it was common practice for a senior member of a family with a steady job to throw open his home to the clan and close friends” (Y., 165) – but afforded more privacy than usual for each of the family units. Rukmani insisted that only friends, not family, should be co-tenants. With Rukmani’s accidental drowning in 1928, the living situation shifted again, with R.’s mother and family members once more permitted into the Triplicane house.
Unlike his mother’s widowhood, R.’s was short-lived and culturally unpoisonous, “he became an object for effusive sympathy. […] After the domestic tragedy, he resorted to his ‘ostrich tactics’ by further burying his head in work.” (Y., 177) This period included the herculean task of moving the U. Madras library to its new building, and frequent speaking engagements. R. was “pushed to re-marry, which he did in late 1929.”
His second wife Vangal Lakshmana Sarada hailed from “Vangal, a small inland village in South India,” in the middle of eleven total siblings in a blended family after a remarriage. The family was “reasonably affluent” from patriarch V.K. Lakshman’s businesses; but “his passion was for anything technological. He had designed and developed coffee roasting machines and fully automated installations for beverage bottling and candy production.” This technical bent extended through the whole family, Sarada “probably could use screw drivers and spanners before she had learnt to cook. […] Probably because of this more modern atmosphere, Lakshmana’s children got married at a much older age than had been prevalent in Father’s family.” (Y., 183-185) During the matchmaking process, the family deferred to Sarada when several of her suitors were “prepared to exchange ‘paan and betel nuts’” to confirm the match. “She had declared quite firmly that it was going to be the Librarian.” R. refused any dowry from Sarada’s family. She was 21 and he 37.
Y. suggests R. may have experienced initial “misgivings” about remarrying for a variety of reasons. On the professional side, he was now fully engrossed in his life’s mission. And on the personal side, at the time it was unclear if his first marriage’s lack of children was from fertility issues on his end; And his extended family was concerned that his material support for them may change once he had children of his own.
With council from his trusted friends, he proceeded onward. Just prior to Yogeshwar’s birth, the extended family finalized a plan that transferred the bulk of the inheritance to R.’s brother. Yogeshwar, born Dec. 4, 1932, was their only child, a self-described typical “spoilt brat.” In classic fashion, R. celebrated his son’s birth by recording its details precisely. 2
“During the time that the Parents lived in Triplicane, our home at Sami Pillai Street was a base of a kind of ‘joint family’ with father as its Karta or managing agent.” (Y., 93) Members of the extended family sometimes moved for work, and R.’s house remained a consistent place to “park” the younger generation while parents managed relocations. There was also a “lean and lovable […] paternal uncle Jagannathan” who apparently wrote (pseudonymously, as “Saagaran”) a fictionalized account of the family home’s goings-on in the Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan during the 1930s. R.’s mother “Sitalakshmi spent most of her life with us [e.g. in R.’s immediate household]” until her death in 1953.
Modern readers may be surprised with R.’s blasé attitude and general reluctance with the application and screening processes for the U. Madras Librarian post – but taking a step back to examine where R. was in his personal life in 1924 goes a long way to explaining why he didn’t immediately jump at the chance.
R.’s parents’ and extended family’s aspirations for his life and career were shaped by their cultural context. Y. comments that Sitalakshmi’s brother Kalyana Mama was “a representative model of the typical South Indian Ayyar [ed. “an ethno-religious community of Tamil-speaking Brahmins” wiki] of his time:” His government position as postmaster of a small town conferred him stable employment, income, and social status. R.’s position as a math professor likewise provided him not just with intellectual challenges and an enjoyable social environment, but
assured him a steady income… adequate to support his mother and others of the clan, whom he had taken on at his ‘hostel.’ He was all set to follow the classical career pattern of a South Indian Ayyar, not in the fields of bureaucracy or law, but in academia. […] He had reached a plateau on which life sustenance at the upper levels of mediocrity was easily possible. (Y., 104; 112)
So we can see why R. struggled with the decision to change careers: Though the Librarian position payed more, it was also an unknown path – one in which potential failure might endanger the material security of his extended family. But his reluctance becomes an unexpected asset: During the interviews, his prickly attitude and refusal to kiss the screeners’ rings unexpectedly make a favorable contrast with his sycophantic competitors.
R. famously hates his job when he starts – finding it lonely and dull. But this is because he’s approaching librarianship as it was handed to him, rather than as it could be imagined.
R. reveals some interesting details about his education in England. He was initially supposed to train at the library school at the British Museum; But the clerk who receives him tells him to go instead to the University College London’s [UCL] new program, which opened 2 years prior and was much better-regarded. At UCL, his advisors allow him to skip classes he doesn’t need (e.g. Sanskrit and German, which he speaks fluently and reads passably, respectively) – a practice I wish SJSU would embrace! He takes classes through November; Apprentices at Croydon Public Library through December; Then, visits other libraries to observe their functioning.
Though the library director approved this unusual plan, he “cautioned [R.] would not be eligible to get a formal Diploma if he took this route. Father felt that gaining real competence was more important than obtaining a paper certificate.” (Y., 131) However, “several months after the final examinations at the School and after [R.] was back in India, he received by mail, not just a Diploma Certificate, but an Honors Certificate. He had scored record marks in Classification, Cataloguing and Indexing.” (Y., 132)
On his whirlwind library tour, he finds a library landscape shifting through “different stages of development” in many of its technical aspects, such as reference service and charging systems. This exposure allows for his analyses of different methods which appear in The Five Laws. He arrives firmly on the side of open (versus closed) access after seeing both strategies in use and learning some “lurid facts:” about the loss of books: “The library in Westminster served highly educated, highly placed, clean-collared officers, and one at East London servicing the general public introduced open access about a year earlier. The loss in the former was ten times that in the later.” (R., 1992)
His critiques of some UCL classes later inform his own approach to LIS pedagogy. He’s particularly frustrated when context is elided, e.g., when a reading room’s dimensions are presented without explanations for why they were selected. In these critiques, we see R. begin to identify many of the information gaps the Five Laws and his works on classification and administration would later fill:
The course included also library legilsation. Here again, it was all a string of facts regarding the way in which the section of the Library Act were interpreted in practice by the different Library Authorities. Nothing was said about the sociological or educational background of the National Library System. Nothing was said about the way in which library rate [ed. tax allocation] was determined from time to time. […]
The rules in the [Anglo-American Catalogue Code] were never studied systematically. The normative principles behind the rules were not touched upon. In fact, the idea that the rules should have been based on some fundamental principles never dawned in anybody’s mind. (R., 1992)
These information gaps are reinforced during his observation tour, where he’s “amazed that there was hardly any library which had not mangled [DDC]. Nor could SSR find in his discussion with the various classifiers any normative principles guiding such a mangling.” (R., 1992)
“In many ways Father had innerly prepared himself for the [his UK trip]. He was going to retain his ‘Indian-ness’ to the greatest extent possible.” (Y.) Along with the influence of R.’s culturally conservative mother, Y. suggests he may have felt “a subconscious warning” from the tragic experience of the math prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose overseas experience in the UK from 1914 to 1919 precipitated his untimely death in 1920. (see “Sidebar: Ramanujan” below)
But R. was practical, and “arrived reasonably well outfitted for the cold season of England and the notorious London ‘pea soup’”. Y. reports a receipt from a tailor in Madras listing “among other items, a full tweed suit and 12 soft collars and even a flannel waist band”, totaling around two weeks of his wages. (Y., 138) Note that at this point, R. is still mainly wearing western dress; he hadn’t yet converted to the traditional Indian dress in support of the independence movement. (see “Colonial Politics” below)
In London, R. initially lodges at the Indian Students’ Hostel, where the Hindu cooks provide familiar meals. (See Y. 138-139 for a typical daily menu.) The cold weather arrived about a month into his stay, and he reports it exacerbates his “weakness for sleeping long”: “Once I get into bed with 4 blankets, I am gone till the noon of the next day.” (R., 140) R.’s lifestyle in the UK was somewhat spartan; He includes financial details in his letters to Rukmani, noting that he spends “nothing on items like coffee or tea or on amusements like theatre shows.” (R., 141) His Rs 400 monthly salary was sufficient to cover his needs in the UK along with the usual support of his joint family.
R. was older than the other hostel residents, and eventually he and six other older Indians in London for their “second schooling” found a home with Mrs. Petersen, a widow who supported herself by lodging and homemaking for boarders.
By this route, this band of hungry South Indians “captured” a Swedish lady’s home and transformed it into a small hostel. The lady was able to see that this bunch were mature people and serious about their advanced studies. Very small likelihood of hanky-panky. What she probably had not foreseen was that she would end up as an expert in South Indian cuisine, trained by an Indian Chemist! (Y., 143)
R. recounts a conversation in the UK with a Mr. and Mrs. Neville, who had been involved in getting Ramanujan transferred to England. Recalling Ramanujan’s distress at cutting his hair and abandoning the turban, she asks R. this was done. R. replies there was an impression at the time that there was “a blind belief that a person walking in the streets of London or Cambridge wearing a turban would be hooted down or even stoned by the mob.” On the contrary, R. found his presentation went mostly unremarked, or engendered polite curiosity.
The following quote occurs as a digression in a discussion of W.C. Berwick Sayers, but I found it a valuable observation about R.’s general method of inquiry. (This section involves some specific terms from R.’s Spiral of Scientific Inquiry, which appears in the 1954 second revision of the Five Laws: Induction, sublimation, intuition, etc.)
Here, Y. describes how R.’s cultural background might lead modern writers to describe his character as somewhat “contradictory”; That is, his comfortable embrace of both traditionalism and emerging techniques and technologies, rationalism and mysticism, and so on.
Most civilisations use “scriptures” as books of rules for life in societies. With few exceptions, such books are products of “induction” and “sublimation” of experiences of humanity by inspired and intuitive individuals, often considered as messengers of “god”. Updates of the originals take place occasional and the result is a variety of religions and “Isms” and sets of “deduced” rituals. A common characteristic of all, including Brahmanism, is an innate resistance to adapt to expanding and changing patters of such human experiences and new knowledge. The Vedic civilisation is somewhat different. In its original form, it is a collection of speculative thoughts over centuries in the form of 4 Vedas followed by innumerable Upanishads as an ongoing chain of updates. There are no particular authors. Father had always been a strange mixture when it came to his Inner Self. He had been conditioned to conduct his daily life according to Brahmanic rituals. At the same time, he was a product of the Upanishadic tradition and his academic training had been as a mathematician.
Sayers was from an earlier “generation” of librarians, but his and Ranganathan’s trajectories were largely parallel, regarding their path-breaking roles in the formation of library organizations in their respective countries and admirable plate-spinning. The fruitfulness of their collaboration was life-long; which Y. attributes to both men’s efforts to find the “symbiosis between two ingrained characteristics of the human psyche: The doer and the dreamer.” Sayers was the consummate doer, with a wealth of experience from building library systems from the ground-up. R. “imbibed the ‘do-how” and added the ingredients of philosophy and ‘dream’ with his wider cultural background to provide the ‘know-how’.” (Y., 136)
R.’s three-week return trip on the MV Dumana created an unintended space for reflection. Aside from the “scholarly” Captain, who befriended R. after observing his daily pre-sunrise recitations of The Ramayana on deck, R.’s fellow passengers were “all Britishers employed in India in plantations, railways, and other industries owned by the British. There was hardly any intellectual among them. They spent most of their time in gossip and frolic.” (R., 1992)
Comparing this period to a less-intensive version of “the prolonged silence phase passed through by aspirants of self-realization,” it “enabled SSR to come to a firm decision about his future.” (R., 1992) He lays out the “Benefits of Silence” in an ordered list. I’ve seen this referred to obliquely in other texts, but am reproducing it in full below, because of its import to the context of The Five Laws:
I found “Benefit 3” particularly interesting because it reads in some ways like the effusive cultural flattening common to undergrads who spend a semester abroad or adults who go on midlife Eat, Pray, Love sojourns. (That sentence came out snarky, but I truly mean this in a value-neutral way. I lived in Singapore for a year, and am as guilty of this as the next person.) R.’s description of indefatigable British industriousness reads like an inverted version of a traveling Westerner’s description of suffusive Indian spirituality: That is, it’s a gross oversimplification still retaining a broad nugget of cross-cultural information; Deeply impactful for the subjective observer, even if it lacks nuance.
In R.’s case, this vaguely monolithic view of the British citizenry segues into next Benefit; It seems unclear if R. is aware the “nation-building” British libraries helped to bring about sometimes involved messy, conflicting, and self-interested views of the character and direction of the nation. (See “Context Part 2 : England” e.g. Peatling, 2004; Hewitt, 2000; Fletcher, 1996) Nonetheless, this simplified view translates into a powerful conceptual trajectory for empowering a colonized people: Coupled with some sly implications in The Five Laws regarding the relationship between Russian public libraries prior to the October Revolution, we can see R.’s line of thinking here.
Yogeshwar provides a good distillation of the Benefits of Silence:
Or to summarize another way, R. returned to India “loaded with ideas and plans for his life in the new profession which far exceeded the framework of his designated office.” (Y., 163)
On the final leg of the return trip from Colombo (Sri Lanka) to the mainland, R. makes use of a common travel hack for returning Indians: He leaves his luggage with the ship (which may be in port for up to a week), and takes the daily boat mail train’s ferry to the mainland, which drops off at “the holy island” of Rameswaram. Here, he performs a bathing ritual to remove the “contamination” from being abroad (see “Ranganathan’s Family” above); Over the next four days he performs another bathing ritual at Sethu, a Saarddha ceremony to honor “his departed father and other ancestors,” and a fire sacrifice before his return to Madras. (Y., 156, 133)
When I started my research, I was unclear about MALA’s relationship with The Five Laws and the Library Movement generally – but these books clarify that its role in both was absolutely critical. The formation of MALA is intrinsically linked with the Indian National Congress and shared its conceptual aims; And the crossover between MALA administration and the U. Madras executive opened doors and provided a dedicated space for R. to develop his ideas in the context of presentations and publications.
FunFact! The not-quite-exact acronym MALA was selected because it means “garland” in Sanskrit. (Y., 170)
According to Yogeshwar, the ball got rolling during the 1927 All-India Public Library Conference, an “adjunct to the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress.” Here, R. met “Sushil Kumar Ghosh, a teacher from Calcutta, and Ayyanki Venkataramanaiah, an Adhra landlord.” They had “little know-how about library management” but were convinced “that libraries were important depositories of information to prepare Indians to participate in the Freedom Movement.”
In their [e.d. Ghosh and Venkataramanaiah] assessment, the then Madras Presidency has no citizens’ movement to popularise the idea of libraries. Madras had the most qualified and enthusiastic librarian in the country. He was convinced of the importance of libraries, but need a “god-father” to become effective. […] This two-some had roped in a leading advocate of Madras to take on this role. K.V. Krishnaswamy Ayyar was “a live wire”, both in his profession and in academic and social circles. Just the kind of personality to get a citizens’ movement “going”, by Haldane’s words. (Y., 62) (“Haldane’s”: see “Colonial Politics” below.)
Ghosh, Venkataramanaiah, and Ayyer were the essential political counterparts to R., who “neither had the political savvy of his own nor the mental make-up to realise that concrete achievements in society required political clout. […] The most important task of finding political support had been completed post-haste over R.’s dizzy head by people who had been total strangers to him.” (Y., 62-63) As Y. puts it, upon R.’s return to Madras, “he would be a target to shoot at for the new hunters in the communal political jungle. […] Father did not have the mental makeup to face up to this ‘reality’ […] His escape route was an ostrich tactic. Bury his head in intellectual efforts whenever he felt lost.” (Y. 158; 162)
R. gives most of the credit for MALA’s Jan. 30, 1928 founding to Venkataramaniah (himself not directly involved in educational work or, according to R., much of a reader at all); And Ayyer, who convened the first promotional meeting, enrolled many members directly, and was elected president at the first official meeting. Note the following breakdown of MALA’s initial membership by professional field:
Library...........2 Journalism........6 Engineering.......2 Medicine..........6 Education........46 Administration...22 Business.........32 Law.............294 Total...........410
“The connection, of 82% of the members enrolled belonging to the legal and educational profession, with K V Krishnaswammy Ayyar being a leader of the Bar and a member of the Executive of the University of Madras, is unmistakable.” MALA’s initial leadership likewise hailed from a broad swath, including a retired police commissioner, a museum superintendent, a “well-known patriot,” and someone from the Postal Audit Office. Far from being a rag-tag crew, MALA’s broad cross-section allowed for wide-reaching promotional activities.
At MALA’s first meeting to establish a constitution, three main goals were set:
Request funds from the Corporation of Madras to be provisioned to public libraries;
Appeal to local boards in urban areas to establish libraries; and
Appeal to the public in rural areas to form library associations.
I’m going to cede the floor to Yogeshwar here:
The war of independence in 1857 was an attempt to throw out the foreign exploiters with violent means. But it had failed […] for two primary reasons. […] India at that time did not have the technical equipment and know-how to use it to throw out the better equipped foreigners. The second reason was that there had been an enormous communication gap between the freedom enthusiasts and the masses who had gone totally apathetic. […]
In the first half of the twentieth century, a different category of freedom enthusiasts had entered the political scene. The weapon they started using was “The rich cultural heritage.” The Indian National Congress became the “volunteer army” to employ the new weapons. Libraries could play a key role in their strategy. […]
But an army consisting only of a Chief of Staff and a few general and colonels cannot perform. It needs the muscle of the “other ranks”, in this case, the collective cultural muscle of the people of India. […] The All-India Public Libraries Association had wisely made it a point to accompany [the INC] as an independent adjunct and propaganda machinery to awaken interest in potential recruits […] They were trying to organise distribution centres for the “brochures” to make people aware of libraries as “cultural information centres.” MALA was to be the regional co-ordinator for the South, not created by library professionals, but by enthusiastic and cultured patriots. (Y., 171-172)
“On the day of its birth, MALA was not expected to be a vehicle for the development of ‘library science’”, but rather
as a vehicle to promote means to exploit the potential availability of information in libraries for the benefit of society. Something like a publicity and public relations agency. It was not expected to create or run libraries on its own, leave alone inventing techniques to perform such functions. The object was to make it a vehicle of a “library movement” in the Presidency of Madras. (Y., 171)
Perhaps to be expected in an organization whose membership is half lawyers, much of R.’s legislative work occurred in the context of MALA. But let’s rewind a little to relay two contrasting experiences with the legislative process R. experienced in the UK.
While in the UK, R. attended a conference concerning rural library service, where he befriends a Col. Mitchell from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. This connection enables him to “to get copies of the publications of the [Trust]… These were of immense value to SRR on his return to Madras–in drafting the Public Library Bill, and in working out the memorandum for the development of the Library Systems, for Madras, and the other states.”
But the flip side of the coin is when R. receives a hard “lesson in politics” (Y.) just a month after his arrival in the UK, and the government was transitioning from Labour to Conservative. R. happened to hear a speech Conservative MP Viscount Haldane, who stated that the government should essentially stay uninvolved in “matters like education, instruments like libraries” until these entities are so overwhelming popular that it becomes politically advantageous for the government to administer them [emphasis mine]. (It’s worth noting this cynical opinion arrives several years after the 1919 Library Act, which had resounding public support and passed easily through parliament.)
Thus, from the outset of his library career, R. was exposed to both the possibilities of library legislation, and the potential neglect it may face in the political sphere.
A Librarian Looks Back contains a good overview of R.’s legislative work, and provides some context for the many draft bills he produced. As early as 1929, R. was interfacing with U. Madras executives who had a seat at the table regarding potential legislative changes enabling more gov’t funding for libraries, and suggesting adjustments to bills based on his boots-on-the-ground experience.
In the context of The Five Laws, the role of draft legislation is crucial to MALA’s second goal above, while the more entertaining parts of the book can assist with the third. Based on his familiarity with the Carnegie Trust legislation mentioned above, R. writes his first draft bill in 1930, while attending the All-Asian Educational Conference, where he works as the secretary of the Library Services Section. MALA “gave wide publicity to the draft Act by printing it as Annexure 7 to its Annual Report for 1930.” (R., 1992)
This first draft bill opened the door for future collaboration; R. was asked to write or sit on committees to write 32 draft bills from 1930 to 1967. However, getting these bills passed was another matter. From 1931 to 1939, MALA “made three attempts to have a Public Libraries Act put on the statute book.” These were unsuccessful “In spite of the Association having succeeded in getting most of the local bodies to Pass resolutions asking for library legislation.”
However, in the early 1940s, a fortuitous connection occurred when a former student of R.’s, Avinashilingam Chettiar, had become a minister of Education. In his typical single-minded fashion, R. shows up unannounced at the ministers office, and presses him to do something with the draft bill. Chettiar “piloted the Bill through the Select Committee stage…[and it] was passed through legislature in 1948”, thus becoming India’s first Public Library Act.
R.’s outreach work with MALA was extensive: Between 1931 and 1939, he spoke at 147 publicity events and published 68 articles for the organization. The first appearance of the Five Laws occurred during a series of lectures at Chidambaram, in December 1928, during the Annual South Indian Educational Conference. While technically part of a U. Madras general-interest lecture series (the “Vacation Lectures”), the timing and selection of R. as speaker was arranged by K.V.K. Ayyer and K.A. Neelakanta Sastry, both members of the University Executive and admin in MALA. “They also got the permission of the University to invite local bodies to attend the lectures. […] At that time, SRR arranged also an exhibition of library pictures and library apparatus. The audience was more than 500 strong. Thus a good impact was made on the educated public about the value of library service.” (R., 1992)
This occasion [ed. the Vacation Lectures] was to be just another forum to promote and extend the “library movement” in South India. An enthusiastic MALA and an accommodating University of Madras had made his participation possible. Instead of making “amorphous commercial palaver for the library movement,” Father presented “a crystallized definition of the totality”. What it was all about and what it takes to achieve it. (Y., 181)
The final sentence of this quote encapsulates the broader Western research gap on The Five Laws: The focus lies entirely on what it’s all about at the expense of what it takes to achieve it. And in R.’s case specifically, the what it takes was intrinsically linked to India’s status as a colony, and the limits of its colonial legislative structure for empowering its colonized people.
Along with publications and presentations, Ranganathan’s contributions to MALA were also monetary: He donated the authorship rights of The Five Laws, along with several other key texts including Colon Classification, to MALA. That is, his royalties went to the association. Kaula reports that during its first six months, The Five Laws had generated nearly Rs 1,000, and suggests a large part of the eventual Rs 20,000 the Association had set aside for the construction of its headquarters was likely from these royalties.3
R.’s oft-repeated honorific “The Father of Library Science in India” is not overblown: He directed India’s first graduate Library Science program, under the auspices of MALA in 1929. This was a summer program and its first cohort was 12 students: 7 graduates and 5 “non-graduates but with some years of experience working in libraries.” (R., 1992) The Five Laws were presented in brief during this program. The management of this program was transferred to Madras University the next year, with R. directing in his capacity as University Librarian.
This permeable membrane between R.’s roles at U. Madras and MALA – a public university and a private organization – gave some ammunition to his political opponents in the U. Madras admin, who used partisan newspapers to accuse him of double-dipping. Once again, a friendly member of the U. Madras exec councils him through the appropriate press responses to these accusations.
In fact, a careful reader will notice that many (perhaps most) of R.’s anecdotes in A Librarian Looks Back are concerned with his challenges navigating interpersonal spaces threaded with complex political interests and bureaucracy. (See also “Personal Note” below.)
At the beginning of his U. Madras appointment, R. paints himself as a doe-eyed naif suddenly tossed into the palace intrigue of higher ed. He doesn’t always see the angles his peers and superiors are playing, and comes to rely on trusted friends and advisors to inform him when potential storms are brewing. As his profile grows with the success of his library reforms, he often relies on his command of facts-and-figures (what we’d now call “data-driven decision-making”) to overcome the caltrops his administrative opponents increasingly toss in his path.
Chapters AS, AT, and AU (“Socio-political background”, “Premonitions”, and “Direct action”) are a essentially a catalog of slights, bureaucratic machinations, and outright lies utilized against him during his U. Madras tenure. “It may be asked why one should lay bare the unseamy [sic] side or the adversity of one’s life. The reason is that otherwise others would fall into the illusion that SRR was a favoured child of God or circumstances. This would make them fatalistic and deprive them of self-reliance and initiative.” (R., 1992)
The first of these chapters is a broad overview of certain social currents in India, beginning with the “latest cycle of cultural exhaustion of the Indian community [beginning] about the thirteenth century,” via the South-moving occupation of India by “Muslim invaders from West Asia.” (R., 1992) He frames the establishment and eventual “decadence” of the Moghuls as paving the way the gradual takeover of India by the East India Company beginning in the mid-1700s.4 This segues into a discussion of the “divide-and-conquer” political schemes enacted by the British to keep their heterogeneous colonial subjects from achieving solidarity. Yogeshwar fleshes out R.’s brief overview, and in the process, contextualizes some of the political push-back to R.’s work:
The British had created a consolidated administrative area known in those days as “India, Burma and Ceylon,” which they could manipulate for their own benefit. They could hold on to it if there were enough internal tensions which would pre-occupy the people and thus keep them away from thoughts of throwing out the foreign exploiter. (Y., 159)
The residents of Madras, with its large Hindu majority, were “living in the traditional Indian style of social structure which had been practised for centuries.” Here, the “crudely described” caste system created dividing lines the British could exploit; in “other parts of India which had received a strong impact of Islam through later Moghul rulers […] the dividing lines were not so much between various castes within the Hindu society, but between Hindus and Muslims.”
After the First War of Independence in 1853 (British: the Sepoy Mutiny), the British “permitted” a system of higher education of certain Indians, “so that they could be used as glorified servants in the administration of the empire. The […] Indian Civil Service had opened its door for such a few. […] But they had been programmed to distance themselves from the real Indian society. An exalted platoon of civilian mercenaries.” Conversion to Christianity granted “special preference” in employment, and the British practice of bestowing honorifics (Sir, Saheb, Bahadur, and “other ‘title lollipops’”) likewise served as hierarchical demarcators.
As the Indian nationalist movement began gaining steam in “the early 1900s,” British efforts to increase cultural tensions likewise intensified. The Hindu-Muslim divide continued to be the lever in the North, but in the South, the British identified Brahmins as a potential threat: Although a “small minority of the total population, [they] had a very high representation in the fields of education and law. […] They were also much more ‘Indian’ in than other communities in their outlook and daily life style.”
If this key group got infected by the ideas of Gandhi and others, they could become the core of a formidable phalanx in the brewing independence movement. The clever and sly British political mind realised that something had to be done, but without ostentatious British involvement.
Material affluence had been no traditional goal for Brahmins. On the contrary, austerity had been the rule. A Brahmin millionaire was a rarity. Therefore, this group could not be ‘bought up’ easily by addressing ‘greed’. Putting ‘fear’ into them could only accelerate their consolidation as a group.
The tactics adopted was to sow seeds of ‘jealousy’ and to nurture it among the ‘non-Brahmins’. If the project were well executed, the target of the disruption would be achieve as a result of purely internal strife among Indians. The British might even be ‘needed’ to maintain order and stability. (Y., 161)
Yogeshwar’s analysis clarifies some of R.’s spicier attitudes concerning English-educated Indians in The Five Laws: “Only a few [Hindus] took to English education and entered government service. It is these few that were used as a hammer to break the solidarity of people of South India.” (R., 1992)
This political background sets the stage for several of the administrative conflicts he later faces; U. Madras’ executives are first-and-foremost politicians, and several among them undercut his plans and appoint incompatible workers to his staff for purely partisan reasons.5
As the old bromide goes: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Upon being formally diagnosed with ASD 1 last year, the blissfully academia-free summer I envisioned instead became a crash course on Autism, as I trawled through the literature to better understand my particular location within this very broad diagnosis, and get up-to-speed on the current research. My healthcare provided a handful of sessions with a therapist specializing in the transitionary period after diagnosis. When I told her I was a librarian, she laughed and said “Oh, I see a lot of you people.” Perhaps it’s intuitive that individuals with excessively “systematizing” cognition would be drawn to the knowledge organization field. (Frith, 2008)
This table-setting is important, because without this recent detour, I probably wouldn’t have realized that many of P.N. Kaula’s anecdotes about R. in the chapter “CK: Personal Glimpses” are describing textbook ASD behaviors – and I mean literally textbook, i.e. Atwood (2015).
Some of this may be authorial overexaggeration – Kaula is clearly besotted with R.’s unconventional intensity, and from my experience as an editor, his overuse of superlatives makes me skeptical of his accuracy – but I personally feel it’s worth relating some of this, just to put it out there. As Y. comments, “The total personality of a person is a composite entity made up of many facets. Its shape and color will be different each time depending on who does the assessment and presentation.” (Y. 76)
Rigid habits: Ranganathan lobbied for the library to be open 365 days a year, and personally worked there every day. He famously worked a shift on the day of his second marriage. His meals were strictly regimented, and “Even the quantity and the time at which he drank water was to a strict schedule.” (Y. 208; Which also contains R’s typical menu.) He read a section of The Ramayana each morning; When he finished, he’d start over, marking the date on a front page.
Circumscribed interests: Per Kaula, “From the early hours of his rising till late at night, he would talk of nothing but library science. Even in ordinary conversation he would connect every topic to library science and once he started talking or writing about it, he forgot himself.” Yogeshwar comments, “That R. was totally infected by his Library Science was a fact of life that his biological family had come to accept.” Kaula provides more anecdotes about his idiosyncratic interpersonal style under the unflattering headings “Unattached to Family,” “Hard Task Master,” and “The Measuring Rod.”
“Islands of ability”: Yogeshwar relates an anecdote where R. buys a wrist watch, but it seems to stop working after a few days. Y. tries it out, it works fine. He takes it to the repairman, who says there’s nothing wrong. Y. asks R. to show him how he’s been winding the watch… and as it turns out, he’d been winding it the wrong direction for a full minute every day, because he concluded that the direction that made the knob more difficult to turn must be incorrect. Throughout his life, R. almost never cooked, and Y. recounts his disastrous attempts during a time when Sarada was away. Y.’s section “16.3 Eccentricities about health” (210-212) is a catalog of practices it seems odd that someone with daily access to a robust library would have persisted in.
Difficulty with ambiguous social environments: Beginning right with the interview process, R. describes himself as somewhat lost in the complex bureaucratic and political milleiu of University admin. It’s worth noting that he’s 32 years old, and a reasonably well-respected mathematician at this point. He is fortunate to have friends who guide him through difficult situations. With time, he adjusts to the odious reality of the admin milleiu, “For, as he grew in age, SRR has been seeing every now and then at the levels of political life –local, district, state, national and international level–such inconsistencies. This seems to be an inexorable weakness in man.” (118) This gradual adaptation in social deficit areas is characteristic of ASD individuals with lower support needs (née “high-functioning”).
Black-and-white thinking: In his book, R. describes a few instances where he interprets official requests in unusually extreme ways. For example, an administrator requests that official architectural proceedings for the new library come only from the architect; In response, R. stops vising the construction site altogether, expecting that this request will shortly arrive. (It does not.) According to Kaula, “SRR did not care of the middle course. He could not adjust or compromise.” He describes a conversation with a government official who comments “SRR cannot fit in the government machinery. He wants the things to be done immediately and he cannot adjust himself to circumstances.”
Physical clumsiness: “All those who have known Ranganathan must have noticed his total lack of manual dexterity. He always had a water-tight theory of how something should be done, but could rarely actually do it himself.” (Y., p 58)
Inheritability: Children with ASD are more likely to have parents in “highly systematizing” or “technical occupations” like academia, healthcare, engineering, and financial analysis. (Dickerson, et al. 2014) Ranganathan’s father regularly gave exegetic talks on the Ramayana; His second wife Sarada’s family includes many people in technical fields, and their son Yogeshwar and all of his children are in technical fields.
Later in life, R. has a health crisis that necessitates Y. traveling to the hospital where he’s been admitted. The staff there had commented R. had been in-and-out of lucidity, and “had been incoherent in his speech, talking of some numbers and digits which no one was able to decipher.” What the staff didn’t know was that “R. had allotted a classification number to each member of the family. Father was ‘2w1’. We were familiar with these because every letter he wrote carried them.”
Post-diagnosis, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stereotype of the absent-minded professor; and about my own “islands of ability,” and how I can best establish ferry service between them. Not every personal idiosyncrasy need be pathologized, and one of the weird parts about a midlife diagnosis is that you’ve already developed various coping strategies – some more successfully than others – in order to integrate into a sometimes-ill-fitting world.
But I digress. I guess what I’m trying to say with this section is that, in these descriptions of R.’s way of moving through the world, I recognize a fellow traveler – for better or for worse.
A digitized version is held by Hathi Trust and is inaccessible without a certain kind of account (that SJSU does not provide). It is likewise unavailable on Black OA channels. During the period of my research, no copies have surfaced on the secondary market. The only physical copy in Northern California is housed at UC Berkeley; There is an additional copy at UC’s Southern Regional Library Facility in LA.
“With all the excitement, Father behaved in his typical manner. The first thing that he did was to enter the precise time, date, month, and year of my birth in his Ramayana. This entry shows the kind of alloy he was between a traditional Indian and a Scientist. the data is as per the Indian calendar with name of the year, name of the month, date of the month, day of the date, followed by two stellar co-oridnates to fix the time. This is followed by an entry as per the Western calendar: ‘12-4-1932. 7.12PM’ ¶ Then follows the subject of the event written in Sanskrit: Shri Yogeshwarasya Shubhajananam. The next notes down my ‘star’ with some numbers behind it, followed by the times of the sunrise and sunset on the day. Thereafter two squares with subdivisions titled raasi and amsam that had been drawn and various squares filled out. The horoscope. ¶ The final entry is a Sanskrit word written in Tamil script Shubhamastu. ‘May all be well’. Excited as he must have been, he had not entered the space co-oridnates of the place. These had been added on, presumably later, because a different ink had been used. It is in Tamil script, ‘Tiruvallikkeni. Sami Pillai Street 15th house number’.” (Y.191)
Conversions: I couldn’t find any online inflation calculators that went this far back for rupees (which, it should be noted, were still administered by the British at this point). The closest comparison I could find was Rs 1,000 in 1957 is around $1,214 USD. A better comparison would be annual salaries for various positions in Madras at the time, but ain’t nobody got time for that.
As a modern reader, I found myself slightly uncomfortable with what seemed like an ethnonationalist reading of long history; That is, where – or when, rather – do we draw the line for when an “invading army” becomes a naturalized demographic? To paraphrase from Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting, to become French, the separate peoples of France must first forget their differences.
R. assumes the reader will have the lay-of-the-land here, so he doesn’t describe the administrative structure of U. Madras in detail – This information would have been helpful for less-familiar readers like myself.
It seems pertinent to mention the following material expresses my opinions as a private citizen, rather than in my public-sector role with CDL, or my role as an SJSU student – though of course, many current events concerning the Dept. of Education have a direct impact on my role as a student.
This week, former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe was arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Huntington Beach City Council’s plan to add a plaque to the local library referencing MAGA. Kluwe studded history and political science in college, making him well-suited to identify historical precedents for the rapid state capture currently occurring in the US. Kluwe’s speech at the council meeting was brief and forthright; But in later interviews, he repeats a largely-held perspective that I also used to hold, and from which this research project has fully disabused me:
We want to honor the library. We want there to be a plaque, but we don’t want MAGA on it because the library isn’t supposed to be political. [emphasis mine]
This naive understanding of libraries’ political neutrality is, in part, pushed by libraries themselves: That is, a key philosophical pillar of librarianship is that patrons should have access to material espousing a wide range of political views, even from the extreme or potentially dangerous fringes (e.g. Death to the Fascist Insect or Industrial Society and its Future).
This perspective is linked with our support for free inquiry; That is, Librarians provide this material in good-faith because we resist judging why patrons are interested in it. For example, a patron may be researching violence in order to promote pacifism. Tangentially, one fascinating if less-remembered episode concerns provisions in the PATROIT Act allowing law enforcement to access patron records which were previously protected by privacy laws, and sometimes barring librarians from discussing these interactions. Librarians were put in the unenviable position of having to decide whether to break the law or violate their professional ethics.
…But all of this is a red herring. None of this is what I mean when I say the idea “libraries have never been political” is naive. This statement is comparable to saying “capitalism is an economic system, not a political system,” conveniently ignoring the creation and maintenance of legislation enabling and regulating corporations and other essential vehicles of capitalist activity. From a legislative perspective, public libraries are enabled by collectivist wealth redistribution: They are built and maintained by public money generated from taxation and other public revenue sources – which could just as easily be spent elsewhere or not collected at all. Public libraries continue to exist because we (the polity) use our democratic system to elect representatives who maintain legal instruments enabling free access to media as a public good.
Every time someone says “I love the library!” they are, essentially, saying “I love that our government redistributes wealth to so I can access information for free!” And we should never forget that!! Speaking personally, I love the library!!! And I would love to see similar library-like legal instruments for (e.g.) healthcare, housing, and childcare, too!!!!