‘What the violent destruction of a Muslim library in Bihar tells us about the troubling state of Islamic heritage in India’

On 31 March, the day of a Hindu non secular pageant and through Ramadan, an extremist mob set a Muslim college, the Azizia Madrasa, and its library ablaze within the metropolis of Bihar Sharif in jap India. Greater than 4,500 printed books and manuscripts of Islamic heritage have been misplaced and broken within the hearth. The throng additionally threw petrol bombs into a close-by mosque and left explosives outdoors the madrasa’s school rooms. For the reason that assault, the district’s superintendent of police, Ashok Mishra, has said that 77 folks have been arrested. One individual died within the violence, and a number of other stay injured.

Endowed by a lady named Bibi Soghra round a century in the past, at present the madrasa has 22 school rooms, which serve as much as 450 college students. Such madrasas type the core of Muslim communities and foster childhood improvement and schooling. Now, ashes of burned books line the flooring of the varsity’s library. Photographs present an imam holding a manuscript with burnt edges and a number of other destroyed handwritten books strewn throughout the grounds. The histories of those books are ceaselessly fragmented.

Anti-Muslim context

This communal violence happens within the wake of quite a few current legal guidelines focusing on Muslims on each nationwide and state ranges in India. But these occasions haven’t drawn almost as a lot uproar as earlier instances, elevating issues as as to if this has turn into anodyne for the mainstream Indian public and media. Most just lately, the Nationwide Council of Instructional Analysis and Coaching (Ncert) dropped whole chapters and sections on Mughal historical past from Indian college textbooks, successfully erasing three centuries of Indian historical past from public schooling and skewing the views of future generations. Main historians the world over have condemned this, however it’s unclear whether or not that may make any affect.

Bihar has had a minimum of two nice websites of studying throughout its lengthy historical past. From a minimum of the fifth century AD it witnessed the rise of Nalanda, a Buddhist monastic college, or vihara, from which the area derives its identify. The medieval historian Juzjani drew an equivalence between the idea of a vihara and madrasa in his description of Bakhtiyar Khalji’s conquest of Nalanda at first of the thirteenth century. He famous that the Buddhist website boasted many books and recognised it as a spot of deep data, regardless of its conquest.

Bihar’s capital Patna additionally homes the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, a world-class assortment of uncommon books and manuscripts, particularly in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, which opened to the general public in 1891. A historical past of Timur and his successors with 132 full-page work commissioned round 1584 stands as one of many library’s best masterpieces. But, in 2021, Bihar’s authorities proposed to construct a flyover that may contain razing a historic a part of the library and endangering the security of the gathering. Widespread disapproval halted this plan.

Whether or not it’s a Buddhist monastery, Muslim madrasa or public manuscript repository, the federal government of India and worldwide events should shield heritage no matter its non secular affiliation. Unesco has stepped in to guard susceptible heritage in lots of different occasions of disaster globally, and the proof—from razing Muslim monuments to burning libraries—speaks in favour of intervention. The stewardship of the Endangered Archives Programme and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, each supported by the Arcadia Fund, have led the way in which for digitising collections that may very well be topic to destruction, neglect or decay, however additional institutional and governmental collaboration is important for all endangered archives to be documented.

When heritage such because the Azizia Madrasa vanishes, a bodily anchor for a complete group ceases to exist inside historical past. Globally, we would even lose the flexibility to reply questions concerning the faraway previous. For instance, a calligraphic apply indigenous to premodern South Asia recognized as Bihari apparently acquired this designation due to an affiliation with Bihar. Different causes for this identify have been put forth, however researchers nonetheless don’t have any definitive proof as to why or how this calligraphy got here to be popularly often known as Bihari. Is the identify a contemporary delusion or does it have some historic credence? Given the script’s shut relationship to Sufi practices and the lengthy historical past of Sufism in Bihar, this may occasionally have been one cause for the connection. Maybe the reply lay amid the rubble of the Azizia Madrasa for a scholar of its group to convey to gentle. Now, this archive is misplaced ceaselessly.

The burning of a madrasa library finds additional resonances inside the arguments of up to date artists who occupy cultural areas distant from contexts like Bihar Sharif. Shubigi Rao, an artist and the curator of the Kochi-Muziris Bienniale 2022-23, says “the destruction of the Azizia Madrasa [is] heartbreaking, like so many libraries which have suffered related fates by the hands of these too ignorant and cruel to know the magnitude and tragedy of such loss.” Rao’s apply has lengthy involved “libricide” and she or he made The River of Ink (2008) in response to the destruction of the Bayt al-Hikmah, or the library of Baghdad pillaged throughout the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions of West Asia. The work options scatters books drowned in ink throughout crates to evoke ashes and the reminiscence of forgetting.

In the meantime the centerpiece of Documenta 13, The Parthenon of Forbidden Books by Marta Minujin, featured a symbolic architectural tribute to the numerous banned books all around the world. Of their destruction, such arson of libraries erases data from histories, very similar to banned or censored books all around the world—such because the case of Mughal historical past in Indian textbooks.

Removed from an remoted occasion in a provincial city, the burning of the Azizia Madrasa library has international ramifications. It leaves one questioning what the longer term holds when governments and establishments present no indicators of safeguarding Muslim heritage in India. Libraries usually are not merely stacks of previous books. They comprise lives whose histories are ready to be informed.

• Vivek Gupta is postdoctoral affiliate on the College of Cambridge