Time and the National Library and Calcutta have a mysterious relationship. The institution encapsulates a phase in India’s, and the city’s, past, while incarnating a forward-looking idea of its own time. India’s foremost public library grew out of the merging of various collections, chiefly of the Calcutta Public Library and the British secretariat libraries, and was built to include all Indian-language publications as well as those from other Commonwealth countries, the United Nations and the United States of America. It houses a huge collection and some of the rarest old books and manuscripts in India. But history has a nasty trick of standing still. So in spite of the much-vaunted schemes of modernization, computerization and digitization, very little seems to move once the unwary visitor enters its precincts. The accessing of books is painfully slow, employees often seem affected by the lethargy of the past, the system creaks, and every small job requires painstaking paperwork and a lot of legwork over the vast greens. It is no surprise that the rare buyer of the library’s publications should have to expend one hour and a lot of physical energy to get his books. In the time-scale of the National Library, one hour is less than the wink of an eye.

The library is also a monument to another strange relationship, that between the bureaucracy and scholarship. The scholar, reader or academic who seeks his precious material in the haven originally meant only for him, is disconcerted by his encounter with a version of the government office. An unwieldy system and lackadaisical officials are not what he expects to deal with. For many readers, the library is the place of last resort because of the time it takes to get a simple job done.

The library is a Central government institution, and it may be suspected that Delhi is not too pleased to have it located so far from the Centre. Perhaps that explains the evident neglect, the infinitesimally slow implementation of plans already old, the vacancies, the disinterest of employees and officials. (One cannot even be sure if the fire-safety devices work and whether the volumes are protected from water.) Maybe the library’s work ethos is also influenced by the placidity of the state government institutions of Calcutta. But the deeper cause seems to lie in Indian culture itself, of which, ironically, India’s only copyright library is one of the most prominent symbols. Indians are peculiarly indifferent to the preservation of antiquity and history, and equally uninterested in perpetuating what is most valuable in tradition. The callousness of publishers, who ignore — or are ignorant of — the provisions of the Delivery of Books and Newspapers Act, 1954, by which a copy of every publication within the country needs to be deposited with the National Library, is just a small manifestation of this blindness. It is enough that the library is there, seems to be the message. It is not polite to ask for more.