A Hoshiarpur library that survived the partition

The Partition was not just the division of territory between two nations, or the exchange of people, marked by carnage and mayhem. It was also the division of artefacts of cultural importance, a division that was no less dramatic than the first — as this story about a little-known repository of ancient manuscripts at the Vishveshvarand Vedic Research Library (VVRI) testifies.

VVRI today is housed in a row of musty old structures on the outskirts of Hoshiarpur in Punjab, but before 1947, it used to be located at the DAV College in Lahore. Over the years, DAV College, under its first principal Mahatma Hasraj, had emerged as an important centre for Vedic studies. A group of scholars here, under the leadership of Acharya Vishwabandhu, worked painstakingly on creating a Vedic concordance, i.e., an alphabetical list of words, with etymology, accent, grammar, etc. It was a mammoth task that required the scholars to go through the Vedas and the entire corpus of Vedic literature, and the commentary on them. Aiding their labours was a repository of ancient Hindu manuscripts, a collection begun in the late 1800s by two mendicants, Swami Vishveshvaranand and Swami Nityanand, who had been the originators of the project in 1903, before Vishwabandhu took over.

By 1947, Vishwabandhu had already brought out three volumes of the concordance, and made extensive notes for subsequent volumes. And that's when the clouds of Partition-related violence began to loom. "In the days leading upto the Partition, there was a huge threat to the library. Acharyaji had information that the mobs were planning to attack the library and he was afraid that the manuscripts would be lost," says Prof ID Uniyal, the 85-year-old current Director of VVRI. "The Pakistan government also threatened to confiscate all the libraries within its territories." The library had to be saved.

Thus in September 1947 began the Herculeon task of packing the entire collection. Given the rioting outside, it wasn't possible to buy the packaging material required, so jute sacks used to pack foodgrains for the refugees who had camped inside the DAV College campus was procured. To secure them, ropes were cut from the string cots inside the hostels. The 9,000 manuscripts and more than 10,303 old and rare books in the VVRI collection were packed into cartons, each of them weighing one mun (around 37.3 kg). It took 4,000 sacks to accommodate the entire lot.

But how could they transport it across the border, hoodwinking the Pakistani border guards? Vishwabandhu decided to use the army trucks that took refugees from the DAV College camp across the border. "It was contrived with the army transporting the 'refugees' that the sacks would be laid on the floor of the trucks...Since about 15 such trucks plied between Amritsar and Lahore every day, about 60 sacs (sic.) full of books could be transported," writes Mahesh Sharma, who teaches history in Punjab University, in an essay, Salvaging Manuscripts from 1947

Lahore. Even so, it took nearly four months to transport all 4,000 sacks. All made it across safely, except for one, which was confiscated by the Pakistani border guards.

Escorting the books across the border were a handful of Vishwabandhu's trusted lieutenants — a dangerous undertaking at this time when the entire Lahore to Amritsar route was in the hands of murderous mobs. Even more dangerous, the escort had to make his way back to Lahore on the trucks coming back to Lahore. In an account of his adventures, Ved Prakash 'Vachaspati', one of Vishwabandhu's aides, writes about how once he was left stranded in Amritsar and had to sleep in the open in the winter cold on an improvised bed made of gunny sacks in which the books were packed. Another time, he was a mere 100 metre from falling into the hands of a mob.

Some of the sacks, says Uniyal, went unescorted and were taken away by the refugees themselves. "Amazingly when they realised that these were holy books, they stored them away carefully. When Acharyaji came to India, he sent out emissaries who recovered them all."

In India, all 3,999 sacks were at first housed in the godown of an Arya Samaj member in Amritsar, and then transported to its present location, gifted by Dhani Ram Bhalla, a Lahore merchant. By 1949, VVRI was functioning again and Vishwabandhu had brought out the next volume of his concordance. By 1965, all 19 volumes — a landmark feat of scholarship — had been published. It is for this achievement that Acharya Vishwabandhu was given the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour, in 1968.

The collection, however, moved out of Hoshiarpur, nearly 50 years later in 1996, when it was taken to the DAV College library in Chandigarh where it lies, impressively preserved in a temperature controlled environment, fumigated and conserved carefully, for future generations. There're now being digitised and put online, along with translations in English so anyone, anywhere, can see them. From Lahore to Hoshiarpur to Chandigarh and now the Internet — the VVRI collection has come a long way.