Libraries, a reminder of how little we know It is a tool of epistemic modesty, or the knowledge that a lot is still unknown, and perhaps unknowable. Such recognition of ignorance is a useful antidote to the disease of certitude, usually present in people who have read too little or not at all

The Italian writer Umberto Eco has 30,000 books in his private collection. He has not read all of them, but even the unread books serve a useful purpose, best described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the irreverent philosopher-cum-trader, in his best-selling book Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Taleb defines the unread books as an anti-library: They are an ever-present reminder of how much one still does not know. It is a tool of epistemic modesty, or the knowledge that a lot is still unknown, and perhaps unknowable. Such recognition of ignorance is a useful antidote to the disease of certitude, usually present in people who have read too little or not at all. As the great behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman reminds us: “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” Every library thus has a fundamental tension between knowledge and ignorance, between what you have read and what you have not. A large collection of unread books is both a reminder of our ignorance as well as a call for intellectual modesty.

Knowledge bank: Technology and new tools of reading present fresh challenges to libraries, forcing many of them to go digital. Photo by Sattish Bate/Hindustan Times.

Not everyone can afford to maintain a private library with thousands of books. Public libraries should play that civilizing role. I have recently been reading a collection of essays by A.C. Tikekar, a former librarian at the University of Mumbai and brother of the scholarly Marathi journalist Aroon Tikekar. In one essay he describes public libraries as peoples’ universities and sites of lifelong learning.The state of our public and university libraries today is nothing less than tragic. I sometimes wonder whether the neglect of public libraries is rooted in a civilizational defect. India has had the unfortunate history of having denied access to knowledge to the so-called lower castes and women. Some of these historical wrongs are now being corrected, but the very idea that knowledge is the privilege of a few works against the concept of public libraries open to every member of society.
However, despite these cultural flaws, India does have a tradition of great libraries and librarians. There was, of course, the famous library of Nalanda that was burnt down by Bakhtiyar Khilji in the 12th century. But many more recent libraries have survived. Nawab Faizullah Khan established the Rampur Raza Library in 1774. The Calcutta Public Library came up in 1836. The Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna has been around since 1891. Many of the universities still have fine libraries. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi is a treasure. Mumbai has the grand Asiatic Society library, but the city is also dotted with reading rooms established by philanthropists and trade unions in an earlier age.
Few librarians have got public recognition in India, but some names are worth recalling. Harinath De of Kolkata was perhaps the first great Indian librarian. The Kautilya Arthashastra was discovered by Sama Shastry in the library of Mysore University around a hundred years ago. Mumbai university was lucky to have many superb librarians in a row—P.M. Joshi, D.N. Marshall and B. Anderson.
And then there was perhaps the greatest of them all: S.R. Ranganathan, a mathematician-turned-librarian. In an online appreciation, Mike Steckel writes: “The basic methods Ranganathan used to develop his ideas emerged from his background in mathematics and his beliefs in Hindu mysticism. He would examine complex phenomena, break his observations into small pieces, and then attempt to connect the pieces together in a systematic way.” Ranganathan treated the management of books as a science, and I am told his five basic laws of library science are followed by librarians around the world.
In a stunning speech he gave at the inauguration of the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, site of the famous medieval library that was destroyed by invaders, Eco succinctly explained why libraries are important: “Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know. If you will allow me to use such a metaphor, a library is the best possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and understood at the same time. A person able to store in his or her mind the information provided by a great library would emulate in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we try to do our best to imitate them.”
Technology will present new challenges to libraries, perhaps forcing many of them to go digital. Several libraries are going down that path. The government is trying to set up a national digital library. The way our collective civilizational knowledge is stored may well change, and perhaps be further democratized by digital tools, but there is no doubt in my mind that great countries and countries aspiring to greatness require great libraries.