Place · manuscript library · India
Rampur Raza Library
Also known as Rampur
The Raza Library at Rampur in Uttar Pradesh — the Nawab of Rampur's manuscript collection, founded in 1774 by Nawab Faizullah Khan and expanded to become one of India's richest libraries of Islamic and Indian manuscripts. The library holds 17,000 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Pashto, Urdu, Sanskrit and Hindi, plus 83,000 printed books. Rare holdings include the Khamsa of Nizami illustrated by Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad (Akbar's court painters), the Panchatantra illustrated manuscripts, Hindustani classical music treatises (one of India's richest collections of raga-ragini manuscript illustrations), Mughal court chronicles, and Arabic medical and astronomical texts. The library was nationalised in 1975 under the Raza Library Act. The 2000-2010s digitisation project under the Rampur Raza Library Board has made the collection globally accessible.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.810, 79.030
Connections (1)
- Monument relocationHumayun's Tomb
Rampur took in Delhi's displaced scholars, poets and books after 1857, when the capital's institutions were destroyed and its Muslim elite driven out. Ghalib's circle scattered to states like it. The Raza Library's seventeen thousand manuscripts are partly the wreckage of Mughal Delhi reassembled in a small principality that had the money and the inclination to keep it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Raza Library”. Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860–1900; the seminaries’ own published histories.
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