Place · royal library · India
Thanjavur Saraswathi Mahal
The Thanjavur Nayaka and later Maratha royal library at the Royal Palace, Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu — one of the oldest surviving libraries in Asia. The core manuscript collection was begun by Nayak king Raghunatha Nayak around 1600 and expanded under the Maratha king Serfoji II (1798-1832), who added European printed books, music scores and medical texts. The library holds over 60,000 palm-leaf manuscripts and 40,000 paper manuscripts in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Arabic, Persian, Portuguese and other languages — including the Trisasti Shalakapurusha Charitra, Thevaram palm-leaf collections, and Serfoji's own anatomical sketches. UNESCO Memory of the World Register, 1997 for the Serfoji collection.
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 10.787, 79.137
Connections (4)
- Shared site withJaisalmer Fort
The Saraswathi Mahal at Thanjavur and the Jain bhandars at Jaisalmer are the two largest surviving pre-print manuscript collections in India, and they come from opposite institutions — a royal library assembled by Nayaka and Maratha rulers in the Tamil country, and merchant-funded Jain repositories in a desert fort, some of them kept in sealed underground rooms. Between them they preserve a great deal that exists nowhere else.
- Shared site withThanjavur Maratha palace
The Saraswathi Mahal library occupies part of the Thanjavur Maratha palace, and the collection is largely the work of Serfoji II, who ruled under British protection with no army and spent the resulting leisure and money on books — Sanskrit, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu manuscripts, plus European printed works on medicine and music. It is one of the few Indian princely libraries that survived intact into the twentieth century.
- PatronageThanjāvūr court music
Serfoji II of Thanjavur read Latin, English, Marathi and Sanskrit, corresponded with European scholars, ran a printing press and a school, and built the palace library up to some forty-nine thousand manuscripts and printed books. His marginal annotations survive, which makes him one of very few Indian rulers whose actual reading can be reconstructed rather than inferred from the list of what he was given.
- Site adjacencyThanjavur Brihadishvara
The Saraswathi Mahal library sits inside the Thanjavur Maratha palace a short walk north of the Brihadishvara temple; both are landmarks of Thanjavur city but the library is in the palace precinct rather than inside the Chola temple enclosure.
On these journeys
Sources
Saraswathi Mahal Library catalogue
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