The books are numbered and read. The house of the late Vasant Bawa and his wife Oudesh Rani Bawa on Road No. 12, Banjara Hills, is filled with books, which are now going to be moved to the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU).
“The books need to be read and used by researchers. Here, they are gathering dust and I would like them to be of some use for the next generation,” says Ms. Oudesh, who called up the MANUU officials to take the books.
Inside the house that has a faint smell of vintage books, there are shelves full of them, including some rare first edition copies, maps, manuscripts, and fascimile copies of books that Mr. Bawa called up a librarian at the Nehru Memorial Museum Library to send them over. The fascimile copies, some neatly bound, some still with primitive binding are also part of the collection. Among the books is a Bhagwad Gita in Hindi, written in Urdu script, by Ms. Oudesh’s maternal great great-grandfather Bhupat Rai. There are also trove of material on Latin America as Mr. Bawa researched and wrote extensively on the subject.
