Washington DC, Dec 30 (FN Agency) Many books now unavailable in India can be traced in the University of Chicago’s library collections marked with a stamp saying “PL-480”. The collection is an offshoot of the Public Law programme (PL-480), better known as ‘Food Peace’ a cold war initiative signed into law by President Dwight D Eisenhower in 1954. Designed to address global food shortages while mitigating the U.S. agricultural surpluses, the PL-480 allowed nations like India to purchase grain with local currency rather than dollars. This arrangement alleviated India’s foreign exchange burden during its severe food crisis in the 1950s and 1960s, according to a BBC report.A less-publicised but transformative aspect of PL-480 was its impact on academic institutions. Local currency payments from participating countries were used to fund the acquisition of books, periodicals, and other media from South Asia for U.S. universities, according to a BBC report.
By the 1960s, more than 20 institutions, including the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had begun assembling unparalleled collections of South Asian scholarship.A special team staffed by 60 Indians was established in Delhi in 1959. Initially focused on picking up government publications, the programme expanded over five years to include books and periodicals.By 1968, 20 US universities were receiving materials from the growing collection, as noted by Maureen LP Patterson, a leading bibliographer of South Asian studies. By 1968, more than 750,000 items had been dispatched to American universities, with India contributing the lion’s share. Ananya Vajpeyi, a doctoral scholar, discovered the South Asia collection of books comprising over 8 lakh volumes at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library i 1996.
“I’ve spent time in some of the leading South Asia libraries of the world, at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia. But nothing has ever matched the unending riches held at the University of Chicago,” Vajpeyi, a fellow at India’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), told BBC. However, Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, expressed concerns that such extensive acquisitions might have depleted South Asia’s intellectual resources. Many of these materials are now inaccessible in their countries of origin, forcing scholars from the region to travel to Western institutions to access them. The PL-480 programme officially ended in the 1980s, leaving American academic institutions to shoulder the costs of maintaining and expanding their collections. Today, institutions like the University of Chicago invest substantial sums annually to continue sourcing South Asian materials. Vajpeyi believes the books-for-grain deal had a positive outcome. She studied Sanskrit, but her research in University of Chicago spanned Indian and European languages – French, German, Marathi, and Hindi – and touched on linguistics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and more. “At the Regenstein Library, I never failed to find the books I needed or get them quickly if they weren’t already there,” she says. “The books are safe, valued, accessible and used. I’ve visited libraries, archives and institutions in every part of India and the story in our country is universally dismal. Here they were lost or destroyed or neglected or very often made inaccessible.”