Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library: India’s Treasure Trove of South Asian and Middle Eastern Manuscripts

In the late 19th century, Khan Bahadur Khuda Bakhsh opened his private collection of manuscripts to the public, fulfilling his father Mohammed Bakhsh’s vision. This act laid the foundation for what would become one of India’s richest repositories of intellectual heritage from South Asia and the Middle East.

The Bakhsh family, originally jurists and scholars from Delhi, settled in Patna, Bihar, in the early 19th century. Mohammed Bakhsh, a lawyer and bibliophile, initially amassed 1,400 Arabic and Persian manuscripts. His son Khuda Bakhsh expanded the collection to around 4,000 manuscripts during his lifetime.

Established officially in 1891, the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library is housed in a two-story building near the Ganges River in Patna. Today, it holds more than 2 million items, including books, calligraphy, paintings, and over 21,000 manuscripts. Approximately half of these manuscripts are in Arabic, with thousands more in Persian and other languages such as Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pashto, and Turkish.

The library’s rarest treasures include the “Kitab Al-Tasrif,” a 10th-century Arabic medical encyclopedia by Abu Al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi, known as the father of operative surgery. Another prized manuscript is the “Kitab Al-Hashaish,” an 11th-century Arabic translation of Dioscorides’ botanical and medical texts.

Among Persian works, the original manuscript of “Tarikh-e Khandan-e Timuriyah,” commissioned by Mughal Emperor Akbar, chronicles the descendants of Timur, including Babur and Akbar himself. The “Divan of Hafez,” a collection of poems by the 14th-century Sufi poet Hafez, also forms part of the collection, bearing notes from Mughal emperors in its margins.

Since the 1950s, the Indian government has administered the library, declaring it an Institution of National Importance in 1969. Efforts to digitize the collection began in 2023, making many manuscripts accessible online. Despite this, much research continues to take place within its historic reading rooms. The library remains internationally renowned, attracting scholars worldwide, including from the Arab world, to study its unique manuscripts.