Inside the Maratha palace at Thanjavur, in a quiet wing of its own, the Saraswathi Mahal Library holds something close to fifty thousand manuscripts. Some of them are five hundred years old. Some of them are still being read. It is one of the oldest libraries in Asia that has functioned without a break — through Nayak, Maratha, Company and Republican administrations — as a working scholarly institution.

It is also one of the easier monuments in Thanjavur to underestimate. The reading rooms are small, the public displays modest, the lighting indifferent. What is here is not spectacle. It is the accumulated paper-and-leaf memory of two literate courts and a long line of scholars.

What it is.

Saraswathi Mahal is, formally, the Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji's Saraswathi Mahal Library — a state-administered research library, an archive of manuscripts in four scripts and at least seven languages, and a small public museum. The institutional name records its principal benefactor; the popular name records the goddess of learning to whom the room was originally consecrated.

Nayak foundation.

The library's nucleus was a Nayak court collection of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — chiefly Sanskrit theological and ritual texts, with a Tamil literary sub-collection that included copies of the Cilappatikāram and several Tirumurai anthologies. The Nayaks did not run a public institution; the collection was a royal archive, accessible to a small circle of court scholars.

Serfoji II's expansion.

The library as it survives today is principally the work of one man — Serfoji II, the Maratha king of Thanjavur, r. 1798–1832. Educated by the Lutheran missionary Christian Friedrich Schwartz, fluent in Marathi, Tamil, Sanskrit, English, Latin and a working amount of Danish, Serfoji was an obsessive collector by temperament and a methodical institution-builder by training. He bought manuscripts on three continents, commissioned copies of texts he could not buy, corresponded with William Carey at Serampore and the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and built around the existing royal collection a properly organised research library with a working catalogue.

“Serfoji's library is the single most thoroughly catalogued royal collection from the late Indian eighteenth century. Where the Mughal libraries dispersed, his survived.”— Indira Peterson, ‘The Schools of Serfoji II’ (2002)

Inside the collection.

The collection is approximately 49,000 manuscripts strong. Around 39,000 are in Sanskrit, on palm-leaf and paper. Around 3,000 are in Tamil, 3,000 in Marathi, and the balance in Telugu, Persian and a small Latin-and-English sub-collection that Serfoji built from his Lutheran tutors. The subject range runs from theology, ritual and grammar through astronomy, medicine, music and the ancillary sciences of the Indian classical curriculum.

The medical sub-collection is internationally significant. It includes more than four thousand Ayurvedic and Siddha texts on palm-leaf, several rare Marathi manuscripts on veterinary medicine that Serfoji himself caused to be compiled, and a small but institutionally distinct collection of European medical books — Cullen, Brown, Lind — that Serfoji read in English.

The museum today.

The public-facing component of the library is a small museum that displays a rotating selection of significant manuscripts, palm-leaf bundles, Serfoji II's correspondence with the British East India Company, and a working collection of his more eccentric purchases — physiognomic charts from London, a Marathi manuscript on the gestation of elephants, and an annotated Latin medical text marked up in his own hand.

How to visit.

The library is inside the Thanjavur palace compound. A single palace ticket (currently eighty rupees for Indians, two hundred and fifty for foreign nationals) admits to the durbar hall, the bell tower, the art gallery, the bronze gallery and the library museum. Opening hours are 09:00 to 17:30 daily, with a midday closure between 13:00 and 14:00.

Allow an hour for the museum. Carry a notebook; photography is permitted in the public galleries but discouraged in the manuscript displays. The reading rooms are not open to the general public.

For scholars.

Researchers in any of the collection's languages can apply for a reader's pass by writing to the library director in advance. The library has a serviceable digital catalogue and is in the middle of a long-running manuscript-digitisation project funded by the Tamil Nadu state government and the National Manuscripts Mission. Some twelve thousand manuscripts are now available in digital surrogate.

A practical tip

The library is quietest in the late afternoon — after the lunch closure and before the last palace visitors arrive. The light through the louvred windows around four o'clock is also the best light in the museum.