How a food crisis in India fed America’s library collections

The programme was keen on picking up a comprehensive collection of Indian fiction in all languages. “The policy netted a huge number of detective stories and novels of no lasting value,” wrote Patterson.

In 1963, the choice for acquiring books was narrowed down to “research level material” – and intake of fiction in many languages was halved. By 1966, more than 750,000 books and periodicals were sent to American universities from India, Nepal and Pakistan, with India contributing more than 633,000 items.

“We’ve sent works like History of India from 1000 to 1770 AD, Handicrafts in India, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psychoanalytic Study, and more,” a report, external on a meeting in an US library on the programme in 1967 said.

Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wonders if vast collections from the region in US and other Western libraries took away literary resources from the Indian sub-continent.

Founded during Cold War tensions and funded by PL-480, his university’s South Asia centre grew its library to more than 200,000 titles by the 21st Century.

Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 “creates knowledge gaps”, as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources.

It is unclear whether all the books acquired by US universities from India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd, of India’s FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago’s library collections, all marked with the stamp saying “PL-480”.

“For the most part, books that came through the PL-480 programme are still available in South Asia. But preservation is often a challenge due to white ants, pests, and a lack of temperature and humidity control. In contrast, most materials in the West remain well-preserved thanks to the preservation and conservation efforts in our libraries,” Mr Michelson-Ambelang says.