Librarian and Lover of Languages

[Left] A rare Kalamkari Telugu story cloth that narrates the Ramayana.
Gautham Reddy is the subject librarian for South Asian Studies and Religion at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. His passion for history and his linguistic expertise in Sanskrit, Telugu, Hindi, and German make him the ideal envoy for South Asian literature. Reddy, who earned his PhD from the University of Chicago, is a managing editor of Maidaanam, a web journal that focuses on the Deccan and southern India.
What inspired your interest in South Asian studies, and how has it shaped your career?
My interest in South Asian studies came from a desire to learn more about my heritage. I grew up in a Telugu family outside of Minneapolis. I was a curious child and always enjoyed learning about literature and history. However, the American school curriculum was very Eurocentric. What little information they included about South Asia was often very biased. This troubled me a lot and it inspired me to become an independent learner. I used to spend a lot of time at our local library to find better resources!
I got inspired to do a PhD in South Asian studies because I wanted to learn to read Indian languages (Sanskrit, Telugu, Hindi) and explore these topics more deeply. While finishing my PhD at the University of Chicago (2020), I received an offer to join Emory University as their South Asia Librarian. They were looking for someone with a scholarly background to build and curate their collection. This seemed like a wonderful opportunity—not enough people know this, but Emory has one of the largest and most prestigious South Asia collections in the country! Since then, I have been working to deepen our collection.
What unique challenges do you encounter as a librarian focusing on South Asian works, and how do you ensure that the library’s South Asian collection represents the rich diversity of the region? Do you partner with faculty, departments, and external institutions to enhance the library’s role in promoting South Asian studies?
South Asia is incredibly diverse. It has many nations. Within those nations, there are many regions, languages, and communities. This a good thing—there is a great richness of imagination, expression, and scholarship! But it has its challenges too. Bangladesh, India, Pakistan—they all have their own publishing industries, book markets, and legal concerns. Within India, English and Hindi hold the lion’s share of the market—but languages such as Gujarati, Malayalam, and Tamil have huge readerships. No one person or library can possibly keep up with this diversity! The most effective method I have found is to collaborate with librarians at other universities as well to build a “shared” national collection. Our goal is to get at least a couple copies of titles published in South Asia into the U.S. library network. We share these titles with patrons through the interlibrary loan system and the Library of Congress.
At Emory, I work closely with faculty and graduate students to get familiar with their research and teaching interests. The Emory Library has special strengths in Sanskrit, Hindi, Telugu, Tibetan, and Nepali. I also collaborate with our Middle Eastern Studies Librarian to collect Arabic and Persian materials published in South Asia. We also have small Urdu and Bengali collections and a growing collection of literature in Hindi dialects. I also want to make sure to include voices and communities that are often overlooked. I regularly visit South Asian countries to attend bookfairs and literary festivals. Most recently, I have been improving our focus on Indian Americans, especially in Atlanta and the South. To this end, I started GAACAI (Georgia Asian American Community Archive Initiative) with a few ther librarians. I feel it is important to document the diversity of metro Atlanta.
Do you leverage emerging technologies to showcase South Asian works? How do you balance physical and digital resources for the collection?
Despite the big tech boom in India, the world of publishing is still very print driven. E-books are still very new. There have been some major digitization projects led by the Government of India, but they are not always easy to find or access. I work with a few different groups trying to improve access to digital collections. One is called South Asia Open Archives (SAOA). They have many important government documents such as census records, etc. available in clean scans for free going all the way back to the British period. There are other historic government reports there too. I also work to archive South Asian websites with the Library of Congress. At Emory, we did an interesting project making use of an innovative platform to create a digitized and interactive copy of a seventeenth-century Telugu manuscript of the Mahabharata.
As a linguistic expert in Sanskrit, Telugu, Hindi, and German, you have a deep knowledge, and I imagine, a keen appreciation for, the graceful evolution of languages. How do you view the current—might I say, sometimes unrefined—trends in languages?
I am grateful that I am multilingual. Knowing several languages helps me see how naturally they shape and influence each other. I find this aspect of linguistic history very fascinating. I think it’s very difficult (and undesirable) to understand any language or its literature in isolation. For example, to understand Hindi literature, it is helpful to also know about Sanskrit, Persian, Braj Bhasha, Urdu, and of course, English. So, I think this challenges ideas of “pure” or “exceptional” languages. I am more interested in their shared and cosmopolitan aspects. At the same time, I also enjoy the diversity within languages—I find dialects and regionalisms very charming.
[Right] Gautham Reddy in his Emory office
You are a founding member and co-coordinator of the Library of Congress SACO South Asia Funnel, “a group that works to address outdated, inaccurate, and harmful cataloging terminology.” Could you share an example of harmful cataloging terminology and how you amended the corrigendum?
Some changes are simple. I recently participated in changing “Mogul,” an older spelling popular in colonial India, to “Mughal.” This spelling is considered standard by most scholars today and matches pronunciation by South Asians. The older term is both outdated and inaccurate. Other terms are sometimes harmful. For example, references to people from India are under the term “East Indian.” We can ask—who are the people of India “east” of? The answer is Europe and “the West.” This recreates a colonial way of thinking about people. It brings up some racist ideas about “Eastern” people that have been long debunked. The harm comes from how such categories can unconsciously influence and bias people’s engagement with different topics. In the Library of Congress framework, the term “Indian” is reserved for Native American people. If you look for “Indian cuisine,” “Indian writers,” or “Indian businesses” in library catalogs, you will be directed to Native American materials. I am working with people now to get this remedied. We would like to see “Indian” refer to the people of India and use “Indigenous Peoples of America” for Native Americans. This will not only be more accurate, it will also be more sensitive to how people from India see and describe themselves.
What are some of your favorite reads?
My favorite topic to read about is history. Lately, I have been really interested in the history of food. I just finished reading Sonal Ved’s Whose Samosa is It Anyway: The Story of Where ‘Indian’ Food Really Came From. I also love cookbooks. They can tell us so much about our culture! I just bought a copy of Krish Ashok’s Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking. Another book I am really “savoring” right now is The Mughal Feast: Recipes from the Kitchen of Emperor Shah Jahan. It’s a translation of the original Persian recipe book, Nuskha-e-Shah Jahani, and has historical recipes from that time. It’s very interesting to me because we can see a snapshot of Indian cooking—before chilis, tomatoes, or potatoes were brought by Portuguese traders and became common items in our kitchens! Another interesting work in this way is the Sanskrit Manasollasa, which shows the popularity of millets and other heritage grains (not just rice) in royal kitchens!
Author of Kismetwali & Other Stories, Reetika Khanna is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who likes to spotlight people with purpose. She has worked with ELLE as a senior features writer, and as an associate features editor with ELLE DÉCOR, Mumbai. For more, go to ReetikaKhanna.com
Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.
blog comments powered by Disqus