Mahjoor’s Kutubkhana Collection

Mahjoor was also a historian and took deep interest in numismatics. He collected 500 rare coins mostly belonging to the period of Queen Deda of the Varma dynastry which rules Kashmir several centuries before the advent of Islam in the state. He gathered a number of documents and manuscripts in both Persian and Sanskrit languages. One of the manuscripts, Shar-e-Tul Islam, which deals with Islamic  years old. He also acquired barch paper treatises on grammer written by Abhinavagupta and Mammatacharya.

This collection, fondly named “Kutubkhana” by Mahjoor himself, was offered by his descendants to the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, Srinagar, to be lodged in a national monument where it could be preserved safely. But due to what the grandsons of the poet term as “shortsightedness” of the authorities in the state, this was not to be. The academy undervalued the treasure (it offered only Rs. 38,000) and Mahjoor’s grandsons later sold it to the National Archives for Rs. 71,000. Six years ago this “Kutubkhana” thus found a niche in the premises of the National Archives, New Delhi, under the title of “Mahjoor Collection”.

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From life-sketch of Mahjoor by T.N. Kaul in his book Poems of Mahjoor (Sahitya Akademi, first published 1988)

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