Located in the central city of Kathmandu valley, the Kaiser Library is one of the oldest and resourced libraries of Nepal. Currently inside the Kaiser Mahal it holds a historical place both in terms of history and development. It was established in 2026 B.S. (1969 A.D.) with the personal collection by Her Highness Krishna Chandra Devi Rana in memory of her late husband Field Marshal Kaiser Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana. Since its establishment Kaiser Library has been operating under the Ministry of Education Government of Nepal as an independent authority in itself. The Kaiser Library is unique in terms of art, architecture, cultural heritage, photographs, and paintings that has a collection of total 50,000 books, documents and pictures having historical importance.
Within the serene environment of broad tended lawn and shaded with a variety of semi-tropical trees give you a cozy feeling of learning. Across the lawn spreads a white palace, formal and wide, adorned with porticos and bronze lions that showcases the mark of royalty.
You are welcome inside; but feeling shy, as though this must still be somebody’s place, you pass through a reading room and push open a pair of big double doors and you come on a stuffed Bengal tiger. It strides across your path, turning to snarl. You look up from this first surprise to find you are in the library.
It’s a long high room, ornate and shadowy. Glassed-in bookcases of polished wood run all down the inner wall, rising to the formal painted ceiling. On the opposing wall, between dim tall windows, stand two suits of armour, beside an immense rhinoceros skull. Scan the bookcases: they are stuffed with rather dated, British hard covers, with volumes and volumes on ancient history, on English Kings, leaders, and viceroys.
Getting more with the quest you come across oil portraits of warriors and rulers and scholarly looking men, and heads of great-horned game, is a collection of British fiction, dusty but voluminous. Up a formal staircase you come into a regal foyer, bedecked with shields and swords and more portraits, now all of military men – another day’s rulers of Nepal, all in full-dress array, all wearing the unique crown, the plumed Sri Pej. Dominating them all is a 12-foot oil of a man who, in velvet cloak and sash and much-medalled tunic, looks a little miscast. Just about all the 35,000 books in this collection were his: they carry, pasted on their inside covers, the private label of this intent and thoughtful-looking man. They give his name; Kaiser Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, and this legend: “Beyond all Books”. He brought the books here. It was a life’s occupation. His library, luckily for visitors who share his infatuation, survived.
Enriched with a great history the Kaiser library was later gifted to the government. Kaiser Rana kept only a “sort of descriptive list,” of his 28,000 volumes (the government has added 7,000 more) but his knowledge of the collection was so exhaustive, and his memory so acute, that he could lead anyone exactly to any book; even, it is said, to any passage. Yet he was apparently a self-made scholar. Information on his schooling is scarce – It is still shrouded in mystery.
“A sort of Library” become what was, surely, one of the great personal collections of his time, certainly of this part of the world. It must have largely occupied Kaiser Rana for the rest of his life. Certainly, too and this will seem a paradox only to those who have not known his love – Kaiser Rana’s absorption with a shadowy vault of books enormously widened his world. At that time, when Nepal was quite isolated from the world, he travelled far and wide, and he maintained an intellectual link with most of the scholars, especially in Britain and Europe.
He left a legacy so complete that today’s staff finds it short on only two subjects, geography and political science. You see the real range of it, the way is crosses and comingles the West with the East, when you go deeper upstairs, down a long corridor that’s lined on both sides with green metal cabinets, all crammed with more books. The section markers atop the cases run through subjected from Poetry and Diplomacy to Archaelogy and Gardening, and very much more: Western and Eastern mythology, story, philosophy, ethics, religion, medicine; Sanskirt grammars, poetics, drama, manuscripts; old books on Tibet, cases of Travel accounts, histories of India and Nepal., those vast Indian trovers of wisdom and tale, the Vedas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharat, Bhuddhist and Tantric texts, and tomes of explication; such finds as Sir Richard Burton’s unreduced, 12-volume Arabian Nights, from 1896; Virgil’s Eclogues, side by side with Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, and Burke’s Landed Gentry for 1937.
Kaiser Rana was a hunter, too. Cases are devoted to that, and above them the corridor’s walls are filled again with paintings and photos from rhino and tiger expeditions, and more trophy heads. Along the walls also are portraits of prominent men – Asian and British generals, Napoleon, Churchill, Gandhi, Nehru, Shakespeare. Auto-graphed photos show Lord Louis Mountbatten, India’s last Viceroy, and S. Radhakrishan, the great Hindu philosopher and religious historian.
Thus Kaiser Library not only resourceful but it holds historic value that is directly related to the time and history of Kaiser Rana. Though today Kaiser Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana is dead but his legacy and knowledge lives with Kaiser Library.
