The Concentric Fictions of a Generous History.
Hypertext and other annotations to memory.
The library at Matsyapur does not exist.
Its absence from the documents of record, is not remarked upon because it was never there.
No one walks the aisles of its forlorn shelves and no one creases the spines of its books, for none were ever kept.Â
No land was acquired to build the cloister and no workmen employed to make repairs to it's crumbling colonnade. The wooden alcoves with their delicate Flemish tapestry that faded over time, never existed.
In 1947 when the Gwalior protectorate was rescinded, and the Nawab of Junagadh laid claim to the lands of Matsyapur, his surveyor made no mention of this structure or its collection.
But one may still ponder the existence of the library as if in an attempt to recollect something long effaced from History.
For the library may never have existed, but there is now a record of our having remembered it.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fJK-uV6JLMLDU0TsDopSdepdcj3NCZLwReYv-silKJI
A transcript of our talk from the EyeMyth Festival 2019, Mumbai.
