Mohammed Shakeb: Preserver of Mughal Archival Documents and Reconstructor of Libraries
A tribute to a polymath historian who recently passed away.
Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Shakeb at the Qutb Shahi tombs in Hyderabad, October 2013. Photo: Author provided
History10/Feb/2021
I first met Dr Mohammed Ziauddin Ahmed Shakeb in the summer of 2011, as a naïve PhD student whoâd arrived in Hyderabad from Los Angeles wanting to âread Shah Jahanâs documentsâ. He asked me the very standard question asked of research students in India, âWhat is your topic?â
I only had a rather incoherent answer to give to Shakeb, the man who had, among other things, created the Mughal Record Room, in what is today known as the Telangana State Archives. Located in a nondescript building at the periphery of the Osmania University campus in the dusty precinct of Tarnaka, this institution has undergone numerous transformations over the course of a half-century of its existence in Hyderabad. But institutions were often narrow and unimaginative places for sustaining a towering figure such as Shakeb. He went on to have a long and eclectic life and career that consistently defied the logic and constraints of institutions, for he was himself an institution. The loss of Shakeb is thus far more than the loss of an individual.