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The State Central Library, founded in 1891 as the Asafia State Library by the sixth Nizam Mir Mahbub Ali Khan, is one of the great manuscript libraries of South Asia. It stands above the Afzal Gunj bridge over the Musi, in a long Indo-Saracenic building with an arched reading-room running the length of the upper storey. Its holdings — built up across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by purchase from the great private libraries of the Deccan and the wider Islamicate world — include tens of thousands of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Telugu and Sanskrit, alongside a substantial European-language printed collection.
The founding
A free public library endowed from the privy purse
The library was founded as the personal initiative of the sixth Nizam, who endowed it from his privy purse and opened it to the public on the condition that no charge be levied on readers — a policy that continues today. From the beginning it absorbed important private collections, notably the libraries of the Asafi nobility and several scholarly estates of the old city.
The building
A great riverside reading-room of the high Asafi period
The principal block at Afzal Gunj is one of the finest civic buildings of the high Asafi period — a long ochre frontage with arcaded verandahs, a clock-tower over the main entrance, and a great vaulted reading-room running above the river. Branch libraries were added across the state in the seventh Nizam's reign, but the Afzal Gunj building remains the central one.
The collections
Quranic codices, Deccani histories and rare printed books
The library's manuscript holdings are particularly strong in Quranic codices, tafsir, hadith, Persian poetry, Deccani historiography, Islamic medicine and the sciences. It also holds rare European printed books of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries collected by the Asafi house. It is now the State Central Library of Telangana and remains in daily use as a public reference library.