The K R Cama Oriental Institute He went to Elphinstone School and College but never got a degree simply because Bombay had no university to grant one.
Established in 1916, the KR Cama Institute kicks off its centenary celebrations this month with a series of lectures on an eclectic group of subjects including ‘Carpets of the Orient’, ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson’s fascination with India’, and ‘Philosophizing Persia’. Over the years, the institute has acquired a host of valuable manuscripts such as freedom fighter Madam Cama’s will, various copies of F
irdausi’s Shah Namah, a 280-year-old Koran and an Arabic astronomy text from 1663 AD. There’s also the Ahd Namah written on a mix of paper and parchment, which dates back 1,371 years. “It is a charter of rights given by the first Caliph to the Christians and Jews of Syria exempting them from ‘Jizya’, the tax levied on non-Muslims,” explains Chairman Muncherji Cama. The institute is named after Cama’s accomplished ancestor, Khursetji Rustomji Cama, who was a Zoroastrian scholar, a municipal corporator, a Justice of the Peace, a champion of women’s education, a high-ranking freemason, a numismatist and the founder of the ‘Society for the Promotion of Researches into Zoroastrian Religion’. According to a short biography published by the institute, he was born in Bombay in 1831 and raised by his uncle after his father’s death. But that didn’t stop him from learning eleven languages including German, French, Avesta and Pahlavi. When Bombay University was finally established, he ensured Avestan languages were included in its curriculum. He worked in his family’s trading business in Calcutta and Canton (now Guangzhou), before co-founding the first Indian firm in England along with Dadabhai Naoroji. He seemed to be involved in every pressing issue of his time – from explaining the aims and objectives of the census to his countrymen to convincing mill workers to take the plague vaccine by getting inoculated in their presence. After he died, the citizens of Bombay, decided to set up an oriental institute in his memory with the help of a large donation from a “liberal minded Hindu citizen”, Damodar Gordhundas Sukhadvala. The institute was initially located on Hornby Road (now DN Road), before it was moved to its present site. The land was sold to the institute at cost price by the Tata trust, and the current building’s foundation stone was laid on KR Cama’s 105th birth anniversary according to Masonic rites. At the time, the institute boasted “11,205 books, 1,978 journals and 1,865 manuscripts in Avesta, Pahlavi, Iranian, Arabic, Urdu and Turkish”. Today, that number has ballooned to over 30,000 thanks to the absorption of various collections such as the Mulla Feroze Library and the Poure Dawood Collection.
