Which place in Mumbai housed the city’s largest private library?

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's private library, set up on the first floor of his three-storeyed ‘Rajgruh’ mansion in Hindu Colony of Dadar was once one of the world’s largest, with over 50,000 books on different subjects. In fact, the very reason to shift to the sprawling mansion was to accommodate the ever-growing mountain of a collection, as his Damodar Hall office in Parel was crammed to capacity with books and simply left no room for impending arrivals. ?

From ancient texts to simple primers, his collection had tons of books of every genre. More than a compulsive collector, Dr. Ambedkar was an avid reader who absorbed the contents of every book end to end and remembered every detail including pages, sections, paras and even design issues like cover layout, page color and font type. He followed the mind map technique to create suitable mental images of the book’s structure for quick comprehension and recall of the key ideas and concepts and other takeaways. ???

Once on his return journey from England, he read close to eight thousand pages in the course of a six day travel from Venice to Bombay. While in New York, he found time to buy close to 2,000 old books. During the second round table conference in London, the books he purchased became a humugous pile within no time and had to be dispatched to India in as many as 32 boxes.

His unconditional and unprecedented love for books often made him unmindful of etiquette: he hardly ever returned a borrowed book, and a few book sellers had a tough time getting their bills settled.

Despite his dwindling financial position, he never thought of selling his collection despite plum offers of Rs. 2 lakh and Rs. 4 lakh from heavyweights like Malviya and Birla respectively. In fact, he sold another building ‘Charminar’ owned by him in close vicinity to ‘Rajgruh’ to buy more books and pay off a few loans.

In a most gracious gesture, he donated the entire Rajgruh collection to Siddharth College, Mumbai and Milind College, Aurangabad.