Perhaps Serfoji II’s greatest contribution to posterity is the Saraswati Mahal Library . It’s a monument to both universal knowledge and an eclectic mind that collected prints of Chinese torture methods, Audubon-style sketches of Indian flora and fauna, sketches of the old London skyline and a collection of some 60,000 palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Indian and European languages. Like few of his contemporaries, Serfoji II understood the need to preserve the Indian written canon, and today the library has converted 243 Tamil and 183 Sanskrit palm-leaf records into printed material.
