Haziq and Mohi, a tiny book store in Hyderabad is haven for historians, scholars

Started in 1972 by Ahmed Bin Mohammed Bafna, the treasure trove is home to over 10,000 antique collections from around the world.

Hyderabad: The narrow lanes and the tiny old dilapidated shops in the congested Murgi Chowk area of Hyderabad’s old city hardly suggest the presence of ‘Haziq and Mohi’— a fifty year-old store with tattered rare collection of books, and a haven for scholars, historians and bibliophiles from around the world.

Started in 1972 by Ahmed Bin Mohammed Bafna, the treasure trove is home to over 10,000 antique collections from around the world. Eclectic subjects including history, literature, philosophy, mysticism, religion, medicine, Islamic art, architecture, Urdu and Persian dictionaries— you name it and Haziq and Mohi have them.

The books in the store were the personal collections of Ahmed Bafna, who had inherited a large collection of books from his grandfather, Salim Bin Ali Bafna. Ahmed Bafna was a linguistics graduate from Osmania University and was a voracious reader who was proficient in French, German, English, Persian and Arabic. Over the years, Telugu, Farsi and French books were also added to the collection.

“It was my uncle who started the store with an intention to pass the knowledge he inherited from his grandfather to the younger generations. He named the store after a famous ‘pir’ or Sufi master,” said Ibrahim Bafna, nephew of Ahmed Bafna, who is running the store now, along with his father, Khaled Bafna.

It is interesting to note that the store finds a special mention in ‘The White Mughal’, one of William Dalrymple’s masterpieces, about how Dalrymple accidentally stumbled upon this bookstore while he was looking for some literature on Bidri.

With a space for just one person to walk through, the bookstore is crammed with piles of books everywhere— from the floor to the ceiling— in no seeming order. “Since there are so many books in the store, it is a tedious task to catalogue and even store them, so we decided to not add any new collections for a while now,” Ibrahim aid. Bafna had a couple of other shops in the city where he kept his collection, which may possibly exceed 50,000 books.

“Haziq and Mohi remains one of the last resources for those hunting for books including Urdu literature, Hyderabad’ history and several other manuscripts that are not available on the Internet,” said Ahmed, a regular customer of the store and a history buff.

The store is a popular destination for foreign scholars as well. The pricing of the books depends on how antique they are. If the book is decades old, you can buy it for somewhere between Rs 3,000- Rs 5,000. And if they are centuries old, prices can shoot up to Rs 20,000-Rs 50,000.