Khalid Sabir, the paper collector

Shaheen Bagh is typical of Delhi's Jamia Nagar - all narrow pot-holed lanes festooned with dangling electric wires. Khalid Sabir's house, tucked away in one of the bylanes, is a nondescript two-storied structure. You enter through a side gate and walk into a carpeted hall from where a few unremarkable looking rooms branch out. There's nothing to indicate that housed in here are books, rare historical documents and stamps that are 100 years or older, each of which would fetch thousands of dollars in international auctions.

Foremost among Sabir's collections is a wedding invitation from Wajid Ali Shah, the last nawab of Awadh, and his wife, Hazrat Mahal, to their son's nikaah. Written in Persian, the daawat nama is printed on fine onion paper flecked with gold. Even grander is a nikaah nama (document recording marriage) of one Mirza Bedar Bakht Bahadur, dated 1895, richly decorated in pure gold. Among the seals that ring the document is one of Ali Naqi Khan, Wajid Ali's chief minister. "Also note the mehr (bride price) - Rs. 502,500," Sabir chuckles. "This, at a time Rs.100 would get you a palace of 20,000 square yards."

Amazingly, Sabir picked up all this quite by chance. "It was around 20 years ago. I had come to India and a kabadiwala (scrap dealer) called me from Lucknow, saying there was a man who wanted to sell some stamps and other stuff," he recounts.

Sabir then lived in London - he still spends two-three months of the year there - where he ran a computers business and also traded in stamps. "I bought the stamps, but the rest, weighing about 50 kg, was in a terrible state - white ants had destroyed half of it." That first time, Sabir left without buying, irritated with the owner who demanded Rs.1 lakh. But he got a call again a few months later and drove over from Allahabad, where his family lives. "I picked it up for a few hundred rupees." And what a treasure trove it was - besides the two mentioned, there were also documents pertaining to the marriage negotiations and later divorce of Wajid Ali's son.

Sabir is a compulsive hoarder. "I have," he says with pride, "documents from my birth to now - mark sheets, notebooks, doctor's prescription, tickets… I also have the documents of my brother, sister and uncle." It is stacked all over the 14 rooms of his house - large plastic boxes piled high along the walls of his bedroom; 10 steel almirahs in a windowless dressing room adjacent which contains the more valuable papers; two rooms for his stamps collections which also has the computer from where buys and sells stamps online, and four rooms upstairs with rows of shelves. Most of it is stacked neatly, some between plastic sheets, but without much thought to how the extremes of Delhi's weather would affect them.

To be sure, Sabir's collection is a bit of a hotchpotch, containing some gems such as a set of drawings dating to 1857 showing the secret plan of action that the British had drawn up for Delhi, 'Lakhnao', 'Cawnpore' and other north Indian cities in case of a sepoy uprising. This one was bought, says Sabir, from a London pawn shop a few years ago.

But it's mostly small-time kabadiwalas that Sabir favours. "Just six months ago, Jalil, a kabadiwala whose theka near Daryagunj I have been frequenting for many decades, gave me a set of documents. I went through it, a few caught my eye and I picked it up for a few hundred rupees," says Sabir. That set of papers contained a legal document recording the sale of land to a Britisher called Frere in 1860. This was a Sir Henry Bartle Frere, the first commissioner of Sindh, Sabir later discovered, and the land is where Frere Hall now stands in Karachi.

But for every such gem, Sabir's horde has several kilos of papers of uncertain value. Amazingly, he hasn't even gone through half of it. "It is not possible for one man to do it all," he says. But now he's got help. In February this year, Sabir signed an agreement with Dubai's Juma Al Majid Centre for Culture and Heritage – one of the largest archives of Islam and related material in the world. The Centre has undertaken to digitize Sabir's collection, catalogue it and conserve those that need it. In return, it will keep one digital copy of the documents so scholars can study them.

Sabir's dream, however, is grander. "If there can be a Khuda Baksh library, a Raza library, why not one named after Khalid Sabir?" he asks.

Why not, indeed.