Digitizing Ancient Indian Manuscripts

A day after I wrote about Google digitizing and indexing Mysore University's manuscripts, I came across this in Dataquest!

India, a land of ancient knowledge, has the largest collection of manuscripts in the world dating back thousands of years, covering different areas including religion, philosophy, science, medicine, arts and literature. Composed in various ancient and contemporary Indian languages and scripts like Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, and Tamil, these manuscripts were written on diverse materials such as birch bark, palm leaf, cloth, wood, stone and paper.

Unfortunately, these manuscripts are lying in various corners in utter neglect in libraries, academic institutions, museums, temples and monasteries, and private collections; and were never complied into a single repository until now. Realizing the need to restore these invaluable manuscripts, the Department of Culture took upon itself the task and established the National Manuscript Mission (NMM) in February 2003. A five-year project, NMM does not only locate and preserve manuscripts but is also engaged in spreading awareness. The mission has already created an electronic database for one million manuscripts even as it has estimated that there are five million manuscripts in India.

How serendipitous then, that this article also ends with a quote citing Google:

As N Balakrishnan, IISC professor rightly said: "Since everything today points towards an Internet-dependent world, one is not wrong when one says, you are in this world only if you are on Google."

Heartening to see the government in action! Read the full article here.

Share

Related posts:

  1. Google, Mysore University, manuscripts, and BORI
  2. Indian Women: Beware of Orkut
  3. Indian Child Abuse Statistics — What Can We Do?
  4. Indian inventor doctor’s breakthrough

May 28, 2007 – 6:41 PM | By Mahendra | Posted in India, Science, books, culture | Tagged | Comments (5)

5 Comments

  • Nita wrote:
    Jul 13, 2007 at 8:41 AM

    Btw, your data quest link is not work­ing. You can delete this com­ment after fix­ing it.

  • mahendrap wrote:
    Jul 13, 2007 at 9:05 AM

    Thanks. I checked and it does return an error. But a site search of http://dqindia.ciol.com returns the same link (and the same error). I tried man­u­ally brows­ing the “Indus­try Watch” sec­tion of the site, and the More link itself is giv­ing an error, so I’m guess­ing it is an inter­nal site prob­lem, not an issue with the link as such.

    Let me wait a day or two and if they don’t fix it, will remove the link alto­gether! :-(

  • mahendrap wrote:
    Jul 17, 2007 at 2:59 PM

    I rechecked and the link is work­ing again. It was a site issue, good they fixed it! :-)

  • Dinesh Vaidya wrote:
    Aug 14, 2009 at 9:27 PM

    Hi! there

    I read your arti­cle, we are also work­ing in the field of man­u­scripts for last 3 years.
    we processed over 22000 man­u­scripts in Nashik, and over 2000 man­u­scripts we digi­tised in last one and half year.

    Right now we are research­ing man­u­script data in sci­en­tific con­text (Shulba sutras, yad­nya sanstha, ayurveda and mantra con­cieous­ness, mantra shastra)

    we are now work­ing as Vyas Ori­en­tal Social & edu­ca­tional Research Cen­tre, Nashik.

    Thanks for awar­ness you Build

    Dr. Dinesh

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Aug 15, 2009 at 6:19 PM

    Dr. Vaidya,

    You are most wel­come! I have tried rais­ing aware­ness about impor­tance of man­u­script preser­va­tion, stu­pid­ity of politically-backed orga­ni­za­tions who destroyed man­u­scripts at Bhan­darkar Ori­en­tal Research Insti­tute in Pune, and so on.

    The work you are doing should have been done by India long time ago, but it is never too late. I find it heart­en­ing to be respond­ing to you on Inde­pen­dence Day! :)