NEW DELHI, INDIA, February 21, 2011: One of the most ambitious and exciting projects in recent years — digitization of India’s ancient manuscripts — has moved a step ahead with the Delhi-based National Manuscript Mission (NMM) creating standards for digitization of close to 3 million manuscripts in its care.
Old wisdom in a pdf or a jpeg? That’s right. The Arthashastra on a DVD, no less a version than the palm leaf manuscript in the ancient Grantha script.
The standardization now, in consultation with four other agencies including the National Archives of India and National Informatics Center, lays down guidelines from image resolution to file format. This should also help when the plans for a library for the manuscripts is rolled out.
Digitizing manuscripts entails scanning, photographing of the often-frail manuscripts and storing the digital data. The project began in 2005 and to date has processed close to 71,000 manuscripts — that’s nearly 9.3 million pages, palm leaves, tree bark folios.
It’s not been easy. Collecting manuscripts in the first place is a task, with little idea of the sources. ‘It’s like groping in the dark. Surveyors are required to go door-to-door,’ says Dipti S. Tripathi, director NMM, on hunting down of manuscripts. The NMM approaches repositories, institutes and individuals. Seven states have been covered so far — Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tripura.
The manuscripts, when sourced from institutes like Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute or Oriental Institute at Tirupathi or from individuals, are digitized in the source city itself if possible, and then returned to the owners. The NMM keeps only the digital copy with itself at their Delhi office. The list of manuscripts was recently made available as a catalogue on their website www.namami.org