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Three lakh manuscripts collected from across the country will soon be available online. National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) is developing an app to make them accessible.
Pratapanand Jha, Director, Cultural Informatics, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), and additional charge for NMM under the Ministry of Cutlure, said the platform, being developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, would ensure that the manuscripts are not downloaded by those who access them online. It is to ensure that the material is not misused, since the majority of these manuscripts are collected from individuals and private institutions.
December launch
IGNCA recently launched 30,000 hours worth of audio and visual content on different aspects of India culture such as music, ayurveda and oral folk traditions online at http://ncaa.gov.in. “The platform is ISO 16363 certified, the first of its kind in the world for trusted digital repository. We are looking to do the same for manuscripts as well and targeting December for launch,” Jha said.
NMM was set up in 2003 to identify, document, conserve, digitise and publish Indian manuscripts. So far the organisation has identified 43 lakh manuscripts across the country, 35 lakh is documented and three lakh has been digitised. According to reports, there are close to one crore Indian manuscripts.
Challenges
But identification and convincing owners for documentation is a huge challenge for the NMM. “Even if you identify, it is hard to figure out which manuscript is rare,” Jha said. Of the one crore manuscripts, Jha said, only a few have significant information about the Indian culture that is not already available in the public domain. This requires people who could read different scripts and their variations over the years. For instance, there are 1,300 manuscripts on Geet Govinda, a 12th century work, in 22 variations of Devanagari script. Manuscripts of Sulbasutras are the only source of knowledge about Indian mathematics from the Vedic period. It discusses various principles in mathematics such as the Pythagorean Theorem, which was incorporated from the West.
“This is a part of our heritage and necessary to understand and appreciate the Indian culture and heritage that we continue to uphold. This will not be known unless you have access to these manuscripts and have people who can read and disseminate the knowledge, which is scarce right now,” Jha explained.
PG diploma course
To develop such pool of people who can read manuscripts, NMM launched a one-year post-graduate diploma in manuscriptology and palaeography programme at IGNCA last month.
“But this alone is not enough. To inculcate the interest in students, findings from NMM should be incorporated as a part of the curriculum at school and college level,” he added.
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