Vedic manuscripts on world register

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Vedic manuscripts on world register

Twenty-nine documentary collections in 24 countries have been

inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. These additions

bring to 120 the total number of inscriptions on the Register to

date. They include, for the first time, collections from Albania,

Azerbaijan, Colombia, Cuba, Italy, Lebanon, Namibia, Portugal,

Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the US. From India, the

collection includes the Saiva manuscripts of Pondicherry. This

collection of 11,000 palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Sanskrit,

Tamil and Manipravalam focuses mainly on the religion and worship of

the Hindu God Shiva. It includes the largest collection in the world

of manuscripts of texts of the Saiva Siddhanta, a religious

tradition, which spread across the Indian subcontinent and beyond, as

far as Cambodia in the East. The Pondicherry manuscripts, dating from

the 6th century A.D. to the start of the colonial period, are kept at

the French Institute of Pondicherry.

 

Move to document rare manuscripts

This week you can get a chance to see 125 odd young graduates in the

role of surveyors from the National Mission for Manuscripts knocking

from door-to-door hunting for rare manuscripts in the capital city.

The Mission is also providing conservation kits to manuscript

repositories and private collectors in Delhi. The surveyors would

also visit Noida, Faridabad, Gurgaon and Ghaziabad. This is the first

government effort to approach private collectors. Before this, the

Mission had focussed on institutions only. The surveyors will not ask

people to turn in their valuable manuscripts but will help them

restore those age-old cultural heritage and document their existence.

Individual collectors can keep these manuscripts with them even after

they have been conserved. The surveyors will also record details of

the manuscripts they find according to the standard format for the

Mission's national database—the National Catalogue of Manuscripts.

This database would be made available on the Internet for scholars,

researchers and other interested individuals. National Mission for

Manuscripts has restored about 80,000 manuscripts collected from

around 12 institutions in the capital, including the National Museum

and the National Archives. India has an estimated five million rare

manuscripts which is the largest repository of such documents in the

world. But the sad aspect is that most of this invaluable wealth is

undocumented and ill-preserved. The survey is being organised in

collaboration with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts

(IGNCA). In 2003, at the time of NDA government, the Ministry of

Culture had launched National Mission for Manuscripts for a period of

five years. So far, it has succeeded in conserving more than 1.25

lakh manuscripts all over the country.