INDIAN MANUSCRIPT

[Guest guest]

Friday 25 March, 2005.

 

Indian manuscript list cross 50 lakh

 

With the list of manuscripts in India crossing the 50 lakh mark, India

has become the largest storehouse of the 'records of yore' in the world.

 

National Mission for Manuscripts began a survey to map and document

ancient scriptures lying neglected and unseen in numerous pockets of

the country and discovered that India has an estimated 10 to 20 lakh

of them.

 

The figure after their pilot survey in three states shot up to a

staggering 50 lakh manuscripts and the count is not the final tally,

says Sudha Gopalakrishnan, director of the Mission.

 

Seven lakh of these are just from the three states-Uttar Pradesh,

Bihar and Orissa, where the Mission surveys were held. And of the

interesting volumes that they came across include a voluminous copy of

the Mahabharata weighing a quintal and a metre long copy of Quran.

 

The mission, established in 2003 by the Centre under the Ministry of

Culture to attend to the unkempt manuscripts across the country, plans

to embark on a hunt for the ancient volumes in states such as

Rajasthan and Gujarat.

 

The last year's search in three states - 30 districts of Orissa, 13

districts of Uttar Pradesh and 10 districts of Bihar was carried out

through a well-defined strategy involving around 2700 people.

 

" We involved students and teachers in our drive to find the

scriptures. They then searched the villages in the districts-in

libraries, temples, monasteries and madrassas for the texts, " says

Gitanjali, coordinator of the survey.

 

From Orissa itself, around 17,857 repositories were found, most of

them containing texts of the 'tantric' thought. From Unnao in UP about

25,000 manuscripts were procured.

 

The 50 lakh also includes manuscripts that were digitised and

documented such as the 500 manuscripts of the 6000 stored at the Iqbal

Library in Srinagar and 85 manuscripts of 1,000 Kudiyattam manuscripts

from Kerala.

 

The Mission has also identified 3,500 manuscripts from the Orissa

State Museum, 4,000 Vaishnavite manuscripts from Majuli Islands in

Assam and 6,500 manuscripts from Tamil Nadu about Siddha stream of

medicine, digitisation of which began from January 15 this year,

according to a report prepared by the Mission.

 

Yet another project of the mission is to embark on preservation of

manuscripts with natural ingredients and considering the climatic

conditions of the area of preservation.

 

There are references on preservation of scriptures in ancient and

medieval literature such as Ashokan edicts, Kautilya's Arthashastra,

Puranas, Dasabodhas and the medieval saint literature, Shreenand

Bapat, an Indology lecturer at Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth says in a

paper that he compiled on preserving ancient scriptures.

 

Saroj V Bhate, honorary secretary of Bhandarkar Oriental Research

Institute (BORI) in Pune, says the institute is planning to coach

around 30 people in indigenous methods of conservation.

 

" One of the reasons for bringing the manuscripts from Mumbai to Pune

in 1971 was because the climate here is dry. There need not be much

done to preserve the documents, except for treatment with tobacco

powder and camphor. But that is not the case with the areas in the

coastal belt, where humidity is more, " Bhate says.

 

Sudha Gopalakrishnan says they had organised an exhibition and seminar

where different regions across the country had exhibited their

specific method of preservation. These would be compiled into

reference texts and would be used for preservation works in future,

she says.

 

ram ram

vishwa