Information technology and culture: India to digitize rare manuscripts

Around 532 valuable and rare manuscripts of different languages like Persian, Urdu, Arabic, English and Telugu are being preserved at the Andhra Pradesh State Archive and Research Institute. The institute is now planning to digitise the archive in order to preserve the rare collection.

“In order to carry out preservation work, the APSARI collaborated in May with the National Mission for Manuscripts to set up a manuscript conservation centre,” said Dr Zareena Parveen, director of APSARI. She added, “The NMM has released `5 lakh for preservation of valuable manuscripts.” The MCC taken up conservation and curative treatmen, which includes repair work from primary to permanent level.
“This covers fumigation, hole filling and lamination, to give longer life to palm leaves and manuscripts,” said P Suresh, conservator at NMM.

The state archive houses 95 lakh manuscripts, 1.5 lakh Nizam-era, Mughal and other documents and 30 thousand books. Manuscripts, documents and books dating back to 1407 AD are at the state archive, which maybe lost forever if they are not preserved and digitised. The archives are a treasure trove of information not just on Nizams but also British rulers, Mughals and Delhi Sultans.

“We are preserving them before they get damaged, because they are only sources of research for the next generation,” pointed out Suresh. They have been given preventive treatment and folios treated for their longer life, that cover a variety of themes, textures, aesthetics, scripts, languages, calligraphic works and illustrations, which constitute a part of India’s heritage.

Among the preserved books are the Industrial Census in The Nizam Dominion 1935-45, Agricultural Census and Kesava Iyengar’s Economic Investigations in the Hyderabad State 1939. I Sudarshana Rao, a researcher at University of Hyderabad said conservation and preservation of manuscripts is useful and the historical data should be put on the Internet so that scholars across the world can access it.