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'Digitise palm leaf scrolls'

During the monsoons in India in 2019, the ground floor of a 150-year-old library in Sangli, Maharashtra, the Sangli Zilla Nagar Vachanalaya, crammed from floor-to-ceiling with around 40,000 old books and manuscripts, was submerged under eight feet of water for three whole days. Along with precious collections of rare old books were many fragile, handwritten manuscripts that dated back several centuries, all of which were reduced to pulp.


While there has been growing global awareness about the loss of animal species and plant biodiversity due to climate change, the calamitous loss of the nation’s intellectual heritage has been far less examined.

India has a long, illustrious history of sophisticated philosophical thought. Individual palm leaves were dried, cured, then cut into rectangular shapes. Letters were etched with a knife-like pen on to these palm-leaf scrolls; colourings were applied across the surface and subsequently wiped off, leaving the ink in the incised grooves to reveal the text. The sheets were then tied together with a string that passed through holes in each page to make books.

Such palm-leaf scrolls, with their distinctive rectangular shapes, were used from ancient times right until the 19th century, and each scroll could last anywhere from just a few decades to several centuries.

Made from plant carbohydrates, the organic material in the palm leaves made the scrolls vulnerable to the effect of sunshine, humidity, as well as infestations of insects, silverfish, and mould. Natural disasters like floods and earthquakes, as well as humanmade ones, such as wars and destruction of libraries and temples where these scrolls were housed, contributed to the loss of these valuable manuscripts.

One of the oldest surviving Sanskrit collections of manuscripts on palm leaves is the Parameshvaratantra, a Shaiva Siddhanta text. Dated to about 828 CE, the text is held by the University of Cambridge Library and a digitised copy exists in the digital library of the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute as part of its Shaiva Siddhanta collection, freely available to scholars and seekers worldwide.

The Shaiva Siddhanta collection of the Muktabodha digital library is the result of a collaboration between Muktabodha and the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP). For over 30 years, the IFP and the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient (French School of Asian Studies) had painstakingly collected and copied 200,000 pages of 2,000 mostly Shaiva texts.

The collection was started in the 1950s under Jean Filliozat, founder-director of the IFP, and many of the manuscripts, gathered by Pandit N R Bhatt, came from private collections of priests, monasteries, and libraries across southern India. This was to bring together all material relating to scriptures of Shaiva Siddhanta, which has flourished in South India since the 7th century CE. These Shaiva tantras, agamas, had been neglected and virtually unknown to most Sanskrit scholars. In 2005, this unique collection — which holds the largest number of Shaiva Siddhanta texts in the world — was honoured by Unesco as a ‘Memory of the World’

Today, cutting-edge digital technology offers huge advantages for the preservation of the past: it is not subject to the merciless vagaries of the weather, and with everything offered at the click of a button, no longer do scholars have to trudge to far-flung and often inaccessible temples, monasteries, and libraries to look for ancient texts.

Mercifully this year, the monsoon rains were less destructive, but weather patterns have been rapidly changing. To protect against the destruction of India’s splendid past, discovery, digitisation, and dissemination remain the keys to safeguard India’s great heritage. ■

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