Giving researchers and students access to rare manuscripts, respecting rights of custodians of the documents

From tracking cavalry losses in battle to identifying the owners of horses and dealing with officials charging pilgrims for a dip in the Ganges, medieval manuscripts offer an unusually detailed window into how the State functioned. How were losses of cavalry in battle arrived at, and how did the medieval State determine to whom those horses belonged? Or, for that matter, how did rulers in medieval India come to know that officials were charging pilgrims money for a dip in the Ganges? And what was the script on palm leaves that one finds scattered across private collections and government institutions?Access to answers to these and a plethora of other questions connected to administration will become easier, with Telangana closely working with the Government of India to identify, preserve and digitise thousands of manuscripts and make them available to history enthusiasts and research scholars alike.“The Telangana State Archives and Research Centre signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Culture’s Gyan Bharatam Mission last November,” said State Archives Director Zareena Parveen. “We are surveying, cataloguing, conserving and digitising manuscripts that are with government entities, as well as those held by private citizens, who are willing to allow us to digitise them. Our Special Secretary (Higher Education) Venkatesh Dhotre is the nodal officer. The idea is to have a digital repository of manuscripts online to further the cause of researching India’s cultural heritage, and to better understand our history.”Till September 9, the Gyan Bharatam Mission team working at the State Archives had scanned as many as 6,665 manuscripts. In other words, over 1.61 lakh pages had been digitized thus far. To put the scale of the effort in perspective, as many as 1,300 pages are being scanned each day.A Gyan Bharatam Mission team member at the Telangana State Archives and Research Institute team scans folios. Metadata is then generated after which manuscripts are saved to a document corpus. | Video Credit: Syed Mohammed “There has always been an interest in India’s history and culture, especially among foreign scholars. Often, their topics of research are land, revenue and agriculture. For instance, we are digitising medieval documents that show when the mansabdari system became hereditary, and how mansabdars were penalised or rewarded. There are documents which go into details of horses, their pedigree — whether they were Arabian or otherwise — and if there were chashmish, meaning if they had large eyes. There are details of how horses were branded as well,” Ms. Parveen explained.Another aspect of the Mission is to take into confidence custodians of private collections. These include private libraries, collectors, religious institutions such as dargahs and temples, and organisations working for the promotion of languages.As part of the exercise, the State Archives has thus far identified 2,23,751 manuscripts in 37 institutions in Hyderabad, out of a total of 107 institutions approached in Hyderabad and districts such as Nalgonda, Warangal, Mulugu and Medchal.To strengthen the initiative, the State government is in the process of setting up district coordination committees, conducting field inspections and making the initiative public.But the process is not without its challenges. For instance, taking the owners of private manuscript collections into confidence has been an issue.“This is, of course, a problem. But there is a plan for this. The government has incentivised private collectors. So, once the manuscript is downloaded, the owner of the manuscript will get a large percentage of the payment made by a user to download a copy,” Ms. Parveen explained.The Mission has laid down four manuscript access categories. The first entails free access. The second is visible to scholars and others who are registered; downloads will be enabled after the custodian approves them. The third is the paid category, in which the revenue sharing is 10:90. The final category includes rare manuscripts, which require the Ministry’s approval.On the anvil is including several departments and educational institutions into the exercise. District Collectors are slated to convene coordination meetings with the Endowments department, Telangana State Waqf Board, Education department, Minority Welfare department, and Department of Heritage Telangana. Heads of universities, college principals and librarians will be requested to share information on manuscript holdings.District-level workshops, awareness camps and media campaigns are likely to be organized so as to emphasise the cultural value of manuscripts, the safety offered by digitisation and, importantly, that ownership will remain with the custodian.