Saving the past for the future

Asha Kasbekar makes a strong and convincing case for digitally preserving India’s priceless ancient scriptures

- Asha Kasbekar

Last year, during the monsoons in India, the ground floor of a 150-year-old library in Sangli, Maharashtra, was completely inundated. The Sangli Jilha Nagar Vachanalay library, which was 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 the venerable library’s precious collections of old books, biographies, and autobiographies were many rare, handwritten manuscripts that dated back several centuries, all of which were reduced to pulp.

Sangli, known for its turmeric and sugarcane, sits peacefully beside the river Krishna. That the city suffered such catastrophic flooding last year is proof, if proof be needed, of the growing threat of climate change.

While there has been growing global awareness about the calamitous loss of plant biodiversity and animal species due to the combined causes of human activity, global warming, and climate change, the loss of the nation’s intellectual legacy due to the very same causes has been far less examined.

India has a very long and illustrious history of sophisticated philosophical thought. Many of these profound intellectual musings on metaphysics and the nature of man and God were inscribed on scrolls made from palm leaves. While elsewhere in the world, vellum, papyrus, or paper was used for writing, in India and South Asia, the preferred material for writing was the palm-leaf scroll.

Palm Leaf scrolls