In India, Marking the Paper Trail of History

"We are creating a manuscript map of India. The survey will present new facets to our intellectual heritage," says Sudha Gopalakrishnan, chief of the National Mission for Manuscripts. The project will not take the volumes from their owners but merely document what is available and help in conservation. "The key abstracts of all the ancient knowledge found in our manuscripts will be available digitally for the world to see," Gopalakrishnan says.

Art historians are eagerly watching this massive cataloguing process, hoping for new clues to India's past.

"What we find will answer many nagging doubts about our knowledge tradition," says Lokesh Chandra, an art historian and manuscript scholar. "For example, we came very close to modern mathematics in the 8th century. But what happened after that? Why was there a hiatus in the evolution of ideas in India? How did we miss the bus to the future?"

In the 18th century, some European scholars began translating ancient Sanskrit and Buddhist manuscripts and made them accessible to the world. Many valuable manuscripts were taken out of the country and are now in European libraries and private collections.

Chandra says unearthing the manuscripts will also forge national pride for India's 4,000-year-old history and will "give us a psychological boost for future advances."

The oldest manuscripts that India possesses are a set of 6th-century Buddhist texts that were found buried in the hills of Kashmir about 60 years ago. In the last two years, the surveyors have found rare ancient Sanskrit and Arabic treatises on such subjects as diabetes, astrophysics, interpretation of dreams, surgical instruments, concepts of time and the art of war. A 400-year-old handwritten Koran was also found in a locket measuring three inches.

But Gopalakrishnan says manuscripts are being lost at an alarming rate because of neglect and ignorance. Most ancient manuscripts, found on paper, palm leaves, birch bark, cloth, wood and stone, are languishing because of improper care in this humid, tropical and dusty country.

"By the time we find them, they are moth-eaten, edges falling apart, attacked by fungus," says Ritu Jain, a conservator with the manuscript project. She recently discovered a yellowing and brittle 18th-century Arabic manuscript on a traditional Islamic healing procedure in a dusty, cobweb-filled corner of a college library in New Delhi.

"I shudder in pain when I hold them," she says. "Some pages are so fragile that they just become powder in our hands."

The manuscript mission also trains librarians, private collectors and temple priests in conservation, advising them to keep the documents wrapped in starch-free cotton and in a space free of dust and moisture. Basic training is also given in chemical conservation. But few homes and temples handle the religious manuscripts with reverence and ritual purity. Some also follow indigenous methods of preservation such as using margosa leaves, clove and black pepper.

On a recent morning, an Arabic scholar at the mission office received a letter from a New Delhi resident, Afzal-ur-Rahman, who wanted his decaying ancestral collection of Arabic literature examined by experts.

Later, as a scholar leafed through the frayed, fungus-infected pages of a book about the nuances of Arabic grammar, Rahman, 61, spoke of his great-grandfather, whose literary work was honored by a Mughal king in the early 1800s.

"I am emotionally attached to these manuscripts," he says. "It is a family heirloom. I never let anyone touch it. But it contains knowledge that must be shared with the world."