Manuscripts in India
The manuscript wealth of India is enormous. No one really knows how many manuscripts- in different languages and scripts. On palm leaf, birch bark, cloth, wood, stone and paper- exist, though an Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage survey in the late 1980s put the figure at 50 lakh. A good number of them have been catalogued, and lie preserved in libraries, museums and institutes, but experts are convinced that a still greater number remain undiscovered and undocumented, in various minor libraries, private collections, and religious institutions.” A vast number of India’s manuscripts have still to be unearthed,” said Sudha Gopalakrishnan, director, National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM). “A bigger number have to be catalogued. Many of them are rapidly decaying, and need to be properly preserved or they will be lost.”
It was with these objectives in mind that the Ministry of Culture set up the NMM with a five-year time frame and a budget of Rs 350 crore. Since then the mission, tying up with various like- minded institutions, has set up 27 Manuscript Resources Centers (MRCs) to carryout surveys and awareness campaigns and 20 Manuscript Conservation Centers (MCCs) to help preserve and, restore valuable manuscripts. A single pilot project last year unearthed 2 lakh manuscripts in UP, 1.5 lakh in Bihar and 2.9 lakh in Orissa.
How valuable are the manuscripts that have turned up? Anything that is handwritten and more than 75 years old qualifies as a manuscript, but Sudha insisted they were very discriminating.” We will not pick up anything and everything,” she said. “Land records, horoscopes or personal records are not what we want. We look for documents of scientific, artistic, historical or spiritu...
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...unched a national level mission for the preservation of the manuscripts; India’s real treasure of culture. The Mission has laid emphasis on digital preservation of rare manuscripts all over India and already completed a numbers of manuscripts are captured in digital form. Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) was launched on 19th November, 1985 by the late Prime Minister of India Shri Rajiv Gandhi and registered at New Delhi on 24th March 1987. This Center has taken a nationwide project for digital preservation of manuscripts .This Center is digitizing a number of manuscripts in Assam also.
Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library located in Patna, Bihar has taken a Pilot Project of Digitization of manuscripts in October, 2005, which has a mighty collection of about 21,000 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Hindi and Sanskrit written on Palm-Leaves.
...ed Manuscripts, a Guide to Technical Terms. Malibu, Calif.: Paul Getty Museum in association with the British Library, c1994. Print.
Both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale are dystopian novels, however, these books are a lot more complex than mere portrayals of dystopia, it can be argued that they are explorations of dystopia rather than mere portrayals. In order to explore dystopia, many themes must be considered, such as; feminism, love and repression. Nonetheless, it is apparent that human characteristics are the driving point of the two novels, predominantly, the depiction of human resilience. In an imperfect world, it is important to have certain qualities which, if plentiful, it can mean success, whereas if it lacks, it can mean failure, this characteristic is resilience. The protagonists in each novel, Winston in 1984 and Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale face situations which leave them both in disarray, and both even consider suicide. The authors tentatively highlight human resilience, its limits and most importantly its strengths into the two novels.
There are two ways to approach searching the manuscripts collection. You can use the site specific google search on the Manuscripts Department website, or you can search the library catalog and limit the results to the Manuscripts Department. I chose to use the search engine on the Manuscripts Department webpage because it includes brief snippets from the results that allowed you to quickly look at some description and rule out the results that are totally irrelevant to your search without having to open each one individually. As you look at search results, you will notice that the results have names like papers and collections. This is because archival and manuscript materials are organized by provenance rather than subject. What this means is that materials are grouped together the way they were received. All of an organization’s, individual’s, or family’s papers will be grouped together and as much as possible they will be kept in the original order that the creator stored them in. This means that most collections have materials related to a wide range of subjects and gathering all the material on a particular topic or person requires looking at multiple collections.
In 1894, construction neared completion on The Thomas Jefferson Building, the oldest of the three buildings which comprise the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.. With the exterior well in hand, the architects turned their attention to the interior, commissioning extensive murals by well-known artists. The commissioners of these murals deliberately set out to “personify the ideals of the [American] people” through the medium of government-sponsored art, and provide a relatively young nation with a story about themselves -- a visual “literature” which would connect them to the distant past.1 Among the most famous of these murals is Edwin Blashfield’s The Evolution of Civilization which occupies the massive dome of the Main Reading Room; twelve cultures are represented in the circle, each credited with a unique contribution to Western civilization.2 In one case, ancient Egypt is depicted as having contributed “written records” to civilization, represented by a figure wearing a characteristically Egyptian headdress.3 However, a variety of research, some of which actually occurred in the late nineteenth century, calls this particular choice into question; ancient cuneiform records from Mesopotamia date back to 5000 B.C.E.,4 while Egyptian hieroglyphics appeared around 3400 B.C.E..5 This suggests that Mesopotamia should share with Egypt the honor of having contributed written records to Western civilization, if not displace it.
For years on end, countries have been fighting with big museums from other countries for ancient artifacts that belong to the original countries. The argument of whether or not the museums should be able to keep them still remains. It is the right of the country to have their own artifacts. It is imperative for countries to be able showcase their historical artifacts, therefor museums should return them to their rightful owners.
...writers? Looks were exchanged, pages were ripped out, and who knows what was kept from this document. Having a record is the best way to present the gift of knowledge, so that we can make the world better but so much is affected by the surrounding situation. Our knowledge is fallible.”
The ruins and the scrolls were dated by the carbon method and found to be from the third century which made them the oldest surviving biblical manuscript by at least 1000 years. Since the first discoveries archaeologists have found over 800 scrolls and scroll fragments in 11 different caves in the surrounding area. In fact, there are about 100,000 fragments found in all, most of which were written on goat skin and sheep skin. A few were on papyrus, a plant used to make paper, but one scroll was engraved on copper sheeting telling of sixty buried treasure sites. Because the scrolls containing the directions to the treasures is unable to be fully unrolled, the treasures have not been found yet. In all, the texts of the scrolls were remarkable. They contained unknown psalms, Bible commentary, calendar text, mystical texts, apocalyptic texts, liturgical texts, purity laws , bible stories, and fragments of every book in the Old Testament except that of Esther, including a imaginative paraphrase of the Book of Genesis. Also found were texts, in the original languages, of several books of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. These texts, none of which was included in the Hebrew canon of the Bible, are Tobit, ...
...or historical records and scribing. In this manner, each section showcased the idea of purpose behind each Egyptian artifact; while all items are very ornate and artful, this separation proves the Egyptians lack of embodying “art” so much as embellished items of practicality and function.
Art is a key element in understanding history and culture. It is the written words, drawings, constructions of a nation. Eric Mortimer Wheeler, an archaeologist and British officer, was part of one of the first efforts to conserve art during the war. A fellow officer asked Eric Wheeler how important the destruction to buildings in Leptis Magna, a great city of a Roman emperor, by the British army were. His words were, “They’re irreplaceable. They’re history. They’re… It’s our duty as soldiers to protect them, sir. If we don’t, the enemy will use that against us (Edsel 35)”. Another example of art’s importance is seen when Walter Hancock gave a Torah to a Jewish chaplin. It was previously thought by Jewish survivors at his previous service that all Torah scrolls were destroyed. When the Jewish chaplin brought it to his next service, the scroll received great emotional response, “the people weeping, reaching for it, kissing it, overcome, with joy at the sight of the symbol of their faith (Edsel 310)”. Art protection was crucial during World War II. “This was the moment of art conservation; there was not a second to lose if the world’s cultural patrimony was going to be preserved (Edsel 27)”.
This shepherd boy had been clambering around the clefts and gullies of a rock face on Wadi Qumran, north of the Dead Sea hoping to find one of his lost lambs. Thinking that it could have taken refuge in a cave he threw stones at the opening. He heard a jar break, became fearful and ran to fetch his fellow tribesmen. What they discovered were written scrolls of ancient papyrus, stuffed in jars and wrapped in linen. The Bedouins thought that they could make money on the black market in Bethlehem so sold them for a few shekels. A bundle of four of these scrolls was purchased by “the Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, Yeshue Samuel who then stored them in St. Marks Monastery”. (Albright, 1954, 403)
“An institution that cares for (conserves) a collection of articles and other objects of science, artistic, cultural or historical importance, and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits, that may be permanent, or temporary.” (www.wikipedia.org)
Hailed as the archaeological find of modern times they were made out of papyrus or animal skins called gevil and written right to left with no punctuation. In fact there were no spaces between words they simply ran together. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek using ink made from carbon black and white pigments and using birds feathers as writing implements.
Mishra, Vijay. "The Texts of Mother India." After Europe.Ed. Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989. 119-37.
NEW AVENUES FOR MARKETING OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES, AND PRODUCTS IN INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT (IIM’s) LIBRARIES IN INDIA: A FEASIBILITY STUDY
Literary works continue to be recorded thousands of years after the initial writings of the ancient world. Up until the last hundred years, this consisted strictly of works that were recorded by an author and then made available to the masses. The invention of the printing press greatly increased the availability of literature. No longer were books required to be hand copied and c...