Manuscript Heritage of India and Its Preservation through Digital Repositories: The Case of the Gyan Bharatam Mission

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_61How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Manuscript heritage; Digital preservation; Gyan Bharatam Mission

Abstract

India’s manuscript heritage, which includes palm-leaf, birch-bark, handmade paper, and cloth manuscripts written in many different scripts and languages, is one of the richest collections of indigenous knowledge systems in the world. These manuscripts represent intellectual traditions in religion, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, law, literature, and the arts, illustrating the enduring legacy of Indian scholarship. Even though the National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) and Kriti Sampada were both early attempts to protect these manuscripts, a large part of the collection is still in danger because it is falling apart, being kept by different people, and not easy to get to. This paper examines the changing state of manuscript preservation in India from the perspective of digital humanities, with a specific emphasis on the Government of India’s recent Gyan Bharatam Mission. The research contextualises Gyan Bharatam within the spectrum of national preservation initiatives, examining its digital infrastructure, metadata creation standards, and the incorporation of cutting-edge technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced cataloguing, and provenance mapping. It also looks into some of the main problems, such as the differences in technology and language, as well as the moral issues that come up when it comes to ownership, intellectual property, and including community custodians in the digitization process. Through an analysis of these developments, the paper aims to evaluate the potential of Gyan Bharatam and related initiatives to promote sustainable, ethically responsible, and research-focused access to India’s manuscript heritage, thereby enhancing the function of digital repositories as dynamic archives that connect traditional scholarship with modern knowledge ecosystems.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Monalisha Medhi
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Manuscript Heritage of India and Its Preservation through Digital Repositories: The Case of the Gyan Bharatam Mission
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Systems and Social Management (ICSSSM-2 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1016
EP  - 1023
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_61
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_61
ID  - Medhi2025
ER  -