Mysuru: In order to preserve ancient manuscripts that have been written on palm leaves, the University of Mysore will be signing an MOU with Tara Prakashana which is an organisation founded by PR Mukund. He is someone who has been working on the preservation of ancient manuscripts that are on palm leaves for the last 20 years and who has procured highly advanced multispectral imaging technology to capture their images and preserve them, according to Mysuru MP Pratap Simha.
The special feature of the technology is that it can capture texts in manuscripts that are affected by pests, fungus, overwritten, scribbled, blackened or scrapped and cannot be seen with bare eyes. It uses infrared rays and ultraviolet rays to retrieve texts. ORI has a repository of 40,000 palm leaf manuscripts and nearly 30,000 titles of paper manuscripts and enshrines the ancient Indian knowledge system spanning different disciplines.
Simha said, “Through various media, I just came to know that in ORI (which comes under the University of Mysore) the manuscripts of Kautilya Arthashastra are getting damaged. After speaking to Hemantha Kumar, Vice-Chancellor, UOM, he said it is being preserved well. When I was in Bengaluru, I had an opportunity to meet Mukund. After seeing his impressive technology in preserving various manuscripts, I requested him to visit ORI to use the same technology and try to preserve precious palm-leaf manuscripts. After bringing it to the notice of our higher education minister and Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa, we will be signing an MOU with Tara Prakashana to take up work to preserve manuscripts by using such high-end technology. “
These manuscripts are like a knowledge-bank and we need to preserve it for our future generation” added Pratap Simha who along with Mukund visited ORI.
Mukund said “I have more than 20 years experience in the preservation of ancient manuscripts that are on palm leaves, and we have two technologies that are used for preservation of manuscripts. The first one is imaging through which even badly-damaged scripts can be made readable and made to last for more than 250 years. Another technology is Wafer Fish technology. In this case, we use semi-conductor technology and put metallisation on silicon wafer. This lasts for nearly 1000 years and it is also fire as well as water-proof. After signing MOU, we will be taking up the work very soon”.
