Towards Imagining Universal Access to Textual Knowledge: SAMHITA - Building an Open-access Digital Repository of South Asian Manusc

The speaker is Dr. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Project Director, SAMHiTA and Executive Director, IIC-International Research Division.

SAMHiTA: South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archive is an initiative of the India International Centre (Delhi) to build a database and digital repository of manuscripts of South Asian provenance housed in international repositories such as libraries, archives and private collections. Its primary support comes from the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. Its vision was first articulated at a scoping meeting of experts in 2021, as a project to make manuscripts from the subcontinent accessible to scholars across borders. SAMHiTA is also a platform for interaction between countries in India's neighbourhood through collaborations with institutions in Bhutan, Cambodia, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

At India's National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM), of which I was Founder Director (2003–07), we had established institutional mechanisms such a network of resource centres to carry out cataloguing, door-to-door surveys, and training programmes in traditional scripts.

SAMHiTA is an integrative project in that it gathers data from disparate manuscript collections and documents them in a standardized metadata format, though sometimes we find that the resources of libraries and departments of South Asian studies have varied policies on digitisation and access.  As with the NMM, SAMHiTA's mandate extends from documentation, or creating metadata on manuscripts, digitisation and online publication, to reach out to domain-specific networks through lectures and exhibitions. 

The lecture will describe how SAMHiTA's vision has evolved since its inception: its partnership with the relational database PANDiT (Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts), how new technologies like IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) offer opportunities to generate manuscript descriptions collectively, and how we have been able to engage new funding partners who are strengthening our activities in domain-specific research and publication.

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