Dear Madhav and friends,
Thanks for the great news about digitization plans at BORI.
There's a phenomenon I've begun to be aware of over the last few years. An institution or person in India announces a digitization plan. Then some digitization actually happens. But then, the resulting files are hoarded and not made available to scholars.
This has happened with MS collections in Kerala, Mysore and elsewhere. There are exceptions, of course.
What motives and ideas are behind this behaviour?
"Digitization" is a kind of magic word. It is a semiotic sign for participation in a progressive, modern world. It's what you do if you don't know what to do. And "digitization" is also a sign for possession: if a manuscript is digitized it has been grasped
or gained in some psychological sense. A couple of decades ago there was a similar aura surrounding "making a database." It was a self-standing good, and sent out a semiotic sign of ownership and power. "I have a database of the Vedas," was an assertion
of power and status independent of the instrumentalization of the database.
So perhaps it's reasonably easy to account for a desire to digitize something. (NB I'm not talking about rational reasons, but about irrational motives.)
Then, why refuse to share the resulting digital files? Perhaps for all the old reasons, connected with ideas about loss of mana (in the Austronesian sense), fears about making a dreadful mistake, and residual anger resulting from constructions of colonial
oppression.
Excuse my ramblings!
Dominik