I would like to introduce you to a very interesting project whose goal is the creation of an open online digital resource of Indian manuscripts in all languages and religious traditions that are in collections outside the country. The project, called SAMHiTA is being coordinated by the IIC (India International Centre), under the leadership of the Centre’s President Ambassador Shyam Saran, former Foreign Secretary of India, with support from the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) along with the Ministry’s Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) . The Project’s scholarly team is being led by Dr. Sudha Gopalakrishnan the Executive Director of the IIC’s International Research Division. I understand that the project has been given access to Yigal Bonner’s Pandita software through which a large corpus of Sanskrit manuscripts may be accessed.

The following is an excerpt from an email Dr, Gopalakrishnan sent me a few days ago in which she provides some further information:

To give a brief introduction, SAMHiTA (South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archive) started as a simple idea. In 2015, my organization called Sahapedia was a collaborator in a conference on India-ASEAN cultural links organized by Ambassador Saran. The idea of having an open online digital repository by retrieving digital copies of manuscripts that have gone outside the region came up during this time, and though we approached the MEA at that time, it didn’t happen. After I joined the IIC in 2022, we put a plan together again and this time, they agreed to provide a seed fund. Right now, while the core funding comes from MEA directly, we receive assistance from ICCR for some outreach activities.
In these past years, SAMHiTA has been trying to contact many countries and repositories including Tokyo University, Nepal Archives and the Bodleian. The challenges are several. While some manuscript collections are wonderfully preserved and have great access policies (UPenn for example), some don’t even have a basic catalogue, only handlists. Many people are unwilling to show their data publicly and some others do not give permission to share their own digital collections.
We managed to put together 1100 manuscripts from 5 countries in the pilot phase and are now steadily moving forward.
The conference and exhibition on the history of Indian-South Asian mathematics were demanding in organizing and stimulating in content, and attracted considerable public interest. We had good resource people like Professor Ramasubramanian (IIT Mumbai) and Professor Manjul Bhargava (Princeton).
Your kind offer to help us with this programme means a lot to us. Since this initiative could be successful only with the collaboration of institutions and scholars from multiple domains, it would be wonderful if you might spread the word as much as possible (I am not very active with the INDOLOGY group but I should have publicized the Mathematics Conference in that forum). We could think of other collaborative projects on academic topics and also on digital documentation. I have been nurturing an idea for a while of having a topic like “Classics in Translation”.