In West Bengal’s Howrah, 6,000 ancient Sanskrit manuscripts find a digital home

Restoring and digitising 6,000 ancient Sanskrit manuscripts in Howrah, preserving Bengal's rich intellectual history for global access.

Nestled in a street behind the iconic Howrah Railway Station is the premises of the 87-year-old Howrah Sanskrit Sahitya Samaj. There, for the last three months, restorers, manuscriptologists, and historians have been working on a unique and mammoth task — restoring and digitising 6,000-odd Sanskrit manuscripts, handwritten by Bengali scholars around 400 years ago.

“On February 6 this year, the Howrah Sanskrit Sahitya Samaj and the Bhaktivedanta Research Centre (BRC) decided to collaborate for the preservation, conservation, and digitisation of the 6,000-plus ancient Sanskrit manuscripts housed at the Samaj library,” BRC Dean Sumanta Rudra said.

According to him, the restoration and digitisation of these manuscripts would be complete by February 2026. Each ancient folio needs to be physically cleaned, scanned, catalogued, and watermarked by three handpicked restorers educated in Bangla and Sanskrit. A special Czur ET 16 scanner and a computer have been provided to the Samaj by the BRC for these processes.

“The manuscripts are significant cultural and scholarly resources for various fields of classical Indian wisdom. We are trying to prevent them from physical degradation and make them accessible worldwide,” Mr. Rudra said.

At the end of the project, the team will have built a searchable digital library of Bengal’s ancient Sanskrit texts, as per National Manuscript Mission guidelines, he added.

“All these manuscripts were handwritten in the Bangla script by Bengal-based Sanskrit scholars between 1500 AD and 1800 AD,” Samaj secretary Debabrata Mukhopadhyay told The Hindu. While the 6,000 manuscripts they have selected are in pristine condition, there are thousands more that are run-down and will require repair before the digitisation process, the 75-year-old Sanskrit professor noted.

“These manuscripts comprise ancient writings on Smrti, Nyaya, Kavya, and Vyakarana — texts on Sanskrit literature, grammar, philosophy, logic as well as writings on the Hindu epics,” Mr. Mukhopadhyay said. For him, some of the most notable texts being revived in the project include the original handwritten manuscripts of Joydev’s Rati Shastra, and interpretations of the Mahabharata by Bengali authors.