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 Bengals 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 Joydevs Rati Shastra, and interpretations of the Mahabharata by Bengali authors.

The manuscripts archived in the Samaj were collected in the 1900s by Nityananda Mukhopadhyay and Bijoynath Mukhopadhyay, who sourced them from the personal collections of Sanskrit scholars across Bengal. They were driven by the aim to make Sanskrit accessible, Mr. Mukhopadhyay said. They even started a monthly practice of staging Sanskrit plays in the Samaj auditorium, which continues to this day.

Mr. Mukhopadhyay emphasised that the digital archiving project is entirely non-profit, and is being done solely with the intention of immortalising these scripts. The project costs, borne by the BRC, are estimated to be around 30 lakh.

The academic end of this initiative is being supervised by Presidency Universitys Vice Chancellor Nirmalya Narayan Chakraborty. These ancient manuscripts bear testimony to Bengals rich intellectual history, he said. He is of the opinion that inaccessibility has been the main reason why the scholarly works of Bengali pandits have been ignored by mainstream academia. Hopefully, after the digital library is complete, scholars from around the world can access the texts, research on them and perhaps even shed new light on our ancient literature, he said.

This is just the start. Mr. Chakraborty said that more manuscripts will be sourced from across the State for digital archiving. I have been in touch with other organisations and many old libraries in Bengal. Most of them lack the resources to properly preserve the folios they have, he said, adding that for manuscripts that are illegible and in poor condition, an expert manuscriptologist will be brought in to insert any missing text.

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In West Bengals Howrah, 6,000 ancient Sanskrit manuscripts find a digital home - The Hindu