How did a retired businessman in his 60s end up rescuing ancient Sanskrit manuscripts, taking crumbling pages and preserving them in digital form?

It is a story that began with a retirement plan. At 51, Sanjaya Singhal decided he would give his career another nine years, then step away from his electronic metering company, Secure.

He would study Sanskrit so that he could read the Mahabharata in the original. Then, I wanted to pick an area of interest within the language, and do a PhD. The target was to complete my studies by 70, says Singhal, who is 68 and lives in Udaipur.

Right on schedule, in 2017, Singhal began to study and translate shlokas. Along the way, he stumbled into the world of computational linguistics. With my technological background, I found this field fascinating. It could help preserve manuscripts that were crumbling across the country, he says.

To better understand the potential for this, Singhal made his way to the World Sanskrit Conference, which was being held in Canada in 2018. Here, his mission was reaffirmed. Speaker after speaker discussed how precious manuscripts were crumbling and uncared-for.

Singhal had found a new mission, an urgent one.

Over the next century, we will begin to lose the oldest manuscripts, Singhal says. These ancient texts were usually inscribed on palm leaves, endowed with a remarkable longevity of up to 700 years. But many are already more than 500 years old.

Not knowing where to begin, Singhal turned his focus to the Vaidika Samshodhana Mandala (VSM) research library in Pune, which he had frequented as a student. It houses 15,000 Vedic manuscripts. Singhal had met then VSM director Bhagyalata Pataskar at the World Sanskrit Conference in Vancouver. He crafted a proposal, laying out his plan for digitisation of the librarys archive. The library signed on.

About 6,000 manuscripts had already been scanned and digitised and saved on two hard discs. Regrettably, one of these discs had become corrupted, Singhal says. We enlisted the services of a forensic lab, and retrieved about 40% of the data (equivalent to 2,500 manuscripts). The rest, despite their fragile state, would have to be scanned again.

The library had also preserved some manuscripts on microfilm. Given how easily this material degrades, Singhal decided to digitise the 900 microfilm rolls too. He and his team of 30 four IT specialists and 26 Sanskrit scholars also worked to develop a software program for VSM in 2019, which now acts as a library management system.

Now that things were rolling, Singhal decided to give the project a name, and enlarge its scope. He reached out to libraries across India, to tell them about his Project Sangraha (Sanskrit for collection or the act of organising).

The open-access portal sangraha.org currently features 7,000 digitised manuscripts from across seven libraries. The entries can be searched using keywords and filters. Each of the participating libraries determines its own norms for access (some manuscripts are downloadable as free PDFs; some cost 100 per page).

We lost about two years to the pandemic, as operations were put on hold. But Project Sangraha aims to catalogue 2.5 million manuscripts by 2045, Singhal says.

This endeavour will grant global access to Indias abundant heritage of knowledge, adds Saroja Bhate, chairperson of the VSM managing committee. Manuscripts from across India, carefully preserved in closed racks and cupboards for many years, are now accessible worldwide in digital format, thanks to the Sangraha initiative.

Singhal is now looking to expand his team, with more Sanskrit scholars and specialists in subject such as the Vedas, astronomy and grammar. This ancient language must embrace the digital age, he says. I envision projects like this as stepping stones toward establishing a robust digital platform for Sanskrit, ultimately attracting a new generation of enthusiasts.

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Sanskrit scrolls with the time: A digital project races to preserve a rich past - Hindustan Times