Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts to digitise 8 lakh pages of manuscripts at Visva-Bharati

Visva-Bharati (VB), a central university of which the Prime Minister is the chancellor, signed an MoU on Monday with Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts ( IGNCA) for creating a manuscript conservation centre (MCC) in Santiniketan for Rabindra-Bhavana, the custodian of Tagore’s manuscripts and other documents.

An university official said more than 8 lakh pages including Chinese, Sanskrit, Oriya, Tibetan and Bengali manuscripts will be digitised and conserved by the experts of IGNCA, who would soon come to Santiniketan to start work on the project.

The MoU will empower VB and IGNCA to collaborate on projects of conservation of manuscripts written on different types of materials such as paper, cloth, palm leaves, birch bark, sanchi pat, papyrus, parchment, leather, vellum, metal and ivory. The university is the custodian of about 10,000 manuscripts.

“Many manuscripts are in poor state. They would now be properly conserved,” said special officer of Rabindra Bhavana, Nilanjan Banerjee.

On May 25, Narendra Modi visited Santiniketan to attend the convocation of the institution founded by Tagore in 1921 and promised funds and expertise for academics. This project however has nothing to do with the Prime Minister’s visit.

IGNCA will also help digitise the audio-visual archives of Rabindra-Bhavana and make the collection available through the National Cultural Audiovisual Archives.

IGNCA experts will also help conserve and digitise the Tagore Estate Papers kept in the custody of Rabindra-Bhavana.

Tagore himself encouraged collection of manuscripts for the university.