Around 2,200 old and valuable Marathi hand written manuscripts, ranging from 14th century to 19th century will now find place on internet, thanks to the effort of the former librarian of the Bhandarkar Oriental research institute (BORI), VL Manjul.

This brings in lot of thoughts to our minds. It seems how an effort by a person can really brings in such great developments for the entire civilisation. These manuscripts are the ultimate treasury of our civilisation, which we have never cared to even preserve properly. Nobody cares to even think about them forget about going through them. And then comes people like Manjul who try to preserve these hands written manuscripts for future generation by using present technology.

The manuscripts range from the writings of different saints, biographies, purana granths and translations from Sanskrit to Marathi by prominent writers like Vaman Pundit and Mukteshwar. We never thought how important these manuscripts are for our future generations to know about their past. These manuscripts hold the knowledge pool of our history and yet we never bother to even preserve them.

It took almost six years for Manjul to locate these manuscripts, a collection which also includes about 100 copies of the ‘Dnyaneshwari’ the oldest being a copy made in 1630.

The effort of a single person has brought drawn our attention to this issue as well. This person has opened our eyes and dragged our attention towards our ancient scripts, texts and manuscripts lying in old libraries unattended, unread and ignored.

The collection includes about 250 manuscripts, which are currently in the possession of the Marathi Manuscripts Centre. This organisation has been founded by Manjul himself to preserve such rare manuscripts, which are a treasure trove for those who want to learn about ancient Marathi literature.

I think making these manuscripts available on Internet is a very apt and beneficial idea because this will make these scripts accessible to people all over the world. If a person in one corner of US wants to study the writings of our ancient writers or wants to know about our rich culture and writing material can now very easily have it with just a click of a button at his place only. It will also preserve these manuscripts for more years.

It’s a call for each one of us to actually think of preserving our rich heritage be it these scripts or our monuments. If nothing more, but atleast taking an initiative to go through those scripts or visiting our heritage sites. It’s our responsibility to secure this vanishing heritage of our civilisation. It’s only we who can take this initiative, it’s only we who can be like Manjul and preserve our dying culture for lifetime.