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Journalism of Courage
It’s an old story with a new twist. When spiritual leader and scholar Shri Madhavacharya (1238-1317) penned the Sarvamoola Grantha—a collection of 36 works that are commentaries on important scriptures—he couldn’t have imagined that the palm leaves he wrote on would survive 700 years. This is where the twist comes in. Not only was the rare manuscript found, but has now been subjected to the rigours of modern technology to restore and save it for posterity.
It all began two years ago, when P R Mukund found the manuscript at the Phalimaru muth near the coastal town of Udipi in Karnataka. A professor of electrical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York, Mukund ran into the works during one of the visits to his native town.
Heading a team comprising Keith Knox of Boeing Corporation and Ajay Pasupuleti, a PhD from Microsystems Engineering at RIT, Mukund took on the project to digitally restore the manuscript. “All the 336 palm leaves, which had text on both the sides, had become very brittle and couldn’t be handled without damaging them further,” says Pasupuleti. “The poor condition of the priceless manuscript—the leaves had cracked, small pieces had chipped off and substantial parts of the leaves were missing—needed to be addressed immediately.”
So the team visited Udipi, first in December 2005, to gauge the optical requirements for the high-quality imaging of palm leaves, and then in June last year to image the manuscript using a scientific digital camera. “In the first phase, we took high-resolution images of the manuscript. Each leaf was captured in five or more sections which were digitally stitched together to complete the entire image of the palm leaf,” says Pasupuleti.
It took five days and 7,500 images to complete the process. In the second phase, the digital images were stored on disks. Finally, the images were stored on silicon wafers.
“The silicon wafers can withstand temperatures of up to 400 degree centigrade, remain unaffected by water and the data is visible to the naked eye,” says Mukund. “It was the best way to provide an alternate storage medium.”
Today, the Sarvamoola Grantha, the only existing manuscript authored by Shri Madhavacharya, is fully restored and kept at the RIT.
Even as Mukund thought he was through with the project, he came across Professor Charles S J White, the American University professor who had travelled across India and had microfilmed over 150,000 pages of manuscripts. He has gifted the entire collection to the RIT researchers so that it would be made available to scholars across the world. For Mukund, the project seems to have begun all over again.
