Mohit Bhardwaj, a former information technology professional, has taken up the back-breaking task of scanning and digitizing thousands upon thousands of some of India’s most ancient manuscripts.

A scene from Bhardwaj’s manuscript digitisation process.

Mohit Bhardwaj used to be a student in 2009 when he started getting interested in the fate of the many crumbling manuscripts, many of them old and priceless, held in institutions and private hands around India.

How, he asked himself, would they survive for the next generation?

Cut to 2014, Bhardwaj, now an information technology engineer, decided that he would start digitising old manuscripts to preserve them for the next generation. They had little resources — basically only a laptop and a scanner and with the help of his wife and friends — to start with, and therefore decided to go one city at a time.

At a steady pace, since then, the tiny team has digitised 1 TB of data covering around 200,000 pages of manuscripts. Some of these are nearly six-hundred-years-old and include Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, a treatise on Sanskrit grammar, from 1,420 CE and the second-oldest manuscript of the Rig Veda dated to 1,468 CE.

Digitising old manuscripts is not easy. Many-a-times, the palm leaf parchment might crumble when handled. Winning the trust of the owners of the scrolls is another hurdle — many do not trust government bodies or private parties. There is also a long and nefarious history of such material being stolen from India. This means, often, Bhardwaj and his team can only work on-site.

But giving up, says Bhardwaj, is not an option, not when he chances upon lines like these in the manuscripts from an unknown scribe: “My back is broken, my fingers don’t work and I find it hard to look straight, yet I write this document; protect it, look after it”.

At the moment, Bhardwaj’s Vaidika Bharata is working on digitizing documents at the Raghunath Temple Library in Jammu, the Punjab University, Chandigarh, the Academy of Sanskrit Research, Melkote, the Sri Krishna Museum, Kurukshetra and the Bhuri Singh Museum at Chamba.

“I never really enjoyed my job as an information technology engineer. I had learnt Sanskrit at an early age and when I came upon this work, it felt like I was doing this for my ancestors,” says Bhardwaj.

He has spent a total of around Rs. 2.2 million (around $30,000; half of which came from his own savings and the other half raised through a social media campaign). He is now looking to raise more money to expand the work.

~