Delegates at the review meet at Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library in Patna on Thursday. Telegraph picture

Patna, April 14: “Knowledge is power. It is imperative to retrieve the knowledge that is hidden in the past and utilise it to better the present,” said Dipti S. Tripathi, director, National Mission for Manuscripts.

Tripathi was addressing a review meeting of the Manuscript Resources Center for Eastern India, which works under the purview of the National Mission for Manuscripts, at Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library in the state capital.

The meeting was attended by representatives from 15 centres in eastern India — four from Bihar, five from Orissa, three from Assam and one each from Tripura, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh. They spoke on the work being carried out in their region and also highlighted the difficulties being faced by them in locating, documenting and conserving manuscripts in different languages.

“It is essential to preserve the retrieved knowledge for future generations,” said Tripathi.

She said she was satisfied with the pace of the work but stress that there was a need to accelerate, as the mission had a time-bound mandate to complete.

When the participants complained that they faced a number of problems because of the lack of cooperation from various institutions and some stakeholders, she suggested that there was a need to spread awareness through campaigns. “This would make people and institutions realise the need to extend active co-operation,” she said.

The mission was set up in October 2003 by the Union ministry of culture for the task of locating, documenting and conserving manuscripts in different languages in different parts of the country.

Under the mission, about two million manuscripts have been put through survey and documentation and prepared as a digital database. The mission has also trained scores of people in manuscriptology, palaeography and editing of texts.

The mission has also come up with a series of publications and contributed to the dissemination of knowledge from ancient manuscripts.

The participants also stressed the need to organise courses and training programmes for editing and translating the manuscripts so that the knowledge could be disseminated among a larger number of readers.

Similarly courses, training programmes and workshops on manuscriptology and palaeography should be organised on a more regular basis to enable editing, collecting and publication of texts in different languages, said one of the participants.

The Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library has a collection of the more than 200 manuscripts on medicine, sciences including Ayurveda.

Sources said the library authorities also planning to catalogue, conserve and publish these manuscripts in collaboration with the National Institute of Ayurveda for development of drugs.

The library is a unique repository of the past heritage, preserved in the form of manuscripts written on paper, palm-leaf, deerskin, cloth and other organic material, said a source.

Moreover, the library has one of the rarest collections of manuscripts in Arabic and Islamic calendar, including Kitab-al-Hashaish and Kitab-al-Tasreef, both in Arabic.

These too have been put on display.

The library has over 2,000 rare paintings belonging to the Mugal and Rajput era. More over there are 850 audio and 550 videotapes on many prominent and important personalities which have been made by the library.