• The Ministry of State for Culture inaugurated the exhibition “Hamari Bhasha, Hamari Virasat ” under the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav (AKAM) at the National Archives of India in New Delhi, commemorating the 75th International Archives Day.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

• The exhibition aims to celebrate India’s linguistic diversity, highlighting its status as one of the most linguistically diverse countries globally, with approximately 788 languages spoken. India is thus one of the four most linguistically diversified countries in the world, along with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Nigeria.
• The exhibition features a variety of original manuscripts, including the ancient Gilgit Manuscripts (written between the 5th -6th centuries CE, which is the oldest surviving manuscript collection in India), Tattvartha Sutra (Ancient Jain Text), Ramayana, and Srimad Bhagwad Gita, among others. Furthermore, the National Archives of India has made over 72,000 manuscripts available, both physically and through digitization, ensuring their accessibility to people worldwide.

WHAT ARE MANUSCRIPTS?

• A manuscript is a handwritten composition on paper, bark, cloth, metal, palm leaf or any other material dating back at least seventy-five years that has significant scientific, historical or aesthetic value.
• These are found in hundreds of different languages and scripts. Often, one language is written in a number of different scripts.
• For example, Sanskrit is written in Oriya script, Grantha script, Devanagari script and many other scripts.
• These are distinct from historical records such as epigraphs on rocks, farmans, revenue records which provide direct information on events or processes in history. Manuscripts have knowledge content.

ABOUT GILGIT MANUSCRIPTS:

• It was written between the 5″ -6″ centuries CE, which is the oldest surviving manuscript collection in India.
• It was written on the birch bark folios documents written on pieces of inner layer of the bark of birch trees were found in Kashmir region.
• It contains both canonical and non-canonical Jain and Buddhist works that throw light on the evolution of many religious-philosophical literature.

ABOUT THE DAY

• International Archives Day is a day of celebration and awareness of the importance and value of archives and archivists. It is celebrated on June 9 every year, since 2008, to commemorate the date when the International Council on Archives (ICA) was created under the auspices of UNESCO in 1948.