A workshop on manuscriptology and palaeography was inaugurated at the National Centre for History of Science here on Thursday.
Organised by the National Mission for Manuscripts, New Delhi, and the Oriental Research Institute (ORI), 30 scholars from all over India are participating in the 44-day workshop.
The objective is to train scholars and participants in conservation and preservation of manuscripts and expose them to the corpus of literature available by way of old manuscripts.
The advanced workshop, reckoned to be the first in the series of such programmes, is also the longest-ever to be held.
It is part of the National Mission for Manuscripts' efforts to create a database of India's manuscripts and preserve them for posterity.
In his keynote address, Vijay Shankar Shukla, Senior Research Officer, National Mission for Manuscripts, said that there was hardly five lakh manuscripts collated till 1950, but it received fresh impetus after Independence and the number of manuscripts had crossed 50 lakh of which about 18.10 lakh had been posted on the NMM website.
He said that though there were gifted Sanskrit scholars, not many were interested in manuscript conservation. Hence, the workshop was reckoned to be important.
E.T. Puttaiah, Registrar of the University of Mysore, inaugurated the workshop.
Musicologist R. Sathyanarayana presided over the function.
