So today was mission National Museum, New Delhi through the rare stroke of good luck in meeting the Retd. Archaeologist Cpt. Thakur who was closely associated with the Museum who very kindly arranged my introduction with the Director.
I had a brief conversation with the Curate Mr. Rehman, a Scholar of Arabic – an RTI to get more details is being filed as well – I got to know a few things:
Number of Manuscripts in Perseo-Arabic Group: 8718 ( 1205 are actually antique Books )
Number of Manuscripts in Sanskrit and Other Indian Languages: 5425
So Total is: 14143
2618 Manuscripts have been scanned out of which 80% are in Arabic.
Rehman told me that National Museum manuscripts were being cataloged in the following URL with Sample Images for each.
This above is filtered by National Museum holdings only but Other Museums can be similarly queried:
A filter for Sharada fetched 618 Texts.
Another random search for Pratyabhijna fetched:
which has Pratyabhijna Pravimarshini by Lakshman, something to check out.
I also came to know that they have a manual register of there Manuscripts which strangely is marked Confidential. This due to its confidential status is technically out of bounds, remains to be seen if our RTI can get this List which logically belongs to Public Information.
An Excel of certain manuscripts has also been made, I got to get a glimpse and I asked them to search Ishvar, 3 Items showed in that portion of the Excel with Ishvara Pratyabhijna, there would have been more.
A sad fact I learnt was that Govt rates for getting manuscript copies is 1000 Rs/folio !! yes 1000 Rs/folio.
Soon we will meet the Director Mr. Mani – who was very affable on Phone, I will bring these two issues:
Comprehensive Listing should be online ( whatever has been done including that Excel ) and Digital Texts should be at reasonable rates.
eGangotri Digital Preservation Trust 