New episodeWritten Artefacts of Nepal

20 September 2022

Nepal is home to exceptionally diverse manuscript collections, both in terms of scripts and languages as well as materials used. In a new video series, Bidur Bhattarai explains how these collections are preserved. The latest episode is about cleaning, wrapping, and archiving manuscripts.

In the new video, ‘Preserving the handwritten artefacts of the Āśā Saphūkuthi (Āśā Archives) in Kathmandu: A step by step overview’, Bidur Bhattarai presents the preservation measures that are being taken for the manuscript collection in the Āśā Saphūkuthi (Āśā Archives), Kathmandu. The film documents the techniques used for cleaning and wrapping the manuscripts, how to prepare an acid-free customised E-Flute phase box (‘archival box’), and the long-term strategies for manuscript archiving.

The video is the fourth part of 'Written Artefacts of Nepal – Preservation and Documentation', a series of short films that offers a brief and accessible introduction to Nepalese written artefacts, exploring their diversity and uniqueness in terms of writing, supports, materials, forms, and texts. The first episode provides a general overview of preservation work carried out at the Tribhuvan University Central Library. In the second episode, Bidur Bhattarai introduces a rolled palm-leaf document with a raw clay seal. The third episode is about a Buddhist manuscript that is written on nīlapatra (‘black paper’) using ‘gold-like’ ink.

All episodes are available in Nepalese with English subtitles.