DiPiKAOpening Ceremony of New Cultural Heritage Project

30 January 2024

Photo: CSMC

On 7 January 2024, we officially launched our latest cultural heritage project in Thrissur, Kerala (India): ‘DiPiKA – Digitisation and Preservation of Kerala Archives’ aims at surveying and digitising palm-leaf manuscripts kept in private collections in Kerala.

A further objective is to develop the Kerala Manuscripts Preservation Centre, founded in 2022, which will become the home of the digital community archive of the Kerala manuscript collections.  

The opening ceremony of DiPiKA included the handing over of the digital images of the Thrissur collection and an academic event on Kerala manuscript cultures. It was attended by officials from the Kerala regional government and EFEO, several private collection owners, and about 40 students in Manuscriptology from various universities.

DiPiKA is a collaborative project of the Vadakke Madham Brahmaswam (Vedic Research Centre) in Thrissur, the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in Pondicherry, the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML), and the CSMC. It is generously supported by Arcadia for a period of five years. Started in March 2023, DiPiKA builds on a previous project in which the entire collection of the Vadakke Madham Brahmaswam was digitised with financial support from Arcadia as part of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Program (EAP).