Indian Consul Visits the CSMC

16 October 2024

Photo: CSMC

Soumya Gupta (centre, front row) with representatives of the CSMC in the cluster's building at Warburgstraße.

On 15 October, CSMC representatives of several research projects related to India had the pleasure of presenting their work to the Indian Consul General in Hamburg, Soumya Gupta.

India is an important country for research at the CSMC. The ‘Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative’ (PLMPI) is studying historical palm-leaf manuscripts from the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu; the cluster’s Container Lab, where the World Heritage documents can be analysed on site, has been stationed in Puducherry since spring 2024. In addition, the five-year cultural heritage project ‘Digitisation and Preservation of Kerala Archives’ (DiPiKA) has been running since 2023. Its goal is to preserve and digitally index important manuscript collections in Thrissur in the state of Kerala in the southwest of the country. Finally, ‘Tamilex’, an academy project affiliated with the CSMC and is scheduled to continue until 2046, is creating an electronic corpus of central texts from Tamil literature from the 1st millennium.

On 15 October, the Consul General of India in Hamburg, Soumya Gupta, visited the CSMC and gained an insight into the ongoing research work. After an introduction by Konrad Hirschler, director of the CSMC and spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’, she also met Markus Fischer, who is in charge of the Container Lab, and Eva Wilden, head of ‘Tamilex’. Giovanni Ciotti, head of PLMPI and now Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna, took part in the meeting digitally. Also involved were Sowmeya Sathiyamani, a doctoral student at the CSMC, and Sebastian Bosch, manager of the Mobile Lab, who showed the consul the laboratory facilities on the Cluster’s premises after the meeting.

In January 2025, a group of CSMC researchers, including Markus Fischer and Sebastian Bosch, will travel to India again to continue their work on the palm-leaf manuscripts in the Container Lab.