Digital Preservation of Kerala Archives

Photo: Rinni K. Jayan

DiPiKA is a project to preserve the rich and highly endangered written cultural heritage of Kerala, India. It is collecting and digitising palm-leaf and paper manuscripts held in private collections across the state.

The digitised collections will be fed into a digital repository, creating an online archive of Kerala's manuscripts that will be openly accessible.

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).