The project called “Two Centuries of Indian Print” will scan books in 22 languages, dating from between 1714 and 1914. It is part of the celebrations for the 2017 UK-India Year of Culture, announced in 2015, during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United Kingdom. The British government-funded project was inaugurated at the library by Britain’s Indian-origin Employment Minister Priti Patel. Patel is the senior-most person of Indian origin in Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet.
“Digitising the world’s largest collection of historic South Asian books, many dating back hundreds of years, is an important milestone in our shared history which will further strengthen the deep cultural ties between our two great nations. This reflects Prime Minister Modi’s aspirations to make India’s cultural treasures accessible and builds on his momentous visit to the UK last year where we first announced these plans,” said Patel, who is also the government’s official Indian Diaspora Champion.
The project’s first phase will begin soon, and the British Library is also requesting donations in addition to the government’s sponsorship. 200,000 pages from around 1000 books in the Indian language of Bengali will be scanned in this phase, including the first Bengali book published in 1778. The project has chosen the Bengali titles to begin with because demand for them is quite high. The library plans to digitize the sruti and smriti texts of the Indian scriptural canon next. The srutis primarily include the Upanishads and Vedas, while the smritis include epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharat.
“It is the mission of the British Library to make the vast intellectual and cultural resources we hold accessible to anyone, anywhere,” said Roly Keating, the library’s Chief Executive. “By digitising some of the riches held in our South Asian printed collections, we want to enable people all over the world to appreciate India’s great cultural heritage in new and innovative ways. In India itself, the National Virtual library of India is ushering in a new era for digital research – this exciting project will make millions of pages of historic content available to researchers in the subcontinent.”
