BENGALURU: When you think of a citizen project preserving 1,000-year-old inscriptions scattered in Bengaluru, you would probably picture an office full of archeological tools, and a lot of dusty books and papers strewn around. What you would not imagine is the office of the Inscription Stones of Bengaluru with its state-of-the-art technology and highly advanced data processing units.
Leading this collaboration between historical conservation and technological solutions is Udaya Kumar, an engineer and founder of Bengaluru Inscriptions 3D Digital Conservation Project.“Most often, we read the history of kings and dynasties, very rarely is there a place-centric narration of history. One of the most important sources of history is inscriptions. Each is a record of something that has happened in the past but they are very rarely about kings,” says Kumar.
The citizen project comprising 4 to 5 research scholars along with a slew of volunteers has created an expansive one-of-a-kind digital map with information on about 1,500 such inscriptions in and around the city, with exact coordinates. “People tend to think that Bengaluru is a new city, but one of the inscriptions on this map from Begur is from 500 to 700 AD which is around 1,500 years old,” explains Kumar.
The inscriptions mapped are sourced from epigraphy collections, archaeological reports, journals, articles, and other similar publications. The green hearts represent they have been verified and conserved but the red skulls are already lost. “About 40 per cent of the inscriptions are gone. It stood there for 1,000 years and in the last 20 years, it’s gone. Simply because it’s in the way. People don’t know that they are valuable,” says Kumar.
Apart from conserving and creating awareness, the project, funded by the Mythic Society, a public institution dedicated to Indic studies founded in 1909, started creating digital models of these inscriptions in January 2021. “So far, we have digitally constructed 600 inscriptions. Digital image processing enables us to make it easier to read and conserve a piece of history while it is in good condition,” says Kumar.
Kumar, who accidentally chanced upon one such inscription in 2017 near his home says, “It helped me discover my place. Having travelled the world, I realised my village is as historic as any other place. It generates pride for the place you come from.” Kumar believes that the merit of conservation is tangible if you see it from a community perspective, adding, “If you think you come from insignificant places, you disown your roots and it degrades. When a child looks at an inscription, they grow up believing in their roots, their language and culture.”
The project is also working on software where all the letters from the Kannada inscriptions are scanned and more than 30,000 such images are digitally saved to not only make it accessible but also possible to chart the evolution of the alphabet. Kumar says that we are running out of time to save these inscriptions. “We don’t need individual heroes but a response from the system to fix it,” he adds.