TIRUVANANTHAPURAM : A handful of extremely old palm-leaf manuscripts, reportedly on Kalaripayattu and temple rituals, and rare printed tomes - among them several volumes of the Hortus Malabaricus - are among hundreds of books and documents recovered by the State Archives Department from flood-hit Kodungallur.
The salvaged volumes and manuscripts were carted to Thiruvananthapuram by the department as part of a massive restoration programme to help the public and government offices deal with the aftermath of the mid-August floods. The cache from Kodungallur - from a local library which lost thousands of books to the floods and a local ‘Kalarithara’ and temple - was recovered by one of two teams that were flagged off by Museums, Archaeology and Archives Minister Ramachandran Kadannapally last week to flood-hit districts.
‘’The management of the Kalarithara and temple said that around 10 of the palm-leaf manuscripts were washed away in the floods. We managed to save five,” says Archives Department director P Biju.
The restoration will take time. The library, being a small one and understaffed, had donated all its damaged books to the Archives Department. Once they are properly dried, the really old and valuable books will be set aside for mending and restoration work.
They will also be preserved in digitised formats,.Among the library collection were several volumes of the Hortus Malabaricus, the mammoth Dutch treatise on Indian medicinal plants, especially those of the Western Ghats. “Most of the library books require only minor restoration,” he said.
Christened ‘Paitruka Rekhakolkkoru Suraksha Valayalam,’ the Archives Department project is also aimed at ensuring that the disaster victims, in the midst of their grim struggle to set their lives back on track, do not inadvertently destroy material that is of historical and cultural value.
Another aim of the initiative is to help out government offices, especially sub-registrar offices restore their waterlogged record rooms to a manageable condition. This week, conservation officers and support staff will travel to Pathanamthitta to assist a waterlogged sub-registrar office at Perunad and several cooperative banks to restore documents.