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Preserving Civilisation Memory: A Digital Humanities Approach to the Ramayan

Paper · 2026 · Shashank Tiwari and Girish Nath Jha

Summary

The paper looks at how digitisation is being used to safeguard the Ramayana. Its manuscript and performance heritage spans more than 300 variants across South and Southeast Asia. Much of it survives on fragile palm leaf, birch bark or temple surfaces, and parts have been scattered or destroyed by climate, colonial looting and political upheaval. The authors use a qualitative-leaning mixed-methods design built entirely on secondary sources (2003–2026), such as government portals, UNESCO records and institutional reports. They review four regional case studies: the National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) and the Mewar Ramayana reunification in India, the Bophana Centre in Cambodia, Thai archives, and Indonesian scanning projects. They conclude that digitisation has clearly improved access and comparative scholarship. The landscape remains fragmented, however: repositories rarely interoperate, OCR performs poorly on Grantha and Kawi, and oral traditions are mostly left out. In response, they sketch an integrated multilingual Ramayana platform. For Indic NLP, the paper is useful mainly as a map of resources and of open problems in script recognition.

Key points

  • NMM reports about 33.1 million pages (3.31 crore) digitised from roughly 316,000 manuscripts (3.16 lakh). Yet an estimated 80% of India's approximately 5 million manuscripts are still undigitised.
  • Project Ramayanam (GitHub, 2023–) is encoding the roughly 24,000 shlokas of the Valmiki text as structured Sanskrit XML with word-level glosses. It reportedly has about 70% of the transcription done.
  • Other resources reviewed include the British Library's digital reunion of the Mewar Ramayana folios, more than 100 hours of digitised Reamker audio (listed in UNESCO Memory of the World), and the DREAMSEA project.
  • The study draws on 20+ vetted secondary records and collects no primary field data. Its key challenges are multi-script OCR (Grantha, Devanagari, Kawi), metadata standards (METS/XML, Dublin Core, IIIF), funding and ownership.
  • The proposed platform would combine the Valmiki Ramayana, Ramcharitmanas and regional variants. Its planned features are a lexical system grounded in dictionaries, a tool for setting variants side by side, an access model blending different copyright arrangements, and interfaces in Indian regional languages.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Jawaharlal Nehru UniversityNew Delhi · India3 works · 170 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 worksReligious studies · 226 worksConservation · 7 works

Cite

Cite as Shashank Tiwari and Girish Nath Jha. 2026. Preserving Civilisation Memory: A Digital Humanities Approach to the Ramayan. Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/32f4m4jqh8x3

@inproceedings{tiwari2026preserving,
  title = {{Preserving Civilisation Memory: A Digital Humanities Approach to the Ramayan}},
  author = {Shashank Tiwari and Girish Nath Jha},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/32f4m4jqh8x3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/32f4m4jqh8x3}
}

References

6 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Academia.edu. Tribal Ramkatha traditions in India. find
  2. Amar Chitra Katha. (n.d.). Historical spread of the Ramayana in Southeast Asia. Arunachal Times. (2025). Discovery of tribal Ramayana manuscripts in Arunachal Pradesh. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Catalogue of Ramayana manuscripts. Pune, India. Bharati Ideology. Kakawin Ramayana and Indon… find
  3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. British Library. (2014). The Mewar Ramayana digital reunion project. London, UK. Deccan Herald. Oral and tribal Ramayana traditions in India. Digital Restoration and Conservation of Ancient Manuscripts in Southeast Asia (DREAMSEA). Project reports and digitisation statistics. G… find
  4. Siam Society. (2024). Digital cataloguing of Ramakien murals at Wat Phra Kaew. Thailand. Slideshare. Global translations and adaptations of the Ramayana. Southeast Asian Library Group. DREAMSEA digitisation updates and manuscript collections. find
  5. Spectrum Books. Cultural footprint of the Ramayana in Asia. The Times of India. (2014). Mewar Ramayana folios digitally reunited. The Times of India. National Mission for Manuscripts digitisation statistics. UNESCO. Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Register: Reamker recordings. find
  6. Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). Sage Publications. find

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