Palm leaf manuscript

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Palm leaf manuscripts were used instead of paper to record and preserve thoughts, knowledge and mythical narratives in Ancient India, using dried leaves from the Palmyra palm or talipot palm.

For a long time palm-leaf was the Indian paper, or papyrus; nature's paper which was not easily damaged. The letters had to be inscribed on it with a stylus. Given the recognised intellectual vitality of the Indian culture and its high regard for inherited knowledge, it is no surprise that a vast corpus of these palm-leaf manuscripts accumulated over the centuries until the appearance of the printing press which rendered palm-leaf manuscript transcription obsolete, Indian rajahs, temple authorities, and other concerned individuals ensured that the oldest (and hence most valued) manuscripts were ritually disposed only after they had been copied onto new palm-leaves.

One of the biggest undertaking of palm leaf writing occurred in Matale Aluvihara, Sri Lanka where complete Pali canon was written down in 100 BC. This was a huge undertaking since English translation of the Pali canon is composed of 50 hard bound copies that would take five feet of library shelf space.

The shape and size of a palm-leaf page continues to be used to this day in Tibet for sacred Buddhist texts made on paper using woodblock printing; the Tibetans long ago borrowed these technologies from China, but copied them using the palm-leaf page they were familiar with.

When this age-old cycle was broken in the 19th century, the remaining corpus of palm-leaf manuscripts and the knowledge contained in them began a long slide into obscurity and destruction. With the tradition of the scribe fast dying and with no new system of recording their contents, not only have vast quantities of these manuscripts disappeared forever, but even the very ability to read the archaic palm-leaf script, called Grantha, today survives only among specially-trained scholars.

A recent tentative survey by the Institute of Asian Studies, Madras, indicates that there are still about a hundred thousand palm-leaf manuscripts surviving in South Indian repositories alone, with thousands more scattered across the subcontinent and overseas. But most of these palm-leaves are approaching the end of their natural lifetime and are facing imminent destruction from dampness, fungus, white ants, cockroaches and - not least of all - disposal by villagers whose actions are dictated less by reverence than by superstition.

The existing palm-leaf manuscripts on traditional science cover the following areas: Palm leaf manuscripts are available in many Indian languages such as Sanskrit, Tamil, Sinhalese and Pali.

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