Adding another feather to the digital India movement, the Government has envisioned a unique way to digitise the century old multi-generation ancestry records commonly know as ‘pothee’ in custody of genealogy priests at various pilgrimage centres in India.
For instance next time a pilgrim visit Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, they may track the record of past visit to the temple by their ancestors or family members at the flip of their finger or click of a mouse.
For this, National Archives of India has envisioned a project to digitise multi-generation ancestry records seeking to harvest traditional knowledge and community repositories and preserve them as a cultural heritage.
“NIA has approached these priests and the project will begin with Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain,” said NAI Director General (DG) Arun Singhal in his address at opening session of the meeting of the South and West Asian Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (SWARBICA) here.
India is hosting a meeting of SWARBICA after a long time, currently in the position of the treasurer of this regional body of the Paris-based International Council on Archives (ICA).
In his address, Singhal also shared some details and figures related to the NAI’s “ambitious programme” of digitising 300 million pages in a period of two years, as part of its project that began last year.
“Before we started the project, our portal, Abhilekh Patal, was displaying about 10 million pages. In the past 7-8 months, the number has grown from 10 million to 84 million pages.. Every day, we are scanning about 400,000 pages. It is a process going well,” said the National Archives of India (NAI) DG. “Shortly, we are hoping, we will complete 100 million pages, perhaps by end of April,” he added.
Singhal said it was found during the course of this project that many documents had been left “untouched” in last 50-60 years and nobody had looked at them.
“And, we realised these are in urgent need of repair, and conservation was required. So, we had to spruce up our conservation efforts simultaneously,” he added.
Another project taken up by the NAI is “harvesting of traditional knowledge and community archives”. “In India, if you go to Gaya, Kashi, Allahabad (now Prayagraj), Badrinath, Kedarnath, Jagannath Puri, Dwarka, there are priests there who document every visit by every pilgrim.
These documents are available with them. So, if you go there and tell them about your father’s name, your grandfather’s name, the place you belong to, they are able to come out with some documents, some ‘pothis’ (registers), which will contain genealogical records of such families,” Singhal said.
He underlined that these ancestry records may even have archival information related to ten generations of many families.
“This is traditional knowledge which has been put together in some ‘pothis’. And, these ‘pothis’ can get destroyed. In a major flood in Kedarnath, some of these ‘pothis’ were wiped out,” the NAI chief rued.
Singhal emphasised that children of many of these priests have taken up other career streams and even moved out of these old cities and, therefore, are “not interested in continuing this family tradition”.
These ‘pothis’ in all probability could end up getting locked up in some boxes and perhaps could go waste, he cautioned. “So, we said, we will try to digitise all these information. And, we approached these priests. And, I am happy to inform, the priests in Ujjain have agreed. So, we will start with Ujjain, we will digitise their records,” Singhal said.
There are “more than 25 places” in India where such records exist, he underlined. “If we can digitise all of them, collate and compare the information contained in these records, it can become a very valuable database,” the NAI DG said.
Many people from India and broad travel to religious sites like Gaya in Bihar or Haridwar in Uttarakhand to perform rituals for attaintment of salvation for souls of their deceased ancestors.
In Gaya, the ‘Pitra Paksha Mela’ is held annually on the bank of the Saryu River and ‘Gayawal Pandas’ (genealogy priests) maintain records of multiple generations of people about their ancestors such as year of birth, pilgrimage, caste, and year of death and perhaps even cause of death.
Similarly, in Ujjain and Haridwar, two of the four sites of Kumbh Mela in India, the other being Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh and Nasik in Maharashtra, such priests diligently maintain ancestry records in ‘pothis’, stacks of which are stored physically in rooms and cupboards.
“Harnessing traditional knowledge and such community archives is another thing, we have discussed with SWARBICA. Perhaps, a blueprint for future collaboration could be discussed,” Singhal said.
Union Culture and Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat in his address said the venue of the event — India International Centre (IIC) was also significant that allows space to voice different strands of opinions, as he welcomed participants from different counties who are attending the meeting of SWARBICA. This occasion should be used “to learn from each other and share best practices”, he said.
