IIAS Shimla opens online portal of rare manuscripts in Diamond Jubilee Week

The Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) in Shimla has launched a digitised rare manuscripts library portal, opening part of its manuscript holdings to readers and researchers online. The portal was launched on the opening day of the institute's five-day Diamond Jubilee Week, a public programme that the institute said runs from 11 to 15 October 2026 at Rashtrapati Niwas, its home in Shimla. The portal was launched by Prof Reicha Tanwar, a professor and former director of the Women's Studies Research Centre at Kurukshetra University.

A manuscript is useful to scholarship only when someone can read it. For most of the last century that meant travelling to the library that held it, asking for permission and working under supervision with a fragile original. A digital portal changes the first step. A student of Sanskrit poetics in Pune or a historian of Himalayan trade in Guwahati can look at the same page without going to Shimla, and the original is handled less often.

IIAS is one of the country's best-known centres for advanced research in the humanities and social sciences. It works from Rashtrapati Niwas, the former Viceregal Lodge. The institute has described the new portal as a way to widen public and scholarly access to rare historical manuscripts through digital technology. It has said the Diamond Jubilee Week as a whole is meant to bring history, literature, the Bharatiya knowledge system and art to a wider audience.

The launch also fits a wider national effort. Universities and state archives have been putting manuscript collections online, and the Union government's Gyan Bharatam mission is surveying and digitising manuscripts across the country. Each institution that publishes its own holdings adds to a body of primary texts that researchers can compare and cite, which is how claims about India's knowledge traditions are tested with rigour and not only repeated.

What the reports do not yet say is how many manuscripts the portal holds on its first day, which languages and scripts they are in, or whether the scans come with catalogue notes and transcriptions. Those details decide how useful the portal will be. A scanned page with no description helps a specialist who already knows what to look for; a described and searchable one helps students and teachers as well.

Short-term: Researchers and students can view rare manuscripts from the IIAS library online. Visitors in Shimla can attend the book fair, art exhibition and lectures of the Diamond Jubilee Week until 15 October 2026.

Long-term: Regular handling of fragile originals should fall, which helps preservation. If the institute keeps adding material and descriptions, the portal can become a working source for courses and research on Indian knowledge systems.

Who is affected: Scholars of history, literature, philosophy and languages; university teachers building courses on Indian knowledge systems; librarians and archivists planning similar projects; and general readers interested in primary sources.

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