Jaishankar opens show of 9th-century healing manuscripts, from Charaka to Bali

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar opened an exhibition of South Asian healing manuscripts, some dating back to the 9th century CE, at the India International Centre in New Delhi on Monday, October 12, 2026. Titled Nirāmayatā: Healing and Wellbeing in South Asian Texts and Practices, the show is organised by SAMHiTA (South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archives) and is the fourth in its annual series of exhibitions. Jaishankar said preserving manuscripts is an investment in India's intellectual resources rather than an exercise in nostalgia, and that artificial intelligence can help restore them and make them easier to use.

Many of the most important texts of Indian knowledge, on medicine, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, survive only as handwritten manuscripts, and a large number sit in collections abroad. SAMHiTA's work focuses on exactly those: it is building a relational database and digital archive of South Asian manuscripts held outside India, so that scholars and the public can find out what exists and where. Exhibitions like this one bring that hidden material into view.

The theme of healing links the exhibition to living traditions. Charaka and Sushruta, whose ideas appear in the show, are the foundational names of Ayurveda, and their frameworks still shape how Ayurvedic practitioners describe treatment. By placing those texts next to a Persian anatomy work and healing manuscripts from Bali, the exhibition shows how ideas about health travelled and mixed across Asia, rather than presenting Indian medicine in isolation.

Jaishankar framed the show as more than a medical display. He said it is a study of how societies understood the relationship between the individual, society and nature, and he linked it to India's wider effort to preserve and digitise its knowledge heritage. His remark that civilisations preserve their distinctiveness by engaging with others, rather than by shutting themselves off, fits the exhibition's cross-cultural design.

The use of AI in manuscript work is a growing field. Old manuscripts are often fragile, damaged and written in scripts few people can read today. AI tools can help clean up images, read difficult scripts and make large collections searchable, which speeds up the work of scholars.

Short-term: Visitors in Delhi can see rare healing texts and reproductions that are rarely shown in public, and students of Ayurveda, history and Sanskrit gain a chance to study them closely.

Long-term: Projects like SAMHiTA's archive, combined with India's own manuscript missions, can make the country's knowledge heritage searchable and usable for research in medicine, history and the sciences, wherever the originals are kept.

Who is affected: Scholars of Indian knowledge systems, Ayurveda and South Asian history; libraries and archives that hold manuscripts; students; and the general public interested in India's intellectual traditions.

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