India-funded SAMHiTA project starts digitising Colombo temple's palm-leaf manuscripts

A project to make digital copies of old palm-leaf manuscripts held at the Gangaramaya Temple in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was launched at the temple on Friday, October 23, 2026. The work is part of SAMHiTA, a programme run by the India International Centre (IIC) in New Delhi with financial support from the Government of India. India's High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Santosh Jha, attended the ceremony with the temple's chief incumbent, Dr. Kirinde Assaji Thero. According to reports from Colombo, the digitisation is expected to be finished by the end of November 2026.

SAMHiTA stands for South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archive. The project describes itself as an effort to build a relational database and a digital archive of Indian and wider South Asian manuscripts that are kept outside India, in libraries, archives and other repositories, by working with the institutions that hold them. A relational database here means a catalogue in which each manuscript's record is linked to related records, such as the text it contains, its script, its place of origin and the institution that holds it, so that researchers can trace connections across collections. The holding institutions named on its portal include the University of Tokyo, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Copenhagen and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The point of the project is access. Many texts written in South Asia are now scattered across the world, and a scholar who wants to compare copies of the same work may need to visit several countries. A shared digital archive lets the manuscripts be read and compared without handling the fragile originals. For the knowledge-systems reader, this matters because a large part of what is known about the region's philosophy, grammar, medicine and mathematics survives only in hand-written copies.

The Colombo launch also reflects the shared Buddhist heritage of India and Sri Lanka. The texts at Gangaramaya are mainly Buddhist, and the project places them in the same catalogue as manuscripts from other parts of South Asia. The programme has the backing of India's Ministry of External Affairs; in September 2025, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar inaugurated a SAMHiTA conference on South Asian manuscripts and mathematics in New Delhi, according to All India Radio. The project also lists partner institutions in Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal.

Short-term: Over the next five weeks, the temple's manuscripts will be photographed and catalogued by the Sri Lankan team. Once the records are added to the SAMHiTA portal, students and researchers in India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere should be able to consult them online instead of travelling to Colombo.

Long-term: If the High Commissioner's hope of extending the work to more collections is taken up, more Sri Lankan temple and library holdings could enter the same archive. A larger shared catalogue would make it easier to study how texts travelled between India and Sri Lanka and how they changed as they were copied.

Who is affected: Scholars of Buddhist studies, Pali and Sanskrit, historians of South Asia, the monks and trustees who care for the Gangaramaya collection, and readers in the diaspora who want access to their textual heritage.

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