Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The Ramayana is one of the most important texts in world literature, with a multiplicity of textual traditions and more than 300 variants throughout South and Southeast Asia.These manuscripts have been preserved in various forms, including palm-leaf codices, inscriptions on temple walls, in highly illustrated folios and through generations of oral performance.But the corpus now faces serious challenges due to environmental destruction, material fragility, fragmentation, and the scope of modern script recognition methods.The study examines how digital conversion projects are redefining the preservation of the Ramayana within a networked heritage system spanning the world.In this paper, the author critically assesses the work of large-scale projects through the use of a qualitative research design that has been conducted between the years 2003 and 2026, including the National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM), the digital reunification of the Mewar Ramayana, and efforts by Southeast Asian countries to document adaptations, like the Reamker by Cambodia.It discusses imaging standards, metadata formatting policies, integration of optical character recognition (OCR) and digital access structures.The study addresses multilingual complexity (Grantha, Devanagari, Kawi), partial coverage of variant texts, and infrastructural inequities.The results support the view that digitization has a significant positive impact on scholarly accessibility and comparative research, but the advantages remain unexplored, especially in relation to oral traditions.To make the endeavour sustainable, preservation and interoperable standards must be adopted, script recognition using AI should be encouraged, the community should be involved, and cross-border collaboration should be institutionalised to protect the long-term cultural viability of the Ramayana.
Authors: Shashank Tiwari, Girish Nath Jha
Institution: Jawaharlal Nehru University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166535362