Nizam’s Rare Manuscripts Digitised

Hyderabad: From Persian Ramayana and Bhagavata Mahapurana to Quran verses on gold-plated papers, a large collection of ancient documents belonging to the Nizam is preserved in the Telangana heritage department and converted into digital formats.

Writings of the Adil Shahi, Bahmani and Qutb Shahi dynasties, which were the personal property of the last Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, the collection of the Hyderabad Museum and a Quran written by Aurangzeb are going into digital format.

The collection includes many Quran and Sufi writings written on gold-plated papers. One such important manuscript is Deewan-e-Hafiz by Iranian poet Khwaja Muhammad Hafiz Shirazi, who wrote Sufi poetry in Persian.

The Bhagavata Mahapurana, an 18th-century poetic work about the life of Krishna with traditional Indian style illustrations, is under preservation. A rare 10.5-metre-long royal scroll of Maharaja Itidad Akhwan, containing a collection of letters, was also digitised. The texts were written in Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Sanskrit.

The paper in many of these books had become brittle because they had been stored in a cupboard, leading to damage by termites. Some books are missing pages, and some have lost their original order. To restore the pages, the team uses herbal technology that extends the life of the documents by more than 200 years.

Noor International Microfilm Center, affiliated with the Iranian House of Culture in New Delhi, is founded by the center’s founder, Dr. Under the guidance of Mehdi Khajeh Piri, he is carrying out this work with funding from the Iranian government to save the culture.

Habeeb Ashraf, who is in charge of digitization, said he found the collection to be much larger than expected. “Some books take up to a month to repair and rearrange properly. These works will be useful to researchers in terms of giving an idea about the rulers and their administrations, grants and architecture,” he said.

Heritage department director Prof. K. Arjun Rao said the department has valuable antiques protected by the Nizam. “The preservation aims to preserve ancient and valuable documents that will be useful to future generations,” he said.