- A treasure house of both obscure and celebrated tales of the erstwhile Travancore kingdom that became Asia’s first to defeat any European power on Indian soil, the recently opened Palm leaf Manuscript Museum in the Kerala capital has further brightened the state’s cultural and academic space.
- Billed as the world’s first palm leaf manuscript museum, the facility is essentially a repository of curious nuggets of administrative, socio-cultural, and economic facets of Travancore spanning a period of 650 years till the end of the 19th century, besides documents relating to territories of Kochi in the state’s middle and Malabar further north.
- The museum is a useful resource for historical and cultural studies for both academic and non-academic researchers.
- The museum has 8 theme-based galleries in the museum representing segments like, “History of Writing,” “Land and People,” “Administration,” “War and Peace,” “Education and Health,” “Economy,” “Art and Culture,” and “Mathilakam Records.”
- The museum stores 187 manuscripts at Central Archives and the department’s regional officers in Ernakulam and Kozhikode. The manuscripts span 6 centuries From 1249 CE to 1896.
- It will be housed in the 6,000-sq ft museum which was arranged by the Kerala government’s nodal agency for museums Keralam–Museum of History and Heritage.
- The Museum houses manuscripts in ancient scripts such as Vattezhuthu, Kolezhuthu, Malayanma, and ancient Tamil and Malayalam. The 1st phase’s archival material was selected after sorting through a stock of carelessly stored 1.5 crore palm-leaf records from all across Kerala.
World’s first Palm-leaf Manuscript Museum opened in Kerala
