Preserving Civilisation Memory: A Digital Humanities Approach to the Ramayan

Abstract

Abstract The Ramayana takes a leading role in the list of the most important texts in the world literature, with a multiplicity of textual traditions of unparalleled numbers of more than three hundred variants throughout South and Southeast. Stone manuscripts, bamboo manuscripts, and palm leaf manuscripts have been passed down in 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 the destruction of the environment, material frailty, fragmentation, and the scope of modern script recognition methods. The current analysis examines how digitization projects are re-defining the preservation of Ramayana in a heritage system that is networked across the world. In this paper, the author critically assesses the work of large-scale projects thru 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 predicts imaging standards, metadata formatting policies, integration of optical character recognition (OCR) and digital access structures, and struggles with the problem of multi-script complexity (Grantha, Devanagari, Kawi), partial coverage of variant texts, and infrastructural inequities. The results support that digitization has a significant positive impact on scholarly accessibility and comparative research but the advantages are unexpressed, especially relating to oral traditions. To make the endeavor sustainable preservation, interoperable standards must be adopted, the script recognition with the help of AI should be encouraged, the community should be involved, and cross-border collaboration institutionalized to protect the long-term cultural viability of the Ramayana. Keywords: Ramayana, Manuscript Preservation, Digitization of Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities, Textual Transmission, Palm-Leaf Manuscripts, Grantha and Kawi Scripts, Metadata Standards (METS/XML), IIIF Interoperability, AI-Assisted Philology, Intangible, Cultural Heritage, Archival Sustainability, Cultural Heritage Informatics, Open Access Repositories, Civilizational Memory.

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