A rich repository of historical documents and papers—some centuries old—will be made available for researchers, authors and history buffs as the Maharashtra State Archives plans to digitise these archival records over the next five years.
The Maharashtra State Archives or the Directorate of Archives is the central archival agency of the state government. It has archival repositories in Mumbai, Pune, Kolhapur, Aurangabad and Nagpur. The department has its genesis in the state records office launched in August 1821 by the British.
Today, the repositories have around 175 million pages, of which 105 million pages are in the office at Mumbai, housed in the Elphinstone College building in South Mumbai. These largely are records of the East India Company and the British government, pertaining to the erstwhile Bombay Presidency, which covered present-day Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Sindh in present-day Pakistan, and later, the Bombay province.
Another 40 million pages, largely dating to the Maratha and Peshwa period, are housed in Pune; 20 million pages are in Kolhapur, which contains the records of the erstwhile Kolhapur state, which was ruled by the descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. The offices in Aurangabad and Nagpur have 50,000 pages each, dating to the era of the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Bhonsales of Nagpur, respectively.
The oldest document in this repository is a ‘mazharnama’, or decree, from 1340. It also has the letters by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and his descendant Chhatrapati Shahu of Kolhapur, Peshwa era records, the records and diaries of the East India Company’s operations in western India, and those of its factories like that in Surat. More crucially, the home department papers from the British time contain confidential records about Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation and Quit India movements, the Salt Satyagraha, and the underground and revolutionary movements. The archives contain the records of the plague pandemic in the late 1890s and the measures taken to contain it. It also has a hand impression purported to be that of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Sujitkumar Ugale, director, Maharashtra State Archives, said they have launched a programme to microfilm and digitise these documents over the next five years. “So far, around 30 per cent of these pages have been microfilmed and 35 per cent have been both scanned and microfilmed. We plan to complete the project in the next five years and the documents will be uploaded online for researchers to access from the comforts of their home,” he said. Put together, the project is expected to cost around Rs 150 crore over a five-year period.
Ugale said they planned to create a portal on lines of the ‘Abhilekh Patal’ portal by the National Archives of India. Once the documents are digitised and microfilmed, the need for researchers and authors to access them in physical format will be done away with, and this will prevent the further wear-and-tear of these pages, which are already brittle and have frayed with time. Ugale added that when it came to microfilming and scanning, priority was given to older documents.
Though the scanning and digitisation project was launched in 2010-11, sources said the pace had been affected due to the delicate nature of the work and lack of funding. The directorate has a sanctioned staff strength of 200, but only around 108 employees on the rolls. The digitisation and microfilming is, however, undertaken by a private entity.
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