A Passion for Preservation

Unlike other kids his age, Shiju Alex loved old things when he was growing up in Karimba village in Palakkad. He collected fading old photographs, crumbling books, greying documents, and even his grandfather’s collection of letters. Alex’s passion grew with him as the years went by.

Advanced digital technology also helped his childhood hobby grow into preserving Kerala’s invaluable cultural heritage and legacy for future generations.

Alex, a technical writer, launched Granthappura, a digital repository, in 2009, and now it is one of the most impressive archives of the oldest and rarest books, periodicals, textbooks, documents, etc., related to Kerala and, significantly, freely accessible to all.

Granthappura is credited as the “world’s largest digital archive of books and documents built up voluntarily by a single individual," with over 2,000 Kerala documents dating from the 15th century.

They include the oldest Krishna Pattu written on palm leaves, Hortus Malabaricus, the 17th-century botanical treatise in Latin script, Samkshepavedartham, Malayalam’s first printed book, Muhammadacharitam, the first biography of Prophet Mohammed in Malayalam, Rajyasamacharam, the first newspaper, the first Bible, Gundert’s Malayalam-English dictionary, the Malayalam-Portuguese dictionary, and many more.

Global Backing

The archives have also gained global recognition, with reputed universities such as Oxford, Texas, Harvard, and Tuebingen entering collaborative projects. Many Granthappura materials have also been uploaded to the US-based Internet Archive, archive.org.

Undoubtedly, Alex’s personal passion has been immensely beneficial for humanity at large. Yet, he found it hard to continue single-handedly at one point, owing to the herculean efforts and heavy financial burden. In 2021, he even contemplated closing down his dream project as no support came from anywhere.

Though the painstaking efforts Alex put in all by himself for a decade are usually the responsibility of large institutions like governments, universities, libraries, etc., none of them showed any interest. However, Alex’s travails finally caught the attention of a few young IT professionals in 2022, who offered their support to help him carry on.

Today, Alex’s pioneering efforts are organised under the non-profit organisation Indic Digital Archive Foundation (IDAF), which runs Granthappura as its flagship project. The IDAF also creates and maintains online dictionaries for Indic languages and develops research projects utilising the archives' resources or Indic language computing technologies.

Free Service

All the IDAF activities remain freely accessible to the public, including the online Malayalam dictionary Olam and four Dravidian language dictionaries, Samam. Among those who backed Alex are software professionals like Jisso Jose and Kailash Nath, who are members of IDAF’s Governing Council.

Besides preservation, accessibility, and cost-effective storage, the digitisation of documents and books has made them indexed and searchable to locate specific information within their contents.

IDAF has employed cutting-edge technology using high-quality scanners to ensure accuracy and detail. The German-made Bookeye 5 scanner ensures colour fidelity and accuracy in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), resulting in better searchability.

IDAF currently operates two archive centres in Bengaluru and Thiruvananthapuram. They are involved in digitising the rare documents and books preserved in the library of Dharmaram College, a prominent seminary run by the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate Congregation in Bengaluru, and the works of the late Marxist author P Govinda Pillai in Thiruvananthapuram.

IDAF has also undertaken the digitisation of the works of scholars Dr Scaria Zacharia and Proffessor CK Moosad. It proposes opening a new centre in Kottayam and also plans to establish a mobile digitisation unit.

Costly Affair

As a non-profit organisation that preserves our valued heritage and makes it freely accessible, IDAF needs more support from institutions and the public. It costs about 1,800 rupees to achieve high-quality digitisation of a 300-page book. Technology upgrades are also no less expensive. However, governments and universities have been notoriously uninterested.

Without the support of a few young individuals, Granthappura would have ended up like one of the ancient documents it seeks to save from extinction. Today, India creates a new billionaire every five minutes, with their total number crossing 1,500, according to the Hurun India Rich List of 2024.

Yet, how many of them would care for a project like IDAF, which preserves our heritage for posterity? The response from one of the current Malayali billionaires was illustrative: “This is not an area of our interest. Thank you.”

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