BORI: Storehouse of the ‘Memory of the World’

Did you know that some of the oldest known manuscripts of the Rig Veda are kept at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune? These manuscripts are so valuable that they are a part of UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World Register’, which lists some of the world’s most important documents.

These are the same manuscripts referred to by German scholar Max Mueller, who first translated the Vedas into English. But this fabulous treasure is just a small part of a much larger treasure trove – of more than 28,000 manuscripts painstakingly collected from the far corners of the subcontinent. But what are they doing in Pune?