Advanced Research Consortium Library & Archives

Many thanks to Oja Dr. Moirangthem Ranjana for allowing us to digitise a huge corpus of manuscripts (Korbek/Puya) as the third phase. We lovingly call her Nene (aunt).

These manuscripts are copies dating from the reign of Maharaja Gambhir Singh (r. 1825–1834) to Maharaja Churachand (r. 1891–1941), belonging to her family’s Pandit Achouba lineage, including Paonam Pandit Achouba, Pandit Achouba & Keirungba Moirangthem Thabal, Pandit Achouba Moirangthem Chandra Singh, and the traditional intellectual Moirangthem Narendra.

Today, we digitised 120 manuscripts ex-situ in our library by our trained volunteers.
Among them, we digitised a folded manuscript written in Meitei Mayek on the recto and Arabic on the verso, which appears to have been used as a primer for learning the Arabic script and language. One particularly interesting find was a manuscript overwritten on a government document from 1840 from the Regency of Narasingh ( 1834-1844) due to the scarcity of paper at the time. #

So far, we have digitalised 311 manuscripts (korbek) from Dr. Moirangthem Ranjana’s custody.

Researchers and scholars are invited to access these manuscripts as valuable primary sources for understanding not only the history of Manipur, but also the wider histories of Southeast Asia, Assam, Tripura, Sylhet, Rakhine (Aracan) and Bengal. We should all acknowledge and honour the custodians who have preserved these manuscripts for centuries.

Our library café, “Koso Retreat,” will open for readers soon.

A small open space for reading, conversations, exchange of ideas and coffee.