This post describes how I am preserving the old handwritten poetic manuscripts written around 1880-1930. They had come to me in a bound volume as seen in the picture below. The binding was labeled Deewan-e-Baqa. Baqa being the poetic name, takhalus, of Shah Abdul Ghafoor Manikpuri. Baqa is used in several ghazal and poems in this volume. The experience of Archival of old manuscripts has taught me to become a "heritage detective". The detective is pouring over these old handwritten poetic manuscripts trying to decipher the old hand writing, to find the links and clues spread in these manuscripts, to identify the years when they were written, to identify different handwritings, to identify the links between the different types of cotent pages that were collected in this bound volume, to understand the history of how these pages got collected in this binding which was done some 30-40 years later, to understand the chain of transmittal and weave a credible story around the discovered artifacts.
The next stage is the preservation in protector sheets of these old pages, sending them for scanning, typing and transcription followed by editing and proof reading. Then would come the stage of understanding of the contents, and connecting the contents with the social history of that time, and connecting them with the relevance of our times. This experience reminds me of how archeologists discover, date, investigate, link and try to understand the history of old times by connecting them with different related artificats of that time and the artifacts connected with that time and place.
