Chennai

The Madras High Court, admitting a plea seeking to transfer allinscription and other materials relating to Tamil and other Dravidianinscriptions to Tamil Nadu from Mysuru, sought the Ministry of Culture,Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the TN Tourism, Culture andReligious Endowments Department to clarify on the allegation that Tamilresearchers and experts are not allowed to have access to EpigraphicOffice for reading and research.

Expanding the scope of a PIL moved in this regard, a division bench comprising Justice N Kirubakaran and B Pugalendhi sought answers for a slew of questions about the inscriptions found in India and as to why the ASI, which has got Epigraphy Branch for Arabic and Persian Languages at Nagpur, has not created a separate Epigraphy Division for Tamil in TN. Out of the one lakh inscriptions found in India, 60,000 were found in Tamil Nadu and of them, a mere five per cent relates to other languages, it noted.

The bench also sought to know as to how many stone inscriptions are in Tamil, Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu and other languages, and in which language majority of the inscriptions are found in India.

The bench raised the queries based on the submissions by the petitioner’s counsel S Sidharatha Vishnu that many estampages collected with much effort during the last century are stored in Epigraphy Branch, ASI, Mysuru and Tamil stone inscriptions heaped like ordinary stones. Estampages are not properly preserved and are getting destroyed without knowing their importance, the counsel appearing for petitioner V Illanchezian said quoting Iravadham Mahadevan that all the inscriptions and estampages are out of reach for researchers, especially from TN.

However, L Victoria Gowri, Assistant Solicitor General of India, submitted that the Epigraphy Branch of ASI was established in 1886 in Bengaluru and shifted to Ooty in 1897 and then to Mysuru in 1966 owing to its cool weather, conducive for preserving paper estampages.

The preservation method at Mysore is time-tested. The transcripts are being laminated for longevity and the storerooms treated with pest control every week, she added.