Panaji, Dec 6 (TOI): The state government will set up a committee to verify the transliterated scripts of Modi Marathi at the department of archives and archaeology.
In April this year, the government made a budgetary provision to transliterate the Modi script. Since then, six experts from the Pune-based Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal have regularly visited the department in Mala, Panaji, over the past few months to decode the Modi Marathi documents.
These are legal documents from the Portuguese government archive 'Arquivo Histroico de Estado da India.' TOI had written about the same on November 19.
"There is a risk of damaging these documents if they are transported to the Pune-based institute. The papers are weak and brittle and therefore cannot be put through the journey. We have therefore insisted that the experts come to Goa instead and transliterate them. As a result, the Goa government has put together a budget of Rs 4lakh for this cause," said Balaji Shenoy, an archivist at the department.
The archive department houses more than 5,000 loose manuscripts, besides hundreds of village community records in the same script, which date back to many centuries.
These documents find their roots in the Peshwa period; believed to be the correspondence between Goa and its neighbouring sovereigns such as the Sunda kings, Sawants of Sawantwadi, Kolhapur kings, Peshwas, Hyder Ali, etc.
The experts dedicate a week every month to carrying out this task in Goa. The experts have been able to transliterate a total of 150 records per session, Shenoy informed.
"A government constituted committee will then verify and certify the scripts. Members of this committee will be experts in Modi Marathi script from Goa and Maharashtra because there are some terms in these documents that are in Konkani and Portuguese, which only the Goan experts will be able to understand." he added.
After the committee is done authenticating the data, the transliterated texts will be made open to public domain for researchers to refer to and study.