Shimla, April 22 -- The Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, is drafting a proposal for the ministry of Culture to establish a specialised logistical and research centre for manuscript preservation. IIAS director Himanshu Singh Chaturvedi announced the initiative on Tuesday during the inauguration of a two-day exhibition in Shimla, envisioning the institute as a central hub for documenting and digitising the vanishing literary heritage of Himachal Pradesh and neighbouring Himalayan regions. Chaturvedi said that modern social science research in India has suffered from a chronic reliance on Western methodologies and Western Indology, which often impose rigid binaries on Indian history. He argued that primary sources covering diverse fields-from law and sociology to Ayurveda-remain largely underutilised in contemporary academic debate. According to Chaturvedi, these documents are the most authentic tools for understanding the intellectual trajectory of Indian society, as they represent independent works created by scholars outside of state patronage. These records suggest that concepts like the democratic ethos existed as inherent social values long before they were categorised as formal political systems. The workshop focuses on the legacy of the ancient Sharada script, which flourished in Kashmir after the 10th century and gave rise to several regional offshoots, including Pabuchi, Tankari, Pandvani, and Chandvani. These manuscripts are unique because they are not typically found in libraries; instead, they have been preserved for centuries within village households across districts like Shimla, Sirmaur, Kullu, and Jaunsar-Bawar. The texts, composed in a blend of Sanskrit and regional dialects such as Mahasu and Sirmauri, contain invaluable data on astrology, Vedic interpretations, and ancestral rituals that offer a clear picture of how local legal and economic systems evolved. The initiative is the result of over two decades of fieldwork by scholars like Om Prakash Sharma, who is the workshop coordinator and travelled village to village to learn these scripts from traditional keepers. Today, practitioners and younger learners, such as Rahul Pabuch, warn that mastering these scripts is a demanding process that can take years. Participants at the workshop stressed that to ensure the survival of this heritage, these traditions must be integrated into academic curricula and supported by aggressive digitisation efforts. The final goal of the project is to map manuscript-rich villages and preserve the genealogies of the writers, ultimately reshaping the understanding of India's past through its own primary sources....