Malayalam Digital Archives: The Gundert Portal and Granthappura

Chaired by Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, IIC-International Research Division.

This talk introduces two open-access Malayalam digital archives — the Gundert Portal and Granthappura (Kerala Digital Archive) — tracing how each began and how they came to work together. Granthappura started in 2009 as a volunteer digitisation project and has since grown to over 2,500 digitised items, including the first Malayalam printed book and dictionary. The Gundert Portal grew out of a 2016-18 German Research Foundation project to digitise Hermann Gundert's Kerala-related holdings at Tübingen, ultimately covering some 137,000 pages from 849 titles, with nearly 24,000 pages transcribed into machine-readable Malayalam.

About the speakers: Heike Oberlin heads the Department of Indology at Tübingen University; her research centres on Kerala, Malayalam language and literature, and performance studies, and she established the Gundert Chair for Malayalam at Tübingen in 2015. Shiju Alex is a senior technical writer who volunteers in digital archiving and co-directs the Indic Digital Archive Foundation.