Swahili Queen’s letters among documents surveyed at Goa archives, India’s oldest

IN the 18th century, Mfalme fatimah, the queen regnant of the say of Kilwa on an island away the due east African coast in present-day Tanzania, wrote a series of letters to Mwinyi Juma, a Swahili spy in Mombasa (Kenya) working for the Portuguese. The correspondence coincided with political upheaval involving the Swahili, Omanis, and the Portuguese. The Omanis challenged the Portuguese control of the region, which lasted from the 16th to the 18th century.Fatima’s letters, which relate to a key phase of East African history, are among the over 31,000 documents and manuscripts at the Goa State Archives, India’s oldest, surveyed as part of the Goa Manuscript Mission.Goa archives director Balaji Shenvy said they launched their survey around three months ago and have since surveyed over 31,000 manuscripts and items with the help of the Goa State Library, the Goa State Museum, and the Goa University. He added that the documents include Fatima’s letters, believed to be the earliest written records of the Swahili language dating back 300 years. “We have also been able to secure the private collection of Sanskrit scriptures and other writings dating back to the early 19th century.”Shenvy said that the Kundaikars, a family of landlords from Goa’s Ponda, donated the Sanskrit texts. A palm leaf inscription of the Ramayana in Tamil is also among the documents at the Goa State Archives.In 2026, the Union culture ministry launched the national manuscript survey under the Gyan Bharatam Mission to preserve and digitise manuscripts across the country. According to the ministry website, the survey aimed to unearth and map manuscripts across India for their preservation, research, and digitisation.Officials said Goa’s archives department hopes to leverage the advantage as the country’s oldest archives to make a strong impression under the Gyan Bharatam Mission.In 1595, Portuguese colonialists established the Goa archives department as the “Torre do Tombo do Estado da Índia,” or the General Archive of the State of India. It houses government records dating back to the 16th century. The earliest record in the archive is from 1498, when explorer Vasco da Gama arrived at Calicut (Kozhikode) on the Malabar coast (Kerala) after circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa).Most of the records at the archive are in Portuguese and Marathi. Other documents include those in Sanskrit, Persian, English, French, Vietnamese, and Kannada.Under the Gyan Bharatam Mission, the documents are catalogued with metadata to maintain authenticity and traceability of the source. Digital copies are stored in a secure digital repository for instant access for research, etc. The mission also envisages data security and cloud-based backup with disaster recovery systems.