Tamil Digital Heritage Project

In 2013, a small group of concerned Singaporeans came together to think of a way to commemorate the nation’s 50th birthday and do something that would not only benefit the community, but would last well beyond the celebratory period. Thus was born the idea of the Tamil Digital Heritage Project (TDHP) – a project to digitise Singapore Tamil literary works published between 1965 and 2015, covering the half-century of Singapore’s Independence. This project sought to preserve a significant aspect of the nation's cultural heritage.

Many valuable Tamil publications had already disappeared from the public domain, as no copies were deposited at the National Library Board (NLB) nor were they in any other public collection. The market for Tamil books in Singapore lacked the scale to sustain their availability in bookshops. Given these circumstances, the TDHP team realised that the best way forward was to digitise the books so that they would be made accessible not just to Singaporeans but also to interested readers from all over the world. It approached NLB to be a co-developer of TDHP and to host the resultant digital collections on its own platform.

About 350 books were selected, ranging from novels to short stories and poems, and featuring 80 prominent Tamil writers and poets. This project would not have been made possible without the support of the authors themselves who readily signed off the digital rights to their works in favour of NLB. The project was also supported by more than 250 volunteers, mostly from the Tamil teaching community, who undertook various tasks including proof-reading and annotating. Members of the public also made donations to support the project, with the biggest amount of $40,000 coming from philanthropist Haji Mohamed Abdul Jaleel. TDHP also enjoyed the collective support of the National Heritage Board, National Arts Council and the National Book Development Council.

The digitisation of Tamil texts was especially challenging as the software for this task was not yet fully developed at that time but NLB and the vendor managed to achieve a creditable standard of digitisation, breaking new ground in the process. More than 15 months after its inception, the Digital Archive of Singapore Tamil Literature was launched on 22 August 2015 by Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, and S Iswaran, Minister, Prime Minister's Office, and Second Minister for Home Affairs and Second Minister for Trade and Industry as well as patron of the TDHP. 

Tharman likened the work of the TDHP team to the labour of a great Tamil scholar more than a century ago, U V Swaminatha Iyer, who collected ancient Tamil classical texts that were in the form of palm leaves but decaying and scattered around Tamil Nadu and brought them to print. Following the success of the literary collection, the Tamil Digital Archive of Singapore Tamil Theatre, the Tamil Digital Archive of Singapore Tamil Music and the Tamil Digital Archive of Singapore Tamil Dance were launched in successive years.



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The information in this article is valid as of August 2025 and correct as far as we are able to ascertain from our sources. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or complete history of the subject. If you have any feedback on this article, please submit here.