Meetei Mayek, the indigenous script of Manipur, has a history which makes an interesting subject both for a linguist and a historian. The destruction of the script by burning all the documents in the early 18th century and its resurrection, almost from the ashes, hundreds of years later, reminds one of the mythical bird phoenix which is supposedly consumed by fire, and then rises again from its ashes.

Meetei Mayek is back, and has been given its due place. However, one might surmise if the script is hundred percent safe today. What if some whimsical tyrant comes to power and decides to destroy the script again? Well, I will argue that in this era of new technology and digital information, it is practically impossible to carry out such a destruction.

Computers store everything as numbers - whether you write a story or type in a long proof of a mathematical theorem, the computer stores everything as just numbers. So, a research paper by Einstein or the epic of Khamba-Thoibi, are all stored as a sequence of numbers in a "file" in a computer. The computers in turn store these numbers on some storage devices like hard-disks, CDs, DVDs, floppies and now pendrives.

DVDs and pendrives are portable media, each of which can store several gigabytes of data. To give you an idea of how much space a fat book occupies, the whole Bible occupies only 4-5 megabytes (MB) of data. And one gigabyte is about a thousand MB! So, one can imagine that a tiny pendrive or a DVD can store thousands of books the size of the Bible.

Now, imagine if in the time of king Pamheiba, the technology were as advanced as today. People could have stored all the puyas that were ever written, on a single DVD or on a tiny pendrive, the size of a fountain pen cap! People could compress files of a puya and email it to some account in some other country.

The historical and holy text that was mindlessly destroyed by burning the puyas, could easily have been sent to "safe" places, where Pamheiba's rule did not hold In a matter of seconds, a thousand copies of a puya could be cloned. In such a situation, it would be humanly impossible for someone to erase every trace of a manuscript.

This would have been the scenario, had this technology been around at that time. Sadly, it did not exist then. However, this technology is around now and it is up to us to make the best use of it, in spreading the script, using the script, and popularizing it.

To popularize the script we don't need any library burning fanatics - we only need the internet, computers, and the power of digital media. We don't even need as many teachers, the online tutor programs can easily teach Meetei Mayek to anyone interested. One only has to be interested

The hotch potch of character maps

Now-a-days one can use Meetei Mayek on computers after installing appropriate software. So, have we done everything that needs to be done? The answer is no, and I will explain that in a moment. Those who visit E-pao site regularly must have frequently seen lines like the following:

Meitei Mayek Poem :: fHgd_ra samNyada

Figure 1: A schematic representation of the codespace. The code blocks for a few scripts have been indicated.

Figure 2: The proposed chart of Unicode characters for Meetei Mayek.