I think it was way back in 2013 that I commenced and finished the creation of a digital book version of V. NAGAM AIYA’s Travancore State Manual. At that time what was available as the source materials online were a few very low-quality scanned-versions of the original book.

Actually I did not have any interest in the history of Travancore, since I do not belong to that location at all. Many of the social issues and problems of antique times, over there had very little connection to me. However what spurred the work was the chance discovery of certain information connected to the lower-caste versus higher-caste (Hindus i.e. Brahmins and their henchmen Nayars) belligerence.

It was for the first time that I got to know that there was indeed a very powerful history of how the English East India Company put pressure on the Travancore royalty to give freedom and liberty to the lower castes.

This thread literally led me to a whole lot of historical incidences which have been cunningly pushed into oblivion by the new rulers of the place. For the location is now under the Hindi imperialists from the northern parts of the Sub Continent and their henchmen.

The work was quite hard. And there were a lot of botanical and zoological technical words I simply had to search and get the correct spelling of. Internet was snail-speed in my location then. That also was quite a curious item. Most of my acquaintance in the various cities had quite high-speed internet connectivity. It was quite intriguing that in certain parts of the nation, that the speed was very bad.

It was like saying that if you buy a particular-brand car in Bangalore, it would go fast. However, if you buy the same car from a village, it will go very slow.

Since this was my first work of this kind, I literally forgot about the quality of the digital book I had created. After this book, I did do a few other books of a similar kind; that is, creating them into digital book with a commentary attached.

It was only in recent days, that I got to think again about this book. As of now, reasonably good quality scanned versions are available online. After perusing them, and comparing the text therein with that in my digital version, I found that there was an immensity of typos in my digital book version. The most terrible item was that many of the dates given in the book were totally wrong.

It was then that I decided to do a thorough reworking of the book. It was then that I got to read the text in a more detailed manner. For, by this time, the subject matter was more familiar to me. This is because I had by this time done a similar work on few other books of the same genre and nearby geographical locations. Of these, the most significant one would be the Malabar (Manual) by William Logan.

It goes without saying that as of now, I am in a more powerful stance to take an authoritative glance at the contents of this book. I can now make more categorical statements about the quality of the text.