Few shots are all you need: A progressive learning approach for low resource handwritten text recognition

•A few-shot learning approach for low resource handwritten text recognition.•A generic recognition and pseudo-labeling model, for multiple handwritten scripts.•Unsupervised, segmentation-free method to progressively pseudo-labeling the non-annotated handwritten data.•Reducing the annotation effort, while conserving the recognition performance.•Recognizing multiple scripts without retraining from scratch.