2016 Of Gods and Books. Ritual and Knowledge Transmission in the Manuscript Cultures of Premodern India (original) (raw)
Related papers
Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, 2021
Scholars of South Asia have long known of praśasti-s, eulogistic verses often composed in the trans-regional and cosmopolitan Sanskrit language on copperplates, stone slabs, and temple walls, from the early centuries of the Common Era. They have traditionally sieved these documents to recover dynastic histories and processes of state formation and have supposed that as a genre they faded away in the second millennium CE when Islamic polities were established across the subcontinent and new genres of history writing and political discourse were popularized. In making this supposition they have overlooked the fact that praśasti-s continued to be frequently composed and written. Yet, their appearance was neither in public spaces nor in public documents, but frequently at the ends of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. In this paper, I carefully analyze a corpus of hitherto un-translated praśasti-s and other scribal remarks written at the end of oft illustrated sumptuous Jaina manuscripts prepared between c. 1200 – 1600 in western India. This was a period during which manuscript culture and literary production burgeoned in the region. Through my close reading of these genealogical micro histories, I shed new light on the emergence of new power elites, literati associations, centers of manuscript production, the rise of professional authors and scribes. I also consider the aesthetics and poetics of patronage in the region and ask why patrons in the early centuries of the second millennium CE sought to legitimize their family histories through the use of an archaic genre.
The Oldest Manuscripts from India and Their Histories
Cracow Indological Studies
This essay examines a copy of the Qur’ān from India, now in the India Office Collections at the British Library. The manuscript, registered as IO Loth 4, belongs to the reasonably large group of early Qur’āns that date to the eighth and ninth centuries CE. While some of these manuscripts have charted histories, what is not widely known is that early Qur’āns also made their way to India. There they have their own special histories, meanings and associations. In attempt to address the long ‘after-life’ of these manuscripts, this paper will examine a single example that arrived in India in the Mughal period and was eventually presented to the Library of the East India House by Lord Dalhousie in 1853. While not the earliest of the Qur’āns brought to India, it nonetheless dates to the circa ninth century CE, making it older than any surviving manuscripts in Sanskrit or Prakrit in India proper.
The codex has become ubiquitous in the modern world as a common way of presenting the materiality of texts. Much of the scholarship on the History of the Book has taken this endpoint for granted even when discussing pre-modern writing and manuscript cultures. In this essay, I would like to open the discussion to other possibilities. I will draw on my research on medieval South Asian religions and from my hands-on work with manuscripts in two collections: the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh and the Indic collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing examples from these two collections as well as noting broader patterns within them, this essay reflects on what South Asian manuscript traditions can contribute to our understanding of the materiality of texts. First, I consider how different articulations of orality, memory, ritual, and aesthetics in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism helped to shape the development and formation of manuscript traditions in South Asia with dynamics that might differ from medieval manuscript traditions shaped by Christianity in the West. Then, I turn to specific insights into the materiality of South Asian manuscripts in relation to the task of cataloguing, preserving, and digitizing materials in the Rāmamālā library.
Texts and Rituals: Issues in Indology
Sukrtindra Oriental Research Institute, Kochi, Kerala ., 2015
List of Research articles - Mantrapraśna in the Āpastamba School, Some curious statements in the Taittirīya Brāhmaņa, The Upanayana ritual in the Śatapatha Brāhmaņa, Altruism in Vālmiki's concept of Dharma, Siddhivyañjakādhyāya of Nāțyaśātra, References to astronomy in Kalidasa's works, Abhinayadarpaņa - A new Malayalam manuscript on Dramaturgy, Research Methodology in Sanskrit, The concept of Bhakti in the Nārada Bhaktisūtra and Śāņdilya Bhaktisūtra.
"Indian Manuscripts" in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, 2014
Pre-publication, pre-edited draft. © Dominik Wujastyk, 2011. Now published in: Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds.), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 159-181. ISBN 9783110225624.
Journal of the Epigaphical Society of India, 2023
From as early as the Mehrgarh days (c. 7000 BCE) in ancient Indian subcontinent it appears that people have chosen certain geographical spaces like Harappa, Mathura etc and made, used and modified several things from beads to temples for living through times. Thus they have developed their living conditions by getting over the impediments in their real life situations through the ages. In this context people have historically followed jātidharma (the duties of a caste), deśadharma (conventions and customs of a country) etc. In this connection we find the inscriptions of early Bengal to have been discussed for understanding the social, economic, political and cultural including religious activities of the people of the region. Their religious beliefs and activities are usually focused on scriptures and doctrines. But historically it appears that religious practices are hardly possible without resorting to material artefacts. These physical objects also serve as texts like the written ones and their inter-textual study provides meaningful messages about past human activities. This holds good also for the people of early Bengal. They have made (emphasis added) divine images, decorated them, worshipped them, and built up temples for them and practiced their religious beliefs materially. Therefore the present paper is attempted to materially understand their religious practices by inter-textually studying the inscriptions of early Bengal up to 1300 CE.