Sanskrit Annotated Manuscripts from Northern India and Nepal (original) (raw)
Related papers
For an Indian Philology of Margins: The Case of Kashmirian Sanskrit Manuscripts
The margins of Indian manuscripts have attracted very little scholarly attention to date. The present paper is aimed at showing, through the example of Kashmirian Sanskrit manuscripts, that Classical Indology has much to gain by studying marginal annotations, first and foremost because the latter often include substantial quotations of texts that are no longer extant, so that they constitute a unique source enabling us to retrieve significant parts of lost works. These marginalia also provide us with an opportunity to understand how certain texts came to be marginalized in the course of time despite their innovative character and the intense exegetic or critical reaction that they might have initially triggered; and they may afford us some rare glimpses into the practical aspects of intellectual life – particularly learning and teaching habits – in medieval India. Published in Silvia D’Intino and Sheldon Pollock (eds.), L’espace du sens: Approches de la philologie indienne. The Space of Meaning: Approaches to Indian Philology, with the collaboration of Michaël Meyer, Paris: De Boccard, Publications de l’Institut de Civilisation Indienne du Collège de France 84, 2018, pp. 305-354.
Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages, 2017
Despite the recognised centrality of grammar in South Asian intellectual history, much of the existing scholarship on the history of the various grammatical traditions consists of lists of names, works and relative, approximate chronologies. Little is known of how their fortunes related to the socio-political changes that affected a given region in the course of time, and even less about the social history of grammar. This article is an attempt at reconstructing the history of the three main schools of Sanskrit grammar-Pāṇinīya, Cāndra and Kātantra-in medieval Nepal through the survey of the grammatical works listed in the catalogues of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) and the small but important Cambridge collections. The study of the colophons (where available), as well as the assessment of other indicators of age and provenance such as the material (palm leaf/paper) and the script, can throw light on the social and cultural conditions that made the various systems flourish or decline at different times. 1 Here I will mostly rely on the Descriptive Catalogue (wiki) of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (http://134.100.29.17/wiki/Main\_Page) and the Sanskrit Manuscripts catalogue in the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/sanskrit).
“Scribbling in Newar on the Margins of a Sanskrit Manuscript (Add.2832, University Library, Cambridge)”, in M. Ni Mhaonaigh and M. J. Clarke (eds.), Medieval Multilingual Manuscripts. Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 24. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 199-208., 2022
This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provides an example of the interaction between Sanskrit as a learned, universalising language and the regional vernaculars spoken by those who embraced and disseminated Sanskrit literary culture throughout the South Asian world.
2018
Toyo Bunko has some Nepalese Sanskrit manuscripts in its vast possession of classical works written in various pre-modern languages. KANEKO, MATSUNAMI and SAITO [1979] serves as the comprehensive catalogue of this collection of priceless heritage of Nepal which was brought to Japan by Ven. Ekai Kawaguchi. This catalogue gives us titles of contents along with other bibliographical descriptions for almost all possessions in the collection, while 6 fragmentary manuscripts remained un-identified in it. KANO [2009] and HORI [2012] have served supplemental works respectively, thus, for now, only three manuscripts are to be identified yet(1). Those remaining fragments are so small without a bibliographical part like colophon that mere philologists would not even hit upon titles in them. It, however, would be provable that a expert / practitioner of Nepalese religious literature, who are familiar with various works that are used in daily ritual they perform of participate in, can come acros...
This volume is the outcome of the conference “Studying Documents in Premodern South Asia and Beyond: Problems and Perspective”, held in October 2015 in Heidelberg. In bringing together experts from different fields—including Indology, Tibetology, History, Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Digital Humanties—it aims at exploring and rethinking issues of diplomatics and typology, the place of documents in relation to other texts and literary genres, methods of archiving and editing documents, as well as their “social life”, i.e. the role they play in social, religious and political constellations, the agents and practices of their use, and the norms and institutions they embody and constitute. The book is the first volume of the Documenta Nepalica – Book Series, published by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in collaboration with the National Archives, Nepal.
The Syntax of Colophons: A Comparative Study across Pothi Manuscripts, 2022
The present study examines colophons in fourteenth-century Nepalese manuscripts. More precisely, it focuses on manuscripts written between 1320 and 1395 CE as part of an ongoing research about the cultural history of Nepal in this pivotal century, particularly its second half. The first part of the article is devoted to a discussion of the Sanskrit terminology for colophon and an explanation of how to distinguish colophons from other paratextual material in manuscripts. The second part provides general remarks on the syntax of Nepalese colophons including a detailed analysis of sixteen elements occurring in the colophons. The third part consists of diplomatic editions of colophons from the corpus considered for this study. The article concludes with short preliminary conclusions based on the material examined.