Abstract
Sanskrit philologists are not usually thought of these days as intrepid, but in their search for manuscript collections more than a century ago they were required to brave arsenic, plague, and worst of all, corrosive, insuperable suspicion. The essay that follows is about how that came to be so; it is also about science, broadly defined; about texts and their study as an inalienable part of science and its history; and about gaining access to collections as a strenuous sport.
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Notes
- 1.
In making this statement I leave aside the output of intellectual communities which were based in South Asia but which communicated their arts and sciences in Arabic and Persian. Those learned communities, it has usually been asserted, participated in a different cosmopolitan universe of discourse, which was spread across Europe, Asia and Africa. The story of their contact with, and mutual appraisal of, the Sanskritic learned disciplines remains largely un-written, but see for the astronomical materials (Pingree 1978), and (Pingree 1996, 474–75). I can do no more here than note the limitation of the claim I have made in the body of the text, which is tantamount to identifying the Indic with Sanskritic. This limitation is the legacy of a really determined academic organizational decisions of the past. It awaits an energetic reconsideration.
- 2.
See (Pollock 2001). See also the materials developed by the research project he directs, at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/
- 3.
This constitutive Indological decision was a choice. The alternative would have been to continue to ground truth claims in the authority of statements made by the living exponents of the Sanskrit learned disciplines, as earlier European visitors had done. On this point see Dhruv Raina’s essay in this volume.
- 4.
Most of the reports are listed in (Janert 1965). See also (Gough 1878).
- 5.
See (Peterson 1895).
- 6.
(Bühler 1868, 315–25). This tour was commissioned by the Bombay Presidency before the central Government decision to institute the searches. The towns that Bühler mentions are (in his spelling), Puna, Sattara, Kelgaum, Ashte, Kolhapur, Sângli, Nipâni, Sankeshwar, Yamkhandmardi, Belgaum, Dharwar, Nargund, Navalgund, and Hubalî. Note that the “Marâtha country” of the Bombay Presidency extended well into the modern Indian state of Karnataka.
- 7.
(Bühler 1868, 315).
- 8.
(Bühler 1868, 316).
- 9.
ibid.
- 10.
ibid.
- 11.
ibid.
- 12.
See (Bhandarkar R. 1882, 3).
- 13.
The age of the manuscripts mentioned might not seem terribly old, but it must be remembered that the climate and the insect population of India did not and do not conduce to the long term survival of manuscripts that are made of the very biodegradable materials on which manuscripts were copied, i.e. home-made or “country paper,” palm leaves, or birch bark. Ideally a manuscript should be recopied after a century of use. The implications of these material facts in the present for the impending loss of a vast cultural heritage, given the cessation of manuscript copying traditions by the end of the nineteenth century, are dire.
- 14.
(Bühler 1868, 315). This complaint comes as the very third sentence of the report.
- 15.
Bühler noted, slightly ghoulishly, the advantages that were created by the plague: “Again a great number of Brahminical families have been reduced to extreme distress by the high prices for the necessaries of life which prevailed for more than two years, and by the inability of their Yajamâns, or spiritual clients, to give them the customary support. These special circumstances, regrettable as they are in other respects, have enabled me to collect this year in 9 months more Brahminical manuscripts than I have ever obtained before in Gujarât, and to obtain them at a cheaper rate than usually” (Bühler 1880, 3). The effects of the plague epidemics are noted by R.G. and S.R. Bhandarkar as well.
- 16.
“From Bábu Rájendralála Mitra, to Captain J. Waterhouse, B.S.C., Secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, – No. 47, dated Calcutta, the15th February 1875.” Cited in (Gough 1878, 25).
- 17.
(Bühler 1871, 2–3).
- 18.
(ibid., 2).
- 19.
(Bhandarkar S. 1905, 2).
- 20.
R.T.H. Griffiths, cited in (Gough 1878, 40).
- 21.
“Minute by Major-General the Hon’ble Sir H.M. Durand, C.B. K.C.S.I—dated Simla, the 13th August 1868,” cited in “Gough 1878, 7”. Durand ends the Minute however by holding out a governmental hope that the project may result in “many now uncontemplated practical uses and modes of effective leverage on the manifold masses and phases of the Hindu mind” (Gough 1878, 8).
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
See the essays of participants listed in the bibliography of the research project on the Sanskrit Knowledge Systems available at the website listed under note 2.
- 25.
This paper was smeared with an arsenic-laden preparation in order to discourage the depredations of insects.
- 26.
- 27.
I shall refrain from comment here about the irony in the current experience of researchers in Sanskrit studies who find that the government collections created by the efforts of these frustrated searchers are sometimes now themselves protected with the same jealousy by their custodians.
- 28.
(Bhandarkar S. 1905, 3–4).
- 29.
(Peterson 1895, 2). Peterson further remarks that the owners or custodians of many of the dozen or so ancient “bhandars had, in anticipation of [R.G. Bhandarkar’s] visit, removed their persons or their books from Patan” (ibid., 3).
- 30.
- 31.
It should be noted that European and American institutional collections of Sanskrit sources took their shape during this same period in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often supplied by the same collectors who were doing the work for the British government in India.
- 32.
The famous exception is the list of the collection of the prominent seventeenth-century Banaras-based figure Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī, edited in (Sastri 1921). About this list see (Gode 1943–1944). Items that belonged to Kavīndra ended up in Anūpa’s library. See below.
- 33.
S.R. Bhandarkar records the widow of the owner of one collection reporting that the grandmother of the ruler of Indore had about a hundred manuscripts from her husband’s collection removed at the time of his death (Bhandarkar S. 1905, 4). He also reports that many manuscripts “which consist of loose leaves are sold, as so much waste paper, to grocers and sweetmeat sellers, and the leaves part to meet no more” (Ibid., 17). The looting of a royal library in Jammu for the sake of the silk covers is recounted in (Kunte 1881, 3). The collection had belonged to Ranjit Deva, ruler of Jammu (or Jambu in Kunte’s spelling). The sack of the city had been carried out by Maha Singh, father of Ranjit Singh the last independent ruler of the Punjab, in 1781.
- 34.
“In going over the collections in this place and elsewhere it was a weariness over and over again to come across the same works on modern Nyāya and Grammar and on Astrology and Mantra, which are not of much importance in the eyes of a scholar” (Bhandarkar S. 1905, 4). Numerous comments along the same lines appear in the other reports, if not so petulantly expressed.
- 35.
The following provides only an initial, provisional picture, as complete and descriptive catalogues of the two family collections are not yet available.
- 36.
What Katz discovered about the collection is preserved in a file in the office of the Indian Institute Librarian in the Bodleian Library. My thanks to Gillian Evison for granting me access to this material.
- 37.
In the late 1980s Katz spent some time reconstructing the story told above. He attempted to trace Mrs. Weisz, her intermediaries, or any of their descendants. The surviving Weisz family members by then lived in the US or Israel, or South America, and were eventually remunerated by the Bodleian for the value of the collection at the prevailing rates, after appraisal by the antiquarian bookseller Bernard Quaritsch.
- 38.
The estimate in 1987 by the appraiser was roughly 1500 items.
- 39.
There are some manuscripts from further away places such as Ahmednagar (Vyāsa 132) and Jodhpur (Vyāsa 29).
- 40.
Thus roughly 880 of 1300 items in the collection are directly related to the family occupation as astronomers/astrologers.
- 41.
But see below, under the Anūpa collection.
- 42.
See for example Vyāsa 13, which gives Gaṇeśa’s Tithicintāmaṇi in Sanskrit, and the commentary in Gujarati, or Vyāsa 54 (dated 1781) which gives examples and tables for the Sanskrit Tithikalpadruma in Gujarati.
- 43.
For example Vyāsa 115 which belonged to Ācārya Prabhurāma and then Ācārya Ruganātha.
- 44.
My thanks to V.L. Manjul for generously providing me with a copy of the handlist.
- 45.
To a lesser extent tantric or hermetic practices were also spreading in popularity in the period.
- 46.
Toro MS 79, copied in 1692 Śaka or ca. 1770 C.E. includes reference to Shahji, Serphoji, Tukkoji, and other Maratha rulers.
- 47.
Rudradeva Toro’s work entitled the Pratāpanārasiṃha was evidently dedicated to a ruler called Pratāpa Nṛsiṃha. None of the kings of Kolhāpur in Rudradeva’s period bore this name, however. See below under the Anūpa collection for further examples of this practice of naming texts after the patron.
- 48.
My thanks to Frederick M. Smith for confirmation of this information by personal communication.
- 49.
Here the numbers are only minimal; most prayoga texts in the handlist do not have their caraṇa identified. Many of the manuscripts that had belonged to Jagannātha Dīkṣita Bāpaṭ were ritual texts of the Hiraṇyakeśī school.
- 50.
See (Caland 1908, sections 180 and 183).
- 51.
(Mitra 1880) (Raja, Sarma, and Madhava 1944–1948). The latter catalogue covers 6682 manuscripts, roughly two thirds of the collection.
- 52.
(Pingree 1997). Pingree based his work on the catalogues, and analyzed the colophons of the manuscripts in the collection, which among other things indicate when manuscripts were copied, who was commissioned to copy them and by whom. His study is an example of the sort of history it is possible to reconstruct based on a properly detailed catalogue of a collection. I have supplemented his narrative from my own notes in what follows. Like him I will concentrate on jyotiṣa and dharmaśāstra.
- 53.
Maṇirāma probably visited Bikaner at times. In any case a good part of his own library ended up in the Bikaner collection, as did parts of the library of Kavīndrācārya Sarasvati, mentioned above.
- 54.
(Pingree 1997, 95).
- 55.
For details of these families, including that of Jñānarāja of Pārthapura, of Rāma of Golagrāma, see (ibid., 95–99).
- 56.
It should be noted that the numbers represented are of collections as a whole. Not every manuscript counted can be proved to have belonged to Anūpa.
- 57.
Anūpa 2567 was given to Anūpasiṃha in 1677 C.E. by the author’s son.
- 58.
I give only single examples; there is a very long list of works and authors of dharmaśāstra that were contemporary with Anūpa’s and represented in the collection.
- 59.
- 60.
There is also a Pañcāṅgabhūṣaṇa, a work on pañcāṅgas (Anūpa 4822); a work on catarchic astrology called the Muhūrtasañjīvana (Anūpa 4978); and a work on eclipses, the Grahaṇasādhana (Anūpa 4528) (Pingree 1997, 96).
- 61.
It is worth mentioning here a lengthy work on dream divination, the Anūpakautukārṇava, that Rāmabhaṭṭa wrote. The manuscript is 1558 in the catalogue of 1880, and is 423 pages long.
- 62.
(Pingree 1997, 100). This was a diamond rich area south of the Tuṅgabhadrā river in what is now Andhra Pradesh.
- 63.
There is a copy of the Anūpavilāsa in the Vyas / Weisz collection (Vyāsa 143). In the Anūpa collection there was also Maṇirāma’s lengthy work on catarchic astrology, the Anūpavyavahārasāgara (Anūpa 4426). Anūpa was the patron of other authors in Banaras for more specific treatises as well. For example he requested Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara to compose a commentary explaining in more comprehensible terms the chapters of a tantric treatise, the Śivatāṇḍavatantra, that described the uses of magic squares of orders three and four. See (Minkowski 2008). In turn, Maṇirāma, who produced many summaries and commentaries for Anūpa, wrote a synopsis of Nīlakaṇṭha’s work on magic squares, as well as of his commentary on the Mahābhārata. Indulging his interest in large numbers, Anūpa also commissioned a Bhadrarāma Homigopa to compose a ritual manual for a rite in which one could make ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or ten million offerings into the ritual fire, the Ayutalakṣakoṭihomaprayoga, No. 788 in the 1880 catalogue.
- 64.
For example, manuscripts of the Anūparatnāvalī, which is probably the same thing as, or an excerpted version of, the Anūparatnākara mentioned above, list Anūpa as the author (Anūpa 2315–17).
- 65.
(Pingree 1997, 95).
- 66.
One might mention here Anūpa’s attachment to the performing arts, especially singing. He had a saṃgītarāya, chief musician, at court, and collected avidly in this subject as well.
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Minkowski, C. (2010). Sanskrit Scientific Libraries and Their Uses: Examples and Problems of the Early Modern Period. In: Bretelle-Establet, F. (eds) Looking at it from Asia: the Processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 265. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3676-6_3
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