Cataloguing and Preservation of Manuscripts

Summary

Within a collection of 11 000 manuscripts that concern mainly the religion and worship of the Hindu God Siva, is included the largest collection in the world of manuscripts of texts of the Saiva Siddhanta. In the 10th century CE, this religious tradition, a major current of Hinduism, was spread right across the Indian subcontinent and beyond, as far as Cambodia in the East. It long represented the mainstream of Tantric doctrine and worship and appears to have influenced every Indian theistic tradition. Its surviving texts, the majority of them unpublished, range from the 6th century CE to the colonial period. This unique collection thus furnishes much of the dwindling evidence remaining today for scholars to reconstruct a chapter in the religious annals of humanity. The collection is presently housed in the French institutions of research in Pondicherry.

Objectives

Although some volumes of a descriptive catalogue have been published, and although we have a complete hand-list that records the titles of the works identified in all the manuscripts of the collection, many of the texts have not yet been identified. Our ultimate objective: to put the whole collection online in the form of a descriptive catalogue with hyperlinks to images of the leaves of the manuscripts. This would make it available to scholars throughout the world.

In collaboration with the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute and the EFEO, we have now taken a first large step towards achieving this goal, for all our 1144 transcripts have now been digitised and are accessible through our catalogue and on-line digital library of the paper manuscripts of the IFP.

Materials and Methods

Describing the manuscripts is a long process. A single palm-leaf bundle may contain dozens of texts, all engraved with tiny letters in scriptio continua (without word-breaks), and typically without space between the texts and without rubrication of titles or chapter-colophons. Cataloguing therefore requires careful reading by someone conversant both with a wide range of Sanskrit literature and with the scripts used (most of our manuscripts are written in Grantha, the script employed for writing Sanskrit in the Tamil-speaking South).

As for obtaining digital images of the manuscript leaves, we began at first with a flat-bed scanner using a resolution of 300dpi, but we have abandoned this because the process has proved too time-consuming. With the assistance of the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute, we have begun in 2005 to use digital photography instead.

Manuscripts outside Pondicherry

The National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) has also selected the IFP as one of its Manuscripts Resource Centres. These Centres have the task of surveying and cataloguing manuscripts in unknown collections in the regions surrounding them. Thus the IFP, in addition to maintaining its own manuscripts, is currently also surveying and cataloguing institutional and private collections around Pondicherry and in a few coastal districts of Tamilnadu.

Partners

• Pondicherry Centre of the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)
• National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM), Department of Culture, Government of India, launched by the Indian Prime Minister in February 2003.
• Muktabodha Indological Research Institute (MIRI)

Fundings

The IFP, EFEO and MIRI each fund their own activities in this project. We hope soon to receive a subvention from UNESCO in consequence of their recognition of our manuscripts as a UNESCO “Memory of the World Collection”.

Team

• Dominic GOODALL (EFEO), Head of the Project

• Deviprasad MISHRA (IFP), Cataloguing and data-entry

• T. GANESAN (IFP), Cataloguing
• S. SAMBANDHAN (IFP), Cataloguing
• Anil Kumar ACHARYA (IFP), Cataloguing and data-entry.
• R. SATHYANARAYANAN (EFEO), Cataloguing
• Nibedita ROUT (EFEO), Cataloguing

Main Outputs

Publications and/or CD ROMS

Four volumes of a descriptive catalogue have so far been published (1986, 1987, 1990 and 2002). These volumes contain descriptions of the 4000 texts transmitted in 475 of the IFP’s 8600 palm-leaf bundles.

A brief hand-list of titles that covers all the IFP’s 8600 palm-leaf bundles is available for consultation.

As a by-product of our cataloguing activities, we have been producing Sanskrit electronic texts of a number of Shaiva works, some of which may be downloaded from this site.

Cataloguing still continues and data about all the manuscripts is being entered into an electronic database, integrated with images of the manuscripts. A sample has been released on CD (“Parampara”) and the first complete section of the catalogue, covering the 1144 paper transcripts, is to be published on the internet in 2006, with the help of the MIRI.

• Paraṃparā. A digital archive to the manuscripts in the French Institute of Pondicherry

F. Grimal, D. Goodall, N. Dejenne & R. Datta, IFP/EFEO/AMM Foundation, 2002 [Demonstration CD-ROM/CD-ROM de démonstration]. (PDI nº 90)
Language: English and Sanskrit. 300 Rs (11 €)

The collection of manuscripts at the French Institute of Pondicherry comprising 8500 bundles of manuscripts on palm-leaf and 1144 bundles of transcripts of manuscripts on paper, constitute the most important collection of manuscripts in the world on the Śaiva-siddhānta school of thought, the āgamas; the texts are in Sanskrit (most of them in Grantha script) and Tamil. The demonstration CD-ROM, Paramparā, which represents both the work of digitization and descriptive cataloguing of the collection undertaken at the IFP, contains images of a selection of 66 texts accompanied by their catalogue description. The user can view on screen all the leaves and pages of these texts (around 1600 images) as well as search the data base through a search engine.

Keywords: manuscripts, āgama, Śaivasiddhanta, Sanskrit, grantha, cataloguing