Histoire de la collection

The manuscript collection of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) was started in 1955 at the instigation of its founder-director, the polymath Jean Filliozat, who was at the time also overall director of the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient. His starting point was the desire to explain the Hindu temple and what happens in it. He therefore initiated a project to collect together all the materials bearing on the Saiva religious tradition in the South of India, of which the dominant school is the Saiva Siddhanta. The first reference to the existence of this school in the Tamil-speaking South of India is an allusion to the Saiva initiation in the 7^th century of a king of the Pallava dynasty to be found in an inscription in the famous Kailasanatha temple in Kancheepuram (Tamil Nadu). The agamas, the scriptures of the Saiva Siddhanta, were in the 1950s neglected and virtually unknown to most scholars of Sanskrit in India as well as in the West. The efforts of the French institutions of research in Pondicherry have brought them to the attention of the scholarly world and seen many of them published.

The palm-leaf manuscripts were gathered from the private collections of temples, priests and monasteries across South India. The principal collector was Pandit N.R. Bhatt, a scholar of the EFEO who has since become famous for his editions of Saiva texts published in the IFP series in Pondicherry. He regularly toured the Tamil country for years, always searching in particular for Saiva manuscripts, but often bringing back entire collections that included also a great variety of other texts, which explains why the library now contains so much besides Saiva material.

Owners were prepared to part with their manuscripts because they knew that the IFP was attempting to edit and publish for the first time the corpus of scriptures of the Saiva Siddhanta. But when the palm-leaf manuscripts themselves could not be obtained, modern copies in Devanagari script – the script in which Sanskrit is commonly printed today – were commissioned, and this explains the large number (1144) of post-1950 paper transcripts in the collections.

Most of the IFP’s codices are written in Grantha script, the script used by Tamilian Brahmins for writing Sanskrit ; others are in Malayalam, Telugu, Nandinagari, Oriya and Tulu scripts.