Stockage des manuscrits

Palm-leaf manuscripts kept in South India can perish extremely rapidly. Unattended, they quickly become the homes and feeding material of various types of insect larvae. Once they have become perforated with holes by the larvae, they become so fragile that they are damaged each time they are handled. Typically they break into pieces along fault-lines, usually near the holes through which their binding strings pass, and the margins crumble away, taking with them fragments of writing. A specialist cleaner is employed who continuously takes out manuscripts, gently brushes them free of insects and their detritus, and applies lemon-grass oil (citronella). This repels insects and renders the leaves more supple. But such treatment only delays the decay for a while.

South Indian palm-leaves used for writing are of two types, a thin papery leaf (Talipot) that can, in optimal conditions (e.g. Nepal), be preserved for centuries, and a thicker, stiffer, usually smaller leaf (Palmyra) that is not found in the North and of which we are aware of no surviving examples older than 3 centuries. The greater part of the Pondicherry collection is of the latter type of leaf. The writing is incised in the leaves, rather than written upon them with a pen. A few hundred manuscripts are in exceptionally good condition, a few hundred are in exceptionally bad condition and the vast majority are somewhere in between.

As for the paper manuscripts (transcripts) of the collection, these are equally threatened. They have tended to be much more regularly consulted, being much easier to read, and the most used are now very fragile.

All the IFP’s manuscripts are now stored in a darkened air-conditioned space : the “Jean Filliozat Conservation Room”. Our current plan to digitise the collection with the help of, among others, the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute, is aimed at preserving at least the message, if not the manuscripts themselves, for future generations.