The fragile richness of manuscripts collections in Kerala
(2007) Production, Distribution and Collection of Sanskrit Manuscripts in Ancient South India — Location: IIAS, University of Leiden (20.April.2007)
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- The Hindu on Monday, March 27, 2006, recorded an official release from Kerala according to which “Several ancient manuscripts, some of them dating back about 1,000 years, have been traced [during a manuscripts survey launched by the State Archives Department in collaboration with the National Manuscripts Mission] from different old ‘Manas’ and ‘Illams’ in various parts of the district [of Trichur, central Kerala]”. If such a high dating for palm-leaf manuscripts needs to be confirmed, much less surprizing is the fact that untraced old manuscripts can still be found in Kerala. In Pre-Modern Kerala, both kings and brahmins used to own manuscripts (in Sanskrit or vernacular), which thus were kept and copied in palace libraries, in brahmin colleges (maÒha) and other colleges of learning, or in brahmin family-houses (mana). After the first lists published by Gustav Oppert (1880), scholars started to systematically collect these manuscripts in the beginning of the twentieth century. In the Travancore State, the Department for the publication of oriental manuscripts was established in 1908, popularly known as the Curator’s Office, with the famous pandit T. Ganapati Sastri at its head. The Curator’s Office Library formed the bulk of the present University collection settled in the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library (in Kariyavattom), to which was also transferred the important collection of the Travancore Palace Library, for reaching an amount of more than 20,000 Sanskrit manuscripts. Smaller valuable collections of manuscripts were also constituted in younger university libraries (Calicut, Kalady), Sanskrit colleges (Trippunittura — of royal origin; Pattambi — of Nambudiri brahmin origin; etc.), Ayurvedic colleges (Trivandrum, Kottakkal), and various other institutes such as the Kerala Kalamandalam and the Sahitiya Academy in Trichur (where the mss. are mostly in Malayalam language) or the Sukrtendra Oriental Research Institute in Cochin. Most of these manuscripts, more or less correctly preserved, are already catalogued or in course of being catalogued (even if the catalogues are not all published). The situation is, however, much critical in the case of the collections of manuscripts belonged either to the traditional maṭha or to individual brahmin or noble families. In the few maṭhas still alive the manuscripts are usually in a very bad state of preservation. As for the little private (mana and rāja) collections, it must be noted that most of the ones listed during the fifties for the New Catalogus Catalogorum Project in Madras do not longer exist (some have been included in larger institutional collections, some have simply disappeared); on the other hand, supplementary Nambudiri collections have been discovered, listed and photographied in the last thirty years, sometime by Western scholars and now through the Indian National Mission for Manuscripts. The next stage should be, following the pioneering manuscriptological work of K.V. Sarma (1993), a deeper study of the palaeography, colophons, special marks etc. of the whole of the manuscripts in Malayalam script (kept in and outside Kerala), in order to better identify the original owners, scribes, dates and places of copying, and draw a historical map of manuscripts in ancient Kerala. [The paper was published in its original state as the vol. 4 of the "S.B.I.O. E-Library" once available online on the late blog "Belgian Indology"]
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Vielle, C. (2007). The fragile richness of manuscripts collections in Kerala. Production, Distribution and Collection of Sanskrit Manuscripts in Ancient South India, IIAS, University of Leiden. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/28835