In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the repatriation of 15 illegally acquired sculptures. While there was much celebration of the return of the antiquities, there were hushed conversations on “cooperation in manuscripts” between the governments in London and Delhi.
India’s international trace of manuscripts has been a less glamorous, if not entirely neglected, dimension of the discourse on colonial loot and repatriation. There are both domestic and international complexities involved in identifying, tracing and restituting manuscripts, especially in a country as linguistically diverse as India.
While the issue of the repatriation of manuscripts is entangled in international diplomacy, domestic policies have continued framing manuscripts in terms of Sanskritic literacy and expertise that defy the distinctive history of manuscript traditions in India.
Contrary to what most people believe, Indian manuscript diversity did not rely only on the privileged and the educated for the propagation of various scribal practices. Recent research has shown that even as religious and state institutions heavily mandated scribal constituencies, a robust and eclectic secular scribal heritage emerged in the subcontinent.
It is only with the advent of an Indological view of manuscripts that a specific form of religious literacy came to be privileged and manuscripts came to be identified as rarefied representatives.
This ‘orientalisation’ of Indian manuscripts paralleled the colonial rule in India, but also exceeds it in the fact that the current approach to manuscripts by the Indian government remains driven by an assortment of Indological perspectives that privilege Sanskrit and Brahmanical texts over myriad traditions and functions of manuscripts in the country.
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More than 70% of manuscripts under the National Mission for Manuscripts are in Sanskrit. While the Sanskrit Indological manuscript tradition merits a separate treatment, the Manuscript Mission requires to also go beyond the oriental mindset and include a plethora of manuscripts that do not follow the Indological focus on Brahmanical antiquity.
In this regard, it is salutary to consider examples from our own history where people went beyond the state mandate and identified and constructed a manuscript heritage that was reflective of a dynamic and inclusive perspective of manuscripts.
Most people are familiar with the phenomenal contributions of Rahul Sankrityayan in restituting the connections between Tibetan and Bihari Buddhist philosophies. Sankrityayan, who visited one of the most remote monasteries in Tibet (called Sakya), recovered Buddhist philosophers such as Dharmakirti and Prajnakaragupta. Sankrityayan wrote copiously but also relatively about these manuscripts, highlighting the gaps in documents and their potential connections with other sources.
The Sakya monastery in Tibet. Photo: Antoine Taveneaux/Wikimedia Commons. GNU Free Documentation License.
Raghavan Pillai, the archivist of several tantric, astrological and mathematical treatises, was known to have traced and established a secular manuscript collection in the Oriental Library in Thiruvananthapuram. Locally, the efforts of Punyavijayji Maharaj in collecting manuscripts from Jain bhandaras across Rajasthan and Gujarat are now well-documented.
Indian manuscript heritage possesses a distinctive confluence of religious and state patronage, as well as mercantile and military scribal practices, leading to the emergence of a diverse scriptural ecology.
For example, traveling Buddhist monks and mendicants wrote in the prevalent local scripts they encountered in their journeys. In fact, the Lalit Vistar Sutra, Mahayana Buddhism’s key text composed in about the third century AD, stresses the importance of learning 64 scripts along with arithmetic, chemistry, philosophy and statistics.
What is interesting to note is that the text emphasises learning multiple scripts as the basis of “real” education, “lokanuvartan”, that is education in people’s conduct.
In more recent history, the role of the Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society, the Baptist Mission and the British and Foreign Bible Society in publishing various religious texts in the Kaithi script is well-known. The recent assembling of the central Asian corpus of a fragmented Koran in the Bihari script, dating from the Sultanate period in India (13th to 16th centuries), also attests to the fluid script economy of pre-modern India.
Secular manuscript heritage was equally sustained by military and mercantile establishments. Sher Shah Suri’s sanad, dated December 15, 1640, chronicles the use of Kaithi for grant of passage to merchants and bankers. The Field Exercise of the British Army (1846) was proposed to be written in the Kaithi script. Bal Dipak (1886), a new Hindi series by Sahib Prasad Sinha and introduced by Frederic Pincott, promoted Kaithi script-learning amongst new cadres of the Bihar Regiment.
A manuscript written using Kaithi. Photo: Rajendra Prasad Pandey/Scribd. CC BY-NC.
Langdi Hindi, a form of script used exclusively for bookkeeping in Haryana and the regions surrounding it remains completely undocumented. Mahajani was promoted by the colonial military and was widely used to record day-to-day transactions in various parts of western and northern India.
A number of scientific and poetic treatises from both Sanskritic and Persian traditions were written in Braj using the Gurumukhi script in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Punjab.
While the presence of multiple scripts reflects India’s dynamic manuscript past, India’s manuscript policies have underserved this bountiful heritage. It is critical to identify a home for documents that do not follow the manuscript canons as devised by orientalist assumptions of antiquity, historical eminence and scriptural consistency.
Additionally, there is also the need to identify manuscripts as an assemblage of a variety of technologies and material relationships that requires one to go beyond the content-centric view of manuscripts. This could only be achieved if regional manuscript centres are also strengthened to promote local histories of scribal practices and preservation.
Thus, it is equally important to acknowledge the role of various communities in the preservation and promotion of manuscripts. In this regard, the contributions of different castes of Andhra Pradesh in maintaining manuscripts needs special mention. As documented by historians of the region, hakku patras, the patronage documents maintained by various “mendicant communities”, were critical sources of understanding the caste dynamics of the region.
Odia pothis of Laxmipurana, Brij Bihar and Sri Ramalilamruta have been copied and maintained by various non-savarna castes such as barbers, potters and washermen. Ramchandra Vihara, a manuscript from early modern Odisha, was transcribed by a Muslim, Naseeb Khan.
However, another important contribution of different castes to the scribal ecology of India was in developing writing instruments made of ivory, bone or reed, as well as developing various kinds of preservation processes using chemical and fumigation techniques, specialised inks and clothes. The preparation of traditional dummala oil and neem wood special cupboards used in southern India are some of the methods of palm-leaf conservation practices that involved various communities.
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Recent manuscript and archival collections across many parts of the world acknowledge the communitarian contexts of manuscripts. The mobilisation of local communities in the preservation of Timbuktu manuscripts is widely recognised. Similarly, Nepal’s community manuscript project, Asa Archives, could also serve as an interesting model for creating a more capacious and accessible manuscript collection.
If these complex heritage practices need attention, it would also assist the cause of manuscript curation in India to substantiate the international context of the production of various manuscript collections. DREAMSEA, a collaboration between Indonesia, Thailand and Laos, has made available a number of endangered repositories that recount the fascinating international provenance of various manuscripts from the region, including some from India.
Specialised manuscript collections containing rare, banned books reproduced in Syriac, Malayalam, and Malayalam Garshuni by Christian priests in early modern India would benefit immensely from international contextualisation.
Similarly, research conducted by Russian Indologists, such as K.G. Maximov’s study of Buddhist heritage in southern Turkmenistan and Ajanta and Ellora sculptures, require international scholarly collaboration.
The recently held Festival of Libraries concluded with a memorandum of understanding between three prominent libraries in India for rare manuscript sharing and digitisation. While this is a step ahead, the need for today’s research is not just digital reproduction of manuscripts, but providing nuanced, localised metadata for them. More importantly, there is also the need to reconfigure the ‘rarity’ of manuscripts beyond specific scripts and their institutional associations.
An inclusive and dynamic vision of manuscripts necessitates the promotion of India’s scriptural diversity, identifying distinctive timelines for different scripts as well as acknowledging the non-religious and demotic character of literature and literacy in India. The fluid scriptural economy also calls to attention the various functions of writing and recording in India. It is important that our contemporary manuscript vision reflects this historical diversity.
Anubha Anushree is a historian and teaches at Rajdhani College, University of Delhi.