The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University of Cambridge.

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In a world that seems increasingly small, every artefact documenting the history of ancient civilisations has become part of a global heritage that needs to be carefully preserved and studied. Among such artefacts, manuscripts occupy a distinctive place in as much as they speak to us with the actual words of long-gone men and women, bringing back their beliefs, ideas and sensibilities to immediate life. In this respect, the collections of South Asian manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library are a precious resource, but so far they are little known even to specialists. They comprise almost 2000 documents composed in several South Asian languages, written in various scripts and on different supports, such as birch-bark, palm-leaf and paper. More than half of these are in Sanskrit, the language that dominated the written culture of pre-modern South Asia for almost two millennia. A small portion of them were catalogued in the 19th century, but the collections were enriched by new acquisitions until the 1990s. The collections include works of great rarity, some of them lavishly decorated, from different parts of the subcontinent, in different genres and on a host of subjects, from religion and philosophy to astronomy, grammar, law and poetry, the majority of which are as yet unpublished. Among its treasures are some of the oldest extant manuscripts from South Asia: two Nepali exemplars dating from the end of the first millennium C.E - exceptionally, in a region whose unfavourable climate does not generally allow their survival for more than a few centuries. The Project will carry out an exhaustive survey of the library holdings, putting together all the basic information for each item in keeping with internationally recognised standards for the cataloguing of ancient and medieval manuscript sources. This process will gather data on the physical characteristics of the manuscripts, identify untitled works, either through their colophons or the study of their content, attempt to date them on the basis of their palaeographic and material features and situate them in their broader historical context. By combining traditional philological methods with advanced information technology, the Project will make these extraordinary documents available in various formats to the scholarly community of South-Asianists as well as to the general public. All the findings obtained from the survey of the manuscripts will be collected in an extensive digital archive that will be searchable online. This will be a powerful tool for further investigation into the history of South Asian intellectual traditions, religious cults, literary cultures and political ideas and groupings. Catalogue records will be drawn from the Project database and made available to the Cambridge University Library for incorporation into their online catalogues. Digital photographs will be taken of a substantial number of items in the Library's collections and linked to the catalogue records. In parallel to the survey and cataloguing, the Project researchers will investigate this wealth of material through a collaborative effort with fellow Sanskritists in the U.K. and abroad, demonstrating the importance of these primary manuscript sources for the history of pre-colonial South Asia. The results of their research will be presented in the course of two international conferences organised in the second and third year of the Project, focusing on Tantrism and Buddhism respectively, two religious traditions that have played a key role in South Asian - and generally Asian - civilisations and are richly documented in the Library's collections. The findings will also be disseminated through papers in academic journals and other publications. After the completion of the Project, smaller-scale projects are envisaged to achieve the eventual cataloguing of all South Asian manuscripts in languages other than Sanskrit and the digitisation of the whole collection.