Scholars have long sought to classify people and things based on their geographic origin. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun insisted that climate shapes both the appearance and temperament of different human races; Vātsyāyana imagined an entire geography of desire in his Kāmasūtra. Space, as well as time, seem to be...
The grand siècle of the 17th century was — and still is — widely romanticized as a period of history in which art and literature reached their pinnacle in France. French painters, poets, composers, and gardeners from this era were celebrated across Europe and are still remembered today. The art...
At the end of a Tamil manuscript we are accustomed to find various paratextual materials such as colophons, verses and occasionally even indices. There are, however, other types of texts that were likely added to suit particular needs and are consequently unique or quite rare. Indien 206, a manuscript of...
In a previous article, we discussed the Lakṣmīvyākhyāna, an 18th-century commentary on the Mitākṣarā, written by Lakṣmīdevī, and the influence it had in the law courts of colonial India. As we mentioned, this influence was greatly magnified due to Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s reliance on it in his translation of the...
When the English East India Company seized large swathes of the Indian subcontinent in the 18th century, they were forced to transform from “merchants” into administrators. They needed a new army of English civil servants, not only to deal with the considerable revenue that was being generated, but also to...
Among the paratexts of Tamil manuscripts are prose benedictions or blessings, connected to the copyists rather than to the contents of the manuscripts. Some look more like credos than prose invocation to god(s).1 As it happens, there were also Tamil Muslim copyists, as attested by three manuscripts kept at the...
As Russia pushed its borders eastward in the 17th century, it gained control of a vast, mountainous region in eastern Siberia, populated by Buddhist adherents and dotted with datsans, Mongolian Buddhist monasteries. Although both the Buddhists and their monasteries were officially acknowledged by and assimilated into the Empire, their existence...
Philippe-Édouard Foucaux had a habit of coming in second place. Although he is described as the “first teacher of Tibetan in the Western world”, the way in which that “first” is qualified belies the fact that he was not the first Westerner to master the Tibetan language. That achievement is...
A critical edition of a text will usually list variant readings on each page, in an apparatus beneath the text. Over time, scholars have developed a set of signs and conventions to refer to these variations in a compact way. For example, take this page from the first...
Viśākhadatta’s Mudrārākṣasa, variously translated as “Rákshasa’s Ring”, “The Signet Ring”, or “Signet Rākṣasa”, is a unique Sanskrit drama set during the reign of Candragupta Maurya, in the 4th century BCE. As G. V. Devasthali notes, it is the only work “in the whole of Sanskrit dramatic literature [to have] a...
Anyone who has grown up with American horror movies will be familiar with the Indian Burial Ground trope. Typically, a family will move in to a house or a hotel, and then eerie, inexplicable things will begin to happen. The plot thickens, until even the parents — who initially refuse...
Whereas a scribe or an owner might annotate a manuscript directly, scholars working with manuscripts in institutions, such as the BnF, don’t usually have that luxury. But even if you could write on the manuscript, it wouldn’t be so useful, since you would need to retrieve it from storage each...
Umraosingh Sher-Gil (1870-1954) is perhaps best known by association, as the father of Amrita Sher-Gil, the avant-garde painter whom the New York Times once hailed as “a pioneer of Indian Art”. But, in recent years, Umraosingh himself has become recognized as an artist in his own right, through his photographs...
