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Category: Colophons

Sascrit 1442.6 Ṣaṭsāhasrasaṃhitā. Courtesy of the BnF.

Kathmandu, Calcutta, Paris: the life of a Tantric manuscript

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...

Sanscrit 814, title page, in Foucaux's hand. Courtesy of the BnF.

Lakṣmīdevī’s “intellectual petticoats” and the flamewar they inspired

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...

BnF Sanscrit 715, folio 1, verso, detail

The long-forgotten colophon of Sanscrit 715 Mudrārākṣasa

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...