Events

The largest and intellectually most important collections of Indian manuscripts are to be found in India and Nepal.  Many of these manuscripts provide unique insights into the history of Indian mathematics, medicine and other sciences.  The discovery of a 1000-year-old manuscript, The Compendium

of Suśruta allows us to plot the changes the work has undergone between the ninth century and today. The lecture discusses the four major problems that face a scholar who wishes to study the manuscript heritage—discovery, access, interpretation and dissemination—and the solutions provided by modern developments in software and Digital Humanities.

Professor Dominik Wujastyk holds the Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has worked extensively with Sanskrit manuscripts and on Indian social and intellectual history, including traditions of debate. In 2020, Professor Wujastyk was awarded a four-year Canadian SSHRC Insight Grant for the Suśruta Project (http://sushrutaproject.org).

For the past decade SRI has been producing digital tools for the Sanskrit language and more recently the Khoe-Sān languages of Southern Africa. Martin Gluckman presents some of the works of the past decade and what is currently being worked on at SRI. SRI is a volunteer-powered institute based in Auroville in India.

Martin Gluckman completed his Sanskrit studies at ANU with Dr. McComas Taylor after studying computer science in South Africa. He founded SRI (Sanskrit Research Institute) in 2011 in Auroville.

The history of games in South Asia goes back to the Indus Valley Civilization in the 3rd millennium BCE. This talk invites you on a tour of that history, stopping at classic games such as chess, chaupar, and backgammon.

Jacob Schmidt-Madsen has studied the history of traditional South Asian games, with special emphasis on the interactions between games, ritual, and divination. He has written extensively on the games of chaupar (ludo) and gyan chaupar (snakes and ladders).

In 1599, at the Synod of Diamper (Udayamperur), the Portuguese colonial authorities condemned a long list of Syriac books used by the Syrian Christians of Kerala (the Suriyani) to be confiscated and burnt as heretical.

Ever since, there prevailed the view that the auto-da-fé at Diamper had destroyed the manuscript heritage of Syrian Christians and, thus their history is preserved only in oral legends. The speaker describes his survey, digitization and cataloguing of the Syrian Christian archives, which confirmed his hypothesis that a people who cherished their literary heritage are not unlikely to have obeyed colonial orders and submitted their manuscripts to be burnt.

István Perczel has worked extensively on Late Antique and early Christian philosophy, and on Syriac Christianity. He initiated and directed the digitization and cataloguing of the manuscript collections of the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala (the SRITE project).

Bhartṛhari’s ‘Mahābhāṣyadīpikā’ is the oldest available commentary on the Patañjali’s Vyākaraṇamahābhāṣya, and a mine of information on knowledge systems such as Sāṁkhya and Mīmāṁsā. Unfortunately, only a small part of this commentary has survived, that too, in a single manuscript. The

manuscript is written by multiple scribes, and contains folia with blank spaces in the middle of lines, which scribes left when they failed to understand the writing of the original scribe. There exist three different critically edited texts of this commentary published by different scholars at different times. The lecture surveys all three, with a view to finding out the means used to overcome the problems faced while editing a Codex Unicus.

Saroja Bhate was Professor and Head of the Department of Sanskrit and Prakrit languages, University of Pune for 15 years, and Honorary Secretary of BORI twice, for about five years. An authority on Sanskrit grammar, she has published 15 books and around 60 research articles, and was Visiting Professor at universities in Europe, the U.K., Japan and China. She is at present President Prājñapāṭhaśālā Maṇdala, Vāi, Chairperson, Managing Committee, Vaidika Saṁṣodhana Maṇdala, and Trustee, Ānandagrāma Saṃstha.  Her many awards and honours include the Rāṣṭrapati Puraskāra

Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions preserved in several Asian countries are important documents containing ample information about two millennia of cultural sharing with Asian lands. Whatever was carried by the sage and savants was translated, commented on, and used for the formation and consolidation of the state and the welfare of the masses. Sanskrit served to legitimize royalty, sanctify lands, set high standards of literary production, and established moral, social and political value systems. It was the language of rituals to win wars or invoke rain, and contributed to the advancement of medical science, and of spiritual and meditational practices to uplift consciousness.

Shashibala has 25 publications and 110 research papers on India’s cultural contribution to the world. She has documented relics of cultural linkages with India during her travels outside the country, and worked as Guest Professor in several universities abroad. She is recipient of the Highest Civilian Award conferred by the President of Mongolia. Her website is www.shashibala.org

Heike Oberlin and Shiju Alex introduce the open source, online databases ‘Gundert Portal’ and ‘Granthappura’ (ഗ്രന്ഥപ്പുര | Kerala Digital Archive), presenting their history and relationship and demonstrating their use through

examples. ‘Granthappura’ was started in 2009 by Shiju Alex as a volunteer-driven digitization project. In June 2022 it became part of the ‘Indic Digital Archive Foundation’, a non-profit organization for the digitization of Indic-language documents. It has a constantly growing collection of 2500+ digitized artefacts related to Kerala, among them the first Malayalam printed book and first Malayalam dictionary. In 2012-13 Granthappura volunteers approached Heike Oberlin with a request to digitize the Kerala documents at Tübingen’s University library, in particular Hermann Gundert’s legacy. Thus started a digitization project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2016–18, that resulted in the ‘Gundert Portal’, an open source database run by the University Library of Tübingen. About 137,000 pages from 849 titles have been digitized, including more than 140 manuscripts. Nearly 24,000 pages were transcribed into machine-readable Malayalam script by Indian collaborators coordinated by Shiju Alex.

Heike Oberlin is Head of the Dept. of Indology at Tübingen University, Germany. In 1995–2001 she studied Kūṭiyāṭṭam and Naṅṅyār Kūttu at Kerala Kalamandalam, and gained her PhD in 2004 at Würzburg University with an award-winning work on the subject. Her research focus is on Kerala, Malayalam language and literature and performance studies. In 2012–2016 she together with David Shulman led an international project on Kūṭiyāṭṭam. In 2015, in cooperation with the Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University (Tirur), she established the ‘Gundert Chair’ for Malayalam at Tübingen.

Shiju Alex is Senior Technical Writer with ABB Robotics in Bangalore. He spends his free time in digital archiving activities as a volunteer. He is one of the directors of the newly founded, non-profit organization ‘Indic Digital Archive Foundation’.

Prof. Michael Coulson, British Indologist and Sanskrit scholar, was of the opinion that the existing Sanskrit dictionaries were grossly out of date. The most important lexicographic activity regarding Sanskrit was done more than a hundred years ago. During this time lexicography has advanced enormously, but this is not reflected in Sanskrit dictionaries.  Consequently, updating Sanskrit lexicography is an urgent task. The Catalan and Spanish dictionaries are one small step in this direction.

Òscar Pujol studied Sanskrit (B.A., M.A.) at the Banaras Hindu University where he took his PhD with the edition of the ‘Samarthapāda’ of the ‘Tantrapradīpa’, a manuscript on Sanskrit Grammar. He has published several books and translations from Sanskrit. He has also published the Sanskrit‒Catalan Dictionary (2005) and the Sanskrit‒Spanish Dictionary (2019), of 64.000 words, which for the first time includes the etymologies of contemporary Philology and those of the Indian Grammarians. In 2002, he helped in establishing Casa Asia (Barcelona). He founded in 2007 the Instituto Cervantes of New Delhi.