NCC office, Vaikhanasa agamas

[aklujkar at unixg.ubc.ca]

In his message of 8 March Reinhold Gruenendahl wrote:
<the New Catalogus Catalogorum office, 
Madras University (next door to the Government Oriental Mss. Lib.)>

The present location of the NCC office is on the first floor (one floor
below the office of the Department of Sanskrit) at the U of Madras.  It is
a good 15 minutes walk from the G.O.M.L. The building which now houses the
NCC office is opposite the statue of Kamban/Kampan on Beach Road.

Interested individuals should write to either Dr. Mrs. N.S. Rugmini or Dr.
Mrs. M. Vishalakshi, Research Asst, New Catalogus Catalogorum Section,
Dept. of Sanskrit, Univ of Madras,  Marina, Madras 600 005. 

It should be noted that the NCC office has entries from ms. catalogues,
handlists etc. only up to 1934/1935. Many, many catalogues have been
published n the last 60 years. These catalogues are, on the whole, more
reliable too. Therefore, collecting the information the NCC team has
accumulated is only the first step for anyone wishing to conduct a good ms.
search. Secondly, almost all major Indian ms.  libraries have hundreds of
uncatalogued mss that are mentioned only in the accession/stock registers
and do not appear in the published catalogues because they were acquired
after the press copies of the catalogues were prepared. 

Mss are perishing in India every day as they probably are in many other
countries of the world. In the last fifty years, as pandits became scarce,
not only mss have been thrown away or offered to the rivers by their
descendants, the quality of the work done in ms libraries for identifying
ms contents has gone down. More works are now listed simply as 'a text in
grammar,' 'a text in Miimaa.msaa,' etc. , without spending much effort on
specific identification. 

ashok aklujkar