The New Catalogus Catalogorum

[Royce Wiles]

The NCC is a vital and fundamental resource for those of us interested in
Indology.

Even those not directly using manuscripts need to realize that much of
their scholarly source material was eventually derived from manuscripts by
someone. Like the rainforests, who knows what is still left to discover in
the manuscript heritage of South Asia. We have so few critical editions of
Indic texts we still very much need access to manuscript resources.

If the NCC does not continue then for those texts beyond PA (v.13) those of
us who use manuscripts will be forced to rely on the 19th century tools or,
as Vishal Agrawal has stated, go through individual catalogues of
manuscript libraries. In case you think that's a viable  option you need
only read the introduction to K. L. Janert's An annotated bibliography of
the catalogues of Indian manuscripts. (Wiesbaden : Franz Steiner, 1965). to
see how few institutions even have good holdings of those catalogues.

As an indication of the amount of material in manuscript I quote:

"There are some 3.5 million manuscripts in various collections in India. In
addition about 60,000 Indic manuscripts are preserved in 20 different
countries of Europe and North America ... Only about one million
manuscripts  have been recorded in published catalogues or handlists
brought out by libraries and institutions ... These one million manuscripts
have been listed in about 2000 volumes of catalogues published till 1990;
out of these nearly 300 were publised by overseas institutions."
(Preface (p. xiv) to: Bibliographic survey of Indian manuscript catalogues
: being a union list of manuscript catalogues / editor Subhas C. Biswas ;
assistant editor M. K. Prajapati. xix, 330 p. ; 26 cm. Delhi : Eastern Book
Linkers, 1988.ISBN 81-86339-75-2. Rs800.00--promoted as an updated version
of Janert's 1965 listing. Janert listed 375 manuscript catalogues, this
survey lists 1100  more (p. xvi)).


So (numerically at least) most of the manuscript resources for Indological
study are still in India, most of the catalogues have been published in
India. The Madras project even commissioned special listings of otherwise
undocumented material. I think we need to do whatever we can to promote the
continuation of the project, this is after all India's heritage and it
should be a national Indian project to present this material to the
scholarly world.