[INDOLOGY] ACSAM and 42500 South Asian manuscripts in North America

[Bill Mak]

Dear colleagues,

I was going through the late David Pingree’s archive at the American Philosophical Society and came across the documentation of his ambitious manuscript cataloguing project for the American Committee for South Asian Manuscript (ACSAM) as part his unsuccessful application of the NEH grant in the 1990s. Pingree envisioned the project to take 20 years to complete and gave an overview of the 42500 manuscripts in North America (22,500 in Arabic, 12,000 in Persian and more than 8,000 in Sanskrit and others Indian languages).

I am aware of Peter Scharf’s NEH cataloguing project of the 1700 Sanskrit mss at Havard (2009-2013) and his work in "From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls” (2015). But there also seems to be an ACSAM webpage on the Brown server which no longer exists. Before I reach out to specific colleagues, I thought I should tap into the collective wisdom of the list and wonder if anyone on the list could share with me more information on the background and future of the ACSAM and these manuscripts in various institutions in North America.

Best wishes

Bill Mak

-- 
Bill M. Mak, PhD

Visiting research scholar
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW)
New York University
15 East 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
US

Associate Professor
Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
Yoshidahonmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan 606-8501
〒606-8501 京都市左京区吉田本町
京都大学人文科学研究所

email: mak at zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Tel:+81-75-753-6961
Fax:+81-75-753-6903

copies of my publications may be found at:
http://www.billmak.com



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