[INDOLOGY] Petition to complete the New Catalogus Catalogorum

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Dear friends,

The NCC is two or three volumes short of completion.  As many of you will
know, the project started publication in 1949 at the University of Madras
under the direction of Prof. V. Raghavan, and has continued - with ups and
downs - until the publication of volume thirty-nine in 2015.  With the
retirement of its energetic editor, Prof. S. Dash, publication has
stopped.  Volume thirty-nine ended with the titles "suhotrasaṃhitā" and
"suhodita," so you can see how close the project is to completion.

I am writing to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Madras to
encourage him to bring all his energy to bear in order to complete the
publication of the NCC.  The end is tantalizingly close.

The draft text of my letter is below.  If you would like to add your name
as a signatory to the letter, please write to me directly at the address
wujastyk+ncc at gmail.com with your name and affiliation.  I will do the rest.

Sincerely,
Dominik Wujastyk


​
--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk <http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
​,​

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
​,​

Department of History and Classics <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
​,​
University of Alberta, Canada
​.​

South Asia at the U of A:

​sas.ualberta.ca​


​Draft:

Dear Professor Duraisamy,

I am writing to you in my capacity as a university professor specialising
in Sanskrit and the history of Indian literature. Several professional
colleagues have joined me in adding their names to this letter, below.

Throughout my career, I have referred very frequently to the *New Catalogus
Catalogorum: an Alphabetical Register of Sanskrit and Allied Works and
Authors*, published by your university since 1949 and edited and written by
the great Prof. V. Raghavan, Prof. C. Kunhan Raja, and many distinguished
scholars up to Prof. Siniruddha Dash.

The NCC, as the work is known amongst lovers of Sanskrit literature, is the
only complete, unified survey of all Sanskrit and Prakrit authors and works
that exists. It is a unique work and a golden key to India's heritage. It
is also the only comprehensive guide to the wealth of manuscripts in India
and abroad that transmit this precious heritage. Through the NCC, it is
possible to find all the known manuscripts of such works as the *Ṛgveda*,
the *Bhagavadgītā* and the *Rāmāyana*, Caraka's great encyclopedia of
medicine and Āryabhaṭa's reflections on mathematics and astronomy. Anybody
who speaks authoritatively about Indian literature does so because they
have been able to use the NCC to achieve certainty about the facts.

By supporting this great project through the twentieth- and now
twenty-first centuries, the University of Madras has performed one of the
most significant services to India's literary heritage of the last hundred
years.

Over the forty years of my career, I have visited the Sanskrit department
in Chennai as often as I could, to see how the NCC was coming along, and to
lend my encouragement and support to the project. I vividly remember
meeting Prof. E. R. Rama Bai about twenty years ago. At that time, she
despaired of ever seeing the project completed, although she heroically
produced volume fourteen.

Today, against all expectations, the NCC is almost complete. Since 1949,
the University of Madras has published thirty-nine volumes of the NCC. No
fewer than twenty-five of these were published under the editorship of
Prof. Siniruddha Dash between 2007 and 2015. Unfortunately, since Prof.
Dash's retirement a few years ago, publishing has ceased.

I am writing to you today to ask you to give your attention to this
monumental project and to do whatever you can to bring it to completion.
Only two or three volumes remain to be published! The end is very much
within sight. It would be a terrible shame if a project of this magnitude
at the University of Madras that has been running since 1949 were to fall
short of completion when the end is so very close.

I do not know what means are available to you for completing this project,
or what your ideas might be. Outsourcing the project just for this final
step may be necessary.

If I can be of any assistance in helping NCC to fulfilment, please tell me
what I can do! Quite apart from its intrinsic scholarly importance, the
project is of national and international significance as an icon of Indian
scholarship.

We, the undersigned, hope and trust that the University of Madras will be
able to complete the NCC project soon.
​

​​


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20180504/21433f84/attachment.htm>