[INDOLOGY] Descriptive sanskrit manuscript catalogues best practices

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I have always admired Chandrabhal Tripathi's catalogue of the Strasbourg
Jain MSS as a model.

   - Tripāṭhī, Chandrabhāl. 1975. Catalogue of the Jaina Manuscripts at
   Strasbourg, Indologia Berolinensis ; Bd. 4 (Leiden: E. J. Brill)

There's a big issue at the heart of your question.  Does a catalogue
describe *works* or *manuscripts*?

Almost all catalogues of Indian MSS describe works.  That is to say,
there's a tacit assumption that a manuscript carries a work.  So we say "a
manuscript of the Bhagavadgītā".  This gets cataloguers into difficulties
when a manuscript supports many works.  It also leads to the suppression of
non-work materials such as marginalia, glosses, scribal verses and so on.

The usage of European classicists and medievalists is more evolved, and is
the opposite.  All major catalogues of Western manuscripts describe
*manuscripts*.  A typical entry begins with the physical description and
then continues with a folio-by-folio description of what is written on the
pages.  Finally, there will be references and bibliography.  To find *works*
in such a catalogue, you consult an index.
Some examples:

   - https://archive.org/details/medievalmanuscri0001kern/page/280/mode/1up
   (Neil Ker)
   - https://archive.org/details/catalogueofdated0001brit/page/46/mode/1up
   (Andrew Watson)
   - https://archive.org/details/westernmanuscrip0001trin/page/257/mode/1up
   -
   https://archive.org/details/b30455881_0001/page/72/mode/1up?view=theater
   - https://archive.org/details/descriptivecata00univ/page/176/mode/1up
   - https://archive.org/details/descriptivecata00univ/page/355/mode/1up
   (index)

The second, manuscript-oriented, procedure has more practical and
intellectual advantages than I can list right now.

After the war, the great V. Raghavan designed a spreadsheet-like scheme for
handlisting manuscripts and finagled funding to pay for catalogues that
followed that scheme.  That's all still in place today.  So we have a
century of Indian cataloguing based on a mistaken concept of *what it is
that gets catalogued*.

I wrote a bit about this in my 2013 article, pp. 169 ff. and esp. 172 ff.
See attached.

Dominik
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