[INDOLOGY] Descriptive sanskrit manuscript catalogues best practices

[Harry Spier]

Dominik has as usual identified the central issue, should a manuscript
catalogue describe "works" or "manuscripts".

But a more complicated related question (and the reason I asked my original
question) is "what should be in the catalog descriptions of on-line
sanskrit etext collections?". Is it even possible to come up with a
standard for this, and would it be useful?  There is SARIT, GRETIL,
Muktabodha, Digital Corpus of Sanskrit, TITUS and others online.  So  what
should be the standards for cataloguing these. What to put in their
headers. This is of course complicated because some of the etexts in these
collections are manuscripts and some are copies of published editions
(works). Several collections including Muktabodha contain both published
editions and manuscripts. .

Should such a catalog be directed towards experts (i.e. assume they know
the work) or should there be information useful to people who are less than
expert (information about the work). To give a trivial example. The
Muktabodha digital library contains the Bhagavadgītā with the commentary of
Abhinavagupta edited by Lakshman Joo. This is the Kashmiri recension of the
Bhagavadgita.  Should a catalog entry for this etext just say its the
Kashmiri recension (sufficient information for knowledgeable people) or
should a catalog entry for this etext explain in brief the differences
between the vulgate and the Kashmiri recension (useful to students less
than expert in the Bhagavadgita) who may have come across this in their
internet searchs.

Thanks,
Harry Spier


On Sat, Jul 27, 2024 at 5:20 AM Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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