[INDOLOGY] Sanskrit in Pakistan

[Dominik Wujastyk]

This was the University of Vienna's Woolner Project in which I participated
in 2009.  The project website that I prepared still exists:

   - https://istb-staticsites.univie.ac.at/woolner/index681a.html?id=1

but the prosopographical database, based on about 2000 philosophical
manuscripts in the Lahore Woolner collection at PUL, is no long maintained
and is not available to the public as far as I know.  In many respects, the
database has been superseded by PanditProject <http://panditproject.org>.

The Woolner database, which was the heart of the project and was restricted
only to philosophical works, was intended to combine prosopographical
information about authors, works and PUL manuscripts with digital images of
the PUL manuscripts.  However, after receiving expensive cameras and
laptops, and after a lot of work was done by Korean and Austrian scholars,
the PUL management withdrew permission for photographing whole manuscripts,
permitting only first two and last two folia.  And these were not to be
made public via the database.  That effectively ended the project.

One of the breakthrough discoveries made by Prof. Preisendanz was a card
index file in the PUL library basement that provided a key connecting the
manuscript numbering in the published 1932-1941 catalogues of Sanskrit
manuscripts to their physical locations on the shelves in the library.
Before knowing about the card index, the PUL librarians could not respond
to requests for items in the catalogue because its serial numbers bore no
relation to the shelf locations.

Sincerely,
--
Dominik Wujastyk, Professor Emeritus, Classical Indian History
University of Alberta

"The University of Alberta is committed to the pursuit of truth,
the advancement of learning, and the dissemination of knowledge
through teaching, research and other scholarly and creative activities and
service."
-- Collective Agreement
<https://www.ualberta.ca/human-resources-health-safety-environment/media-library/my-employment/agreements/2020-2024-collective-agreement---working-version.pdf>
3.01



On Sat, 13 Dec 2025 at 09:27, Shrikant Bahulkar via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> I vaguely remember that Prof. Karin Preisendanz was trying to prepare a
> descriptive catalogue of the MSS either in Lahore or Karachi.
>
> _______________________________________________
> INDOLOGY mailing list
> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20251222/ae92bff6/attachment.htm>