Nowadays, online tools make it possible to compile an international petition.  See, e.g., change.org, etc. What do we think as a community about raising a petition to the minister of culture (see their National Mission on Libraries) about the inaccessibility of MSS at the SBL and the damage done thereby to national and international scholarship on the history of Indian culture?

Best,
Dominik

--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
Department of South Asia, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies,
University of Vienna,
Spitalgasse 2-4, Courtyard 2, Entrance 2.1
1090 Vienna, Austria
and
Adjunct Professor,
Division of Health and Humanities,
St. John's Research Institute, Bangalore, India.
Project | home page | HSSA | PGP

On 4 February 2014 14:37, Martin Gansten <martin.gansten@pbhome.se> wrote:

My thanks to Michael Witzel, Madhav Deshpande and George Cardona for sharing their views and experiences. It's a sorry situation indeed. The Sarasvati Bhavan Library catalogue includes some 120 MSS of 15 different texts relevant to my current research, some of them very rare -- but apparently unavailable. The situation lends a new meaning to the dictum 'pustakasthā tu yā vidyā parahastagataṃ dhanam'...

Martin Gansten


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