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@gmail.com with your name and affiliation. I will do the rest.

Sincerely,

Dominik Wujastyk

Professor Dominik Wujastyk

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity

Department of History and Classics

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.