Dear Colleagues,

Some of you may have received this fund-raising email from the RAS in London.  I think the RAS has sent it to Fellows.

I am forwarding it to the INDOLOGY list in case you wished to contribute to the appeal.  But a second reason is to explore with the membership whether you think a post like this is an appropriate use of the forum.  The INDOLOGY committee has always jealously guarded the forum from commercial posts and advertising.  Pressure for such posts has mainly come from publishers.  Point 8 of the Guidelines says:

Discouraged forms of communications: List members are discouraged from posting messages that are not part of a discourse on Indology. In particular, commercial or advertising messages are strongly deprecated, and may lead to suspension. Members should not post job-seeking requests to the list. Long posts that make multiple argumentative points are strongly deprecated.  

What is your opinion about fundraising appeals such as this one from the RAS?  Would it annoy you to see such posts from time to time?  Would you feel the forum was being misused?  Or would you view it as legitimate, since it is not exactly commercial and the goal is to support indological scholarship?

Incidentally, at the end of the post the RAS refers to its collaboration with Archive.org and gives the URL for its online manuscript scans.  This is also an interesting development, for the obvious scholarly reasons but also as an example of modernity in the indological tools and facilities emerging from the digital revollution.

Best,
Dominik Wujastyk
--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk*
Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
University of Alberta, Canada


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Royal Asiatic Society <info@royalasiaticsociety.org>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2019 at 05:16
Subject: Please support our fundraising efforts and help us conserve a rare Burmese manuscript and its woven braid
To: <wujastyk@ualberta.ca>
Please support our fundraising efforts and help us conserve a rare Burmese manuscript and its woven braid

2 May 2019
 
The Royal Asiatic Society is currently undertaking a short campaign to raise funds towards the conservation of one of our manuscripts. The object in question is RAS Burmese 86, one of our Burmese Kammavācā manuscripts.
In order to carry out this conservation treatment, the Society needs to raise £1820. We have already received several generous donations that have helped us make some progress towards this goal. However, we still have some way to go, and so we are asking our Fellows, supporters, and anyone with an interest in protecting cultural heritage, to help us meet this cost. Several years ago, the Society raised some funds to carry out a similar treatment for this valuable object, and these we have added to the new contributions received. We hope that further donations will help us make sure this manuscript and its sazigyo (woven braid) can continue to be studied and appreciated for many years to come.
To donate, please visit

https://royalasiaticsociety.org/donations/

and select the option “Pay Now”, recording “Burmese Braid Fund” as a reference for your contribution. Alternatively, please speak to a member of staff.
Created in 1792, this Kammavācā comprises 11 dark red lacquered, gilded, and decorated plates. The plates are contained within two light wooden covers, and wrapped in a multi-coloured cotton cloth woven with bamboo slats. While the plates themselves are in comparatively good condition, the cloth containing them has suffered from deterioration over time. Its colours have faded, there is age-old dirt heavily concentrated within the woven threads, much of the fabric is fraying, threads are loose or unravelling, and one of the bamboo slats is broken.

We need a professional conservator to carefully clean the manuscript, secure the loose threads in place, support the broken bamboo, and make a bespoke conservation box to protect the manuscript in the future.
This sazigyo is a very early example of this rare art form, and it has become discoloured over time and has suffered from the effects of staining and dirt. A potentially more serious problem is that there are several abrasions and disruption to the weave; and it is in danger of unravelling further. As well as cleaning the sazigyo, these loose threads must be secured to ensure that this precious object does not deteriorate. Once it is stabilized, the sazigyo will be stored on a custom-made roller, and kept in the customized box with the manuscript.
Kammavācā is a Pali term which refers to a collection of passages from the Tipitaka (Theravada Buddhist canon) that relate to religious ordination and the rituals of monastic life. Kammavācā manuscripts have been one of the most popular genres for Western collectors of Burmese texts, and as such they are quite well represented in Western collections. But this particular manuscript stands out, not only for its intrinsic beauty, but also because of its sazigyo: a woven band used for binding manuscripts. This sazigyo is a particularly early example of an unusual and distinctive art form.

There are no details about how this particular manuscript entered the Society’s collections. The Society has about 130 Burmese manuscripts, almost all of which were acquired by the Society during the nineteenth century, when they were purchased from (or donated by) British historians and collectors. Our Burmese manuscripts are currently being digitized as part of the Society’s ongoing collaboration with the Internet Archive, which has already seen over 260 palm-leaf manuscripts from the Society’s collections photographed and made available for people all over the world to see online at https://archive.org/details/royalasiaticsociety.