it is a pleasure to inform you that, with some delay, the publication of a new
Sanskrit catalogue in the COMDC series (https://tinyurl.com/y3lknzmq) has
become available. Actually consisting in 2 volumes (872 pp., 80+ illustrations),
it constitutes COMDC 7.2 and may be ordered from NIAS Press, hence let me
refer you to this link providing you with some basic information
(http://www.niaspress.dk/books/catalogue-sanskrit-manuscripts-0).
Describing the Royal Danish Library’s (http://www.kb.dk/da/index.html)
so-called Paṇḍit Collection, being much larger than all the three collections
described in COMDC 7.1 together, COMDC 7.2 may be said to be contextually
related to a recent larger indological project focusing on Sanskrit Knowledge
Systems at the Eve of Colonialism, which similar to other contributions such as
The Pandit: Traditional Scholarship in India (ed. Axel Michaels, 2001), has
contributed with valuable perspectives to an investigation of “the structure and
social context of Sanskrit science and knowledge from 1550 to 1750.”
That is, complementing our understanding of the paṇḍita in a panorama of external,
historical and socio-political, circumstances, this catalogue of a Paṇḍit’s collection
of Sanskrit manuscripts provides, phenomenologically speaking, many insights into
a Paṇḍit‘s lifeworld, it opens doors, one might say, to his inner life, to his numerous
mental and intellectual spaces of intentional horizons spanning from the Vedas to the
epics and Purāṇas, from grammar to lexicography, from astrology to palmistry, from
the legal works of Dharmaśāstra to the dramatic and poetic works of Kāvya and Subhāṣita,
from the ritual domains of the Śrautasūtras and Gṛhyasūtras to innumerable forms
of prayogas and pūjās, including Tantric variations, not to forget his fondness for
the emotional spheres of stotra and his knowledge of at least some branches of
philosophy and Yogaśāstra.
Given the many illustrations associated with analytic descriptions addressing all
the three levels (the physical, the semiotic and the semantic) embodied in manuscripts
as pre-modern instruments of transmitting knowledge from generation to generation,
it may likewise be a useful tool when initially introducing students to the very fundamental
Indological issue of reading, or at least being aware of the horizon of, manuscripts,
then, from the outset, better to grasp the necessary tasks of philology, the latter
not least also as a proper foundation for assertions related to hermeneutical issues
of textual interpretation.
Myself being (unzeitgemäß ”smartphonelessly”) off to India again
for the following weeks, let me wish you – as long as this may still
be possible without sounding ironical – a wonderful autumn season,
Hartmut Buescher
.