Dear Colleagues

 

Greetings from the International Research Division, India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi.

 

I am glad to introduce you to IIC's new initiative called SAMHiTA: South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archive, and to invite you to the first of our monthly lecture series, Kriti-SAMHiTA. 

On Friday, 29 April 2022, 6:30 pm IST, we have Dominik Wujastyk speaking about the importance of Sanskrit manuscripts in understanding the history of science in South Asia, with reference to the Suśruta Project. Below are links for registration and for the YouTube live streaming/recording. 

An introduction to the SAMHiTA project follows. I very much look forward to everyone's advice, ideas and participation.

Best regards,

Sudha Gopalakrishnan

 

Kriti-SAMHiTA: The Plurality of Indian Knowledge Systems

 

Inaugural Lecture

Friday 29 April 2022, 6:30 pm IST

The Importance of Sanskrit Manuscripts in Understanding the History of Science

Inaugural Remarks: Shri K.N. Shrivastava, Director, IIC

Speaker: Prof. Dominik Wujastyk, Saroj and Prem Singhmar Chair of Classical Indian Polity and Society, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta

Chair: Dr Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, International Research Division, IIC

 

The largest and intellectually most important collections of Indian manuscripts are to be found in India and Nepal.  Many of these manuscripts provide unique insights into the history of Indian mathematics, medicine and other sciences.  Most of the knowledge we depend on for our understanding of these sciences was generated during the 20th century and itself depended on printed books created in the late 19th century and the decades before Independence. These century-old printed Sanskrit texts are reprinted again and again right up to the present time, giving a false impression of being contemporary, while the manuscripts are generally ignored. Yet the manuscripts hold the potential to give us much more up-to-date, accurate and novel information about the history of Indian sciences.  

There are four major problems that face a scholar who wishes to study the manuscript heritage: discovery, access, interpretation and dissemination. Yet modern developments in software and Digital Humanities provide important solutions to these problems.  This lecture will discuss these issues with reference to a research project on the medical classic called The Compendium of Suśruta.  The discovery of a 1000-year-old manuscript allows us to plot the changes the work has undergone between the ninth century and today, but the discovery brings with it many practical difficulties

 

Professor Dominik Wujastyk holds the Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity at the University of Alberta, Canada. After completing a BSc in Physics, he took masters and doctoral degrees in Sanskrit from Oxford. He has worked extensively with Sanskrit manuscripts and on Indian social and intellectual history, including traditions of debate. His expertise ranges from Sanskrit grammar, to the history of Indian medicine and science, and the history of yoga. Among his books are, A Handlist of Sanskrit and Prakrit Manuscripts, Metarules of Paninian Grammar and The Roots of Ayurveda. He founded the INDOLOGY online discussion forum in 1990, and was co-founder of the journal, History of Science in South Asia. In 2020, Professor Wujastyk was awarded a four-year Canadian SSHRC Insight Grant for the Suśruta Project (http://sushrutaproject.org) that is investigating the early history of medicine in South Asia.

 

Registration link:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZNuh0JKKQcq2j1Kvkh-BVw

 

YouTube Link:

https://youtu.be/IcT_IsOcIUA

 

 

SAMHiTA

SAMHiTA (‘compilation’/‘compendium’ in Sanskrit) is an initiative of the India International Centre Delhi, to consolidate metadata on South Asian manuscripts in collections outside India, which would be made available on an online platform accessible to scholars worldwide. Select manuscripts will be digitized, published online, and transcribed in the form of searchable texts. 

The project is being steered by Dr Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director of the International Research Division of the IIC, and Founder Director of India’s National Mission for Manuscripts (2003–07).

In March 2022, SAMHiTA started a 12-month pilot to establish models for cooperation, through cataloguing and digitization of collections at four institutions in Denmark, Nepal and the UK. The pilot is supported by the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, and has the participation of many distinguished scholars including several on this list. 

IIC is partnering with PANDiT: Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts and Records to compile and cross-reference metadata, and with the Sanskrit Research Institute, Auroville  to map repositories with holdings of Indic manuscripts. Our initial database is based on the bibliographic survey carried out by Biswas and Prajapati (1998), and the Sanskrit catalogues compiled by Dominik Wujastyk.

We would be delighted to hear from members of this list who wish to partner with SAMHiTA, and grateful for any leads to institutional repositories in different countries, in the form of links to/electronic copies of hand-lists, catalogues or  bibliographic surveys. We particularly welcome names of institutional representatives we might contact.

 

 

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