Manuscripts

We took a field trip today after class to the very small museum at Tilak Maharashtra College. The museum is "currently" having an exhibit of implements for Vedic sacrificial rites, which looked like it has been up for a long time now. There were lots of big wooden spoons and swords and bowls and diagrams of sacrificial grounds and models of various containers for fire (the "Oblation Eater" in Sanskrit parlance), etc. etc. There were also lots of backlit black-and-white photographs of a Vedic sacrifice being performed by Brahmin priests, which was cool because I've never seen one. (Yes, in case you are wondering, they still go on, not infrequently, although in some parts of India, especially the south, the rituals which call for animal sacrifice are now "vegetarian", meaning the priests slaughter a little goat made of dough and toss its tasty dough entrails into the fire, instead of a using a real goat.)

I was mildly interested in all this, and was lazily wandering around the cases looking at these things, until I noticed one case off to the side that contained a small exhibit of Sanskrit manuscripts. Many of them were illuminated, and some of them had really tiny calligraphy, sometimes in decorative patterns, and they were really well done. They were breathtaking, actually. I really like illuminated manuscripts, and these were gorgeous. Like all great illuminations they managed to be evocative with very little material; if you looked at them closely enough they would transport you into their tiny world. I was told they were "only" a few hundred years old, and that the museum has hundreds of them in the archives, but not on display. The archives, as far as I could tell, were a bunch of green metal lockers that lined the walls and were full of dusty pages of paper tied between pieces of cardboard. The Indian National Mission for Manuscripts estimates that there are about 5 million manuscripts in existence across India, most of them in family collections or in monastery libraries or languishing in collections like this. Some are in Sanskrit and some in vernacular languages, and hundreds of thousands of them are unpublished. It kind of makes me think of the final shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Some pictures are posted here. They don't do them full justice, obviously, but they'll give you an idea. In case any of you are still wondering what to get me for my birthday (coming up soon in February), now you know.