‘If that works, it will be like winning a gold medal’Interview with Giovanni Ciotti

19 May 2022

Pondicherry’s palm-leaf manuscripts have been included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, but the origin of many of them is still unclear. Giovanni Ciotti, head of the 'Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative', intends to discover the story behind them in the new Container Lab.

Lesen Sie hier die deutsche Version dieses Artikels

Giovanni Ciotti, the new ‘Container Lab’ is due to go on its very first journey to India at the end of this year. That’s going to be an enormous effort logistically and in financial and scientific terms. What kinds of treasures are awaiting it in Pondicherry to make it all worthwhile?

Around 12,000 palm-leaf manuscripts are kept there, covering everything from religious treatises to poems and instructions on dance. Most of them are from the 19th century, but a few of them go back as far as the 18th. They’re written in two classical Indian languages: Tamil and Sanskrit. These manuscripts are exceptionally important to our understanding of Tamil culture, religion, and science. The problem is, we know very little about their provenance; hardly any records exist about where they are from and who they were written by. We need to know this to understand how certain religious cults spread in the past, for example.

How can scientists find out where a particular manuscript comes from hundreds of years after it was made?

The writing itself and the kind of language the scribe used indicate that the manuscripts come from the region in the south-east of the country where today the state of Tamil Nadu is located. There are various approaches we can use to narrow down the locality further. First of all, we can take a look at what we call the palaeographic characteristics of manuscripts, such as the shape of the letters that were written. The Container Lab will help us analyse their physical properties as well. If particular patterns become apparent in the process – in soot, for example, which was used as ink for writing, or if the palm leaves all have the same DNA structure – then we can be relatively sure that the manuscripts all came from the same place originally.

From the same place, you say. But you still wouldn’t be able to tell where that was, would you?

Well, luckily for us, there do happen to be a few other manuscripts that we know more about. Over the last ten years, I’ve built up a database with a colleague of mine in which we’ve recorded a significant number of them. It currently contains around 900 items, most of which are kept in Pondicherry. If we identify the physical properties that all these manuscripts possess, then we’ll have a good starting point as we’ll be able to compare the results with the properties that other manuscripts have and then draw some sound conclusions about their provenance. That’s basically what our work in Pondicherry is about.

There are a number of factors in this mission that could turn out to be positive or negative, regardless of each other.

In view of India’s colonial history, isn’t it rather awkward if Europeans arrive in Tamil Nadu with all their expensive equipment and start researching the region’s manuscripts? Shouldn’t that be left to local scholars?

It is a rather delicate matter obviously, but the idea of this trip is not for us to barricade ourselves in the lab, do our research, and then go home again. The container lab is actually a kind of tool to help us transfer what we learn about the manuscripts to other people; we want to work together with local institutions and give as many students as possible the opportunity to learn how to use the instruments we’ve brought along with us. That’s in our own interest; the more skilled people we have on site, the faster we will be at researching the mountains of manuscripts there. We’re going to be working in the lab for ten months and will only be able to analyse 400 manuscripts at most in that period, so there’ll be plenty to do while we are there.

Will you be starting from scratch or has some research already been done that you can build on?

As far as material analysis goes, we really will be starting from scratch with the manuscripts in Pondicherry. That’s why we have to test a number of methods before we go. The equipment we will be taking with us will depend on which methods turn out to be most effective. One big challenge we face is that non-invasive methods are the only ones we can use. The manuscript collections have been classified as part of the 'memory of the world' by UNESCO, which, to put it simply, means you can’t just cut a piece off one of the manuscripts and put it under a microscope. In fact, we are just testing a method now in which a kind of swab is taken from the palm leaves to get just enough material to perform a DNA analysis. The method doesn’t work very reliably yet, I’m afraid, but hopefully we will have perfected it by the time we leave.

Let’s take a look ahead to October 2023 now. What do you need to achieve by then if this mission is to be a success?

That’s hard to say. There are a number of factors in this mission that could turn out to be positive or negative, regardless of each other. First of all, there are the containers themselves. If they prove to be useful in the field and we’re able to ship them overseas without any of them dropping overboard or getting stuck in Customs for ages, then that would be a great achievement in itself. Then there is the aspect of knowledge transfer I just mentioned: it would be great if we managed to convince a few of our colleagues in Tamil Nadu how much the humanities can benefit from employing methods used in the natural sciences. There is still a lot to do when it comes to different academic disciplines collaborating with each other, not just in India of course. Then we come to research on the manuscripts themselves. If we can show that manuscripts from the same locality have certain physical features in common and can then reconstruct the provenance of manuscripts whose origin is unclear, that would be an enormous feat. Nobody knows if that will work yet, and a number of my colleagues are doubtful it will. If it does, though, it would be like winning a gold medal at the Olympics for me!