Related Projects
Giovanni Ciotti, Cluster of Excellence, Research Field A, sub-project RFA07
Towards a Comprehensive Approach to the Study of South Indian Palm-Leaf Manuscripts
This project offers an innovative contribution to the global investigation of palm-leaves used for the production of manuscripts in South India. In particular, it intends to better contextualise the choice and preparation of different kinds of palm-leaves in the production of manuscripts and thus to better evaluate the history of each individual artefact, which is now hampered by our lack of knowledge concerning their material features and the lax ways in which they have been stored in modern times. This will be achieved by integrating information concerning the production and circulation of palm-leaf manuscripts that can be retrieved from the study of their paratexts (colophons and borrowing/lending statements) with the analysis of their material features, such as their DNA and the traces left by the chemical processes that they underwent during preparation. In this respect, the project aims at offering a reliable basis for a wider study of similar artefacts produced and used in vast areas of Central, South, and South-East Asia.
Erin McCann, Cluster of Excellence, Research field D, sub-project RFD02
The Linguistic and Material Aspects of Mixed-Language Manuscripts in the Śrīvaiṣṇava Tradition
The manuscript collection of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) holds approximately 130 multiple-text manuscripts (MTM) that contain materials pertaining to the South Indian Hindu sect of Śrīvaiṣṇavism. The tradition’s teachers (Ācāryas, c. 12th-15th CE) early on accepted three streams of scripture as authoritative – the Tamil devotional corpus, the Nālāyira Tivya Prapantam (NTP); the Sanskrit Vedas, especially via Rāmānuja’s philosophical works; and Sanskrit works on temple-ritual known as the Pañcarātrāgamas. In keeping with this stance, the MTMs of the EFEO collection contain, in an extensive variety of combinations, both Sanskrit and Tamil texts, alongside mixed-language Manipravalam commentaries on the NTP, esoteric works (rahasyagranthas), and hagiographies that are documented in the manuscript sources in a blend of Tamil and Grantha scripts. The project focuses on the material and linguistic aspects of the Manipravalam manuscripts of the collection, particularly the commentaries and esoteric works, with the hagiographies and paratextual materials as important supplementary sources for reconstructing the lines of transmission. It proceeds along three complementary avenues of investigation: 1) material and written transmission based on a manuscriptological approach to the MTMs; 2) internal testimony and paratextual evidence of oral lines of transmission; and 3) the linguistic characteristics of Manipravalam. Research output will range from overviews of the entire collection to detailed case-studies of particular MTMs, and the creation of an open-access database containing a lexicon of Manipravalam as attested by the manuscripts of the EFEO collection.
Leslie Orr, SSHRC IDG Project
South Indian Inscriptions: Media, Messages, and Mobilizations
Stone inscriptions engraved on the walls of temples and copper-plate grants were produced in the region of South India today known as Tamilnadu, in substantial numbers (the stone inscriptions numbering in the tens of thousands), from the eighth century onward. My study consists of a pilot project, focussing on a small region in the far south of Tamilnadu, and on the stone inscriptions and copper-plate grants of this region that date from 1300 to 1800. I examine how, where, why, and for whom inscriptions were produced; to trace changes over time in the inscriptions’ formats, uses, and distribution, as well as the changes that – once produced – inscriptions experienced in their status, audiences, and meanings. I also investigate how these inscriptions participated in religious, political, and cultural realms, in interaction with literary materials produced in the region, including temple legends, devotional literature, and royal eulogy. The project is significant and original because of its sustained attention to inscriptions as physical objects and its concern for inscriptional records in their entirety, as documents produced as coherent wholes. The analysis of the production and form (genre, language) of inscriptions in particular contexts contributes substantially to our understanding of regional dynamics, and the interplay of the local and the cosmopolitan. The project will also help to provide more continuous (less episodic) and more nuanced cultural, political and religious histories of Tamilnadu – histories that reach into the colonial and early modern periods.
Eva Wilden and Neela Manasa Bhaskar, Cluster affiliated Project
Noting down Oral Reports: The Accounts of Local History from the Mackenzie Collection
The 19th century in Tamil Nadu deserves to be called a transitional period for several reasons. On the one hand, it marks the transfer from manuscript to print to be observed in so many cultures of the larger region, although here too, as in other places, manuscripts continued to be in use for a long time (and up to this date have a, if minimal, place in the cultural economy as one of the “traditional handicrafts”). On the other hand, it heralds a large-scale takeover of the institutions of learning on the part of the colonial government which entailed massive changes in the workings of many learned traditions. This process was coupled with losses in traditional knowledge, because learned men such as pandits no longer found a traditional livelihood in the employment of courts or monasteries. Others were integrated into the colonial institutions such as Fort St. George. In order to better understand this process the proposed project will focus on a new type of manuscript. The beginnings of “official” manuscript collection in Tamilnadu (or rather the Madras presidency) were made by the emissaries of the British surveyor Colonel Colin Mackenzie and were brought together as the “Mackenzie collection”, the central piece of today’s Government Oriental Manuscript Library in Chennai. Apart from many old manuscripts they also contain a sizeable portion of a novel kind of document, namely manuscripts (occasionally on palm-leaf, but mostly on paper) written by Mackenzie’s Indian collaborators (mostly Telugu brahmins) who noted down oral accounts of local events, customs and institutions in the areas they visited, mixing what might be factual with traditional myths and legends, often based on the earlier literary production, and creating a new form of historiography.
After a short phase of lively interest in these documents, resulting in a number of descriptive catalogues, they were soon discarded as “useless” in the European project of reconstructing South Indian event history. The project will map the manuscripts in question and make several case studies connected with the early historiography of Maturai and the royal dynasty of the Pāṇṭiyas. It will also explore the possibility that a particular type of late classical manuscript, preserving simple prose retellings of earlier high literature, might have been one model that guided Mackenzie collaborators. The guiding research questions will be: how was traditional knowledge modified and adapted in order to answer a novel type of questions? which layers of traditional knowledge (high literary tradition, lighter prose versions, oral retellings) were exploited to meet the demand? is it possible to trace back some of the famous “modifications” or new versions of earlier legends to particular documents, thus affording a glimpse at concrete agency? how do the various languages (Tamil, Sanskrit, Manipravalam, Telugu, English) involved in the process show in the documents via, firstly, a mixture of languages and registers, secondly, scripts (Tamil, Grantha and European, but also the evolvement of diacritic marks), and, thirdly, layout, beginning with visual organization, structuring the information and dealing with annotation? how do paratexts such as colophons and notes reflect the integration of diverse sources?
Roland Ferenczi, doctoral project
Cēra Historical Geography: The Patiṟṟuppattu
The main target of my researches is to make an annotated English translation of the Patiṟṟuppattu (PP), an Old Tamil anthology written exclusively for the ancient Cēra kings, exploring the various readings, the possibilities and the doubts of the text. The preserved eight decades of poems together with the eight panegyrics (patikam) of the PP are ideal to compare with other available primary sources, in one hand with Old Tamil literary (ilakkiyam) works (Puṟanāṉūṟu, Akanāṉūṟu, Naṟṟiṇai etc.) and grammatical (ilakkaṇam) treatises (Tolkāppiyam, Puṟapporuḷ-veṇpāmālai), with Sanskrit and Prakrit texts, but in another hand with Greek-Latin primary sources written by Ptolemy (par excellence his geographical lists), Pliny the Elder, the anonymous author of the Periplus Maris Erythraei, Cosmas Indicopleustes and others. The list of the sources must be supplemented with Near Eastern and Far Eastern sources, which are beyond the capacity of my knowledge, but will be required to read with the assistance of appropriate experts. The data, which are extracted with the help of our historical/philological comparative methodology, are suitable for further analysis in the light of epigraphic remains and archaeological findings in India and beyond. I am also planning to use the recent results of environmental archaeology (archaeobotany, phytology, anthrakology, archaeozoology) and the results of LIBS- and RAMAN-analysis on the unearthed artefacts and materials. These methods could not just support the historical reconstruction, but can also give further ideas to solve the chronological puzzles. At the end, the processed data will be sufficient to examine the political geography of the early Cēras and to re-discover/re-interpret their political relations with other countries, while we will make important remarks on other chapters of ancient Cēra history regarding their society, their economy and their religion.