Texts Surrounding Texts: Satellite Stanzas, Prefaces and Colophons in South-Indian Manuscripts

The BnF collection is the heir of the “Bibliothèque du roi” (Petit 2014: 438n4), in which Indian manuscripts entered as early as the 17th century.

The BnF Tamil manuscripts number 652, among which 107 are multiple-text manuscripts, for a total of 1140 different texts – not works, as several works exist in several copies. This is a unique collection of Tamil manuscripts. It has no equal in size and diversity except in South Asia. Unlike most European collections, that go back to the efforts of missionaries or other non-specialists of the Tamil literary traditions, the holdings of the BnF include many significant texts of Tamil literature, and especially its collection of Tamil grammatical and lexicographical works deserves to be called unique. What makes it even more important is the fact that in the humid climate of South India palm-leaf does not last long without proper care and for a number of texts the BnF copies are among the oldest surviving witnesses (there are more than 150 mss. of the 18th c.).

The extant catalogue for Tamil manuscripts (Cabaton 1912) is very basic and incomplete (Indien 1–578; there is an annotated copy with supplementary descriptions of further Tamil manuscripts). We find more detailed descriptions in Vinson’s proofreadings of his unpublished catalogue (1867, up to Indien 204), in his handwritten handlist (2 vols. = Indien 1061–1062), and in annotated proofreadings of Vinson’s catalogue supplemented by handwritten descriptions by Léon Feer (Indien 577).

The collection of Sanskrit manuscripts at the BnF consist in 1878 mss. (see BAM, the BnF online database on archives and manuscripts and the presentation of the collection, with the list of printed and mss. catalogues). We have brief descriptions by Cabaton (1907, up to Sanscrit 1141; with handwritten descriptions up to Sanscrit 1875). For a part of it only do we have elaborate descriptions in print (Filliozat 1941 & 1970, up to Sanscrit 452, that is Vedic, Buddhist, and Epic texts) and on the BnF web-portal (that is Jaina mss. of the Senart collection) as well as studies on specific parts of the collection (Filliozat 1934a, 1934b, 1936). However, a number of smaller personal collections have not yet received much attention and as such will be added to the corpus under scrutiny.

The State and University Library in Hamburg owns a collection of around 500 Indian manuscripts mostly on palm-leaf (rather than paper) and in Sanskrit, part of which were donated by K. L. Janert, G. Oppert and O. Schrader. Besides Sanskrit mss. there are also a few manuscripts in Tamil and Telugu. An important characteristic of this collection is that its provenance is mostly South Indian, that is, the same region as the Tamil manuscripts, often produced in the same institutions and clearly sharing a tradition of colophon writing (Franceschini & Ciotti 2016). At present there exists only a basic handwritten handlist made by V. Raghavan of the 205 boxes of the collection. A portion only (a little more than 250 manuscripts) is covered by VOHD (Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland) in vols. II.4–9 (see Janert 1982, 1991), but the descriptions are very rudimentary. More entries are expected in vol. II.14 (Tamil manuscripts, under preparation). Three manuscripts have been described by Francis (2011). As for the manuscripts from Janert (6 boxes, containing at least 27 items), they have yet to be examined.

The Paris Tamil collection of more than 600 mss. is remarkable for several reasons. It contains samples from the majority of the important literary and scientific traditions of premodern Tamil. It is not strong on early classical literature (which was for the most part not yet re-discovered at the time the collection was made), but approximately 30 specimens from this domain will be taken into account completely, since one of the goals of NETamil was to make a complete survey of the surviving material. The collection of grammatical and lexicographical literature (about 40 mss.), as already mentioned, is the treasure of the collection, unique in Europe and invaluable for researchers all the more since it contains a number of the earliest surviving copies. It also falls within the scope of the NETamil project and will, therefore, be completely catalogued. Its paratexts will be studied and a number of copies will be included in ongoing works of critical edition. The BnF has good samples of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava devotional and theological literature (about 50 and 60 mss., respectively), but the majority of texts also survives in multiple Indian copies. Here choices will be made based on the presence of paratexts and on the interests of the team. For the later pre-modern literature again we find a number of treasures, such as some of the later Kāvya texts and Śaiva Purāṇas. Here an attempt will be made, on the one hand, to cover the texts that ought to be critically re-edited and, one the other hand, to include samples from as many sub-genres as can be identified. Another forte of the collection is its share of missionary and early Indological documents connected with the analysis of the Tamil language and the exploration of its domains of knowledge, as well as some administrative documents (altogether some 110 mss.), all relevant for colonial history, cultural history and history of linguistics, focal points of the CEIAS and HTL CNRS teams. The numerous papers of Ariel (Rosny 1866) will also allow us to better understand how the collection itself made its way into the BnF. Finally, sciences such as medicine and astrology are covered by the collection (about 50 mss.), but here expertise is very thin on the ground, and the extended team cannot hope to do more than some spot checks. The same is true for the final category, labelled as “Others”, which comprises some 50 mss. of later sectarian traditions, miscellanea and unidentified and fragmentary material.

Several corpora from areas other than South India will also require careful examination, as they offer important parallels which have not been fully investigated yet, and which will be of particular interest to our project on Tamil mss. The Burnouf collection comprises 218 mss. (Petit 2014: 438) dispersed among Acc. Nos. “Indien” and is only in part (125 mss.) covered by Filliozat (1941 & 1970): it leaves thus 93 mss. to be investigated. The Burnouf collection also comprises precious early printed editions (Sanscrit 1046–1102), among which are also found Tamil texts (Sanscrit 1130–1140). These provide early print sources about the adaptation of paratexts from the manuscript to the print culture. The Senart collection (Filliozat 1936; Petit 2009) of 304 mss. (Sanscrit 1444–1748) consists mostly of mss. written on Indian paper between the 15th and 19th c. The majority is Jaina, besides 30 Brahmanical and 10 Buddhist works (Petit 2009: 177; Balbir 2017a). N. Balbir and J. Petit have started enriching the online descriptions of the Jaina mss. covering so far 100 mss. (see for instance “Sanscrit 1539”), for which improvements are still to be made (survey of incipits, explicits, and colophons; notes and bibliography). Other Jaina mss. are to be found in the Anquetil-Duperron, Ochoa, and Foucher collections. Of particular interest also are 45 mss. from Kashmir (Foucher, Stein) and a group of palm-leaf mss. from Bengal sent in the 1730s by the Jesuit Father Jean-François Pons, especially remarkable for its large number of Sanskrit works in the fields of Dialectics (Nyāya) and Systematics or Natural Philosophy (Vaiśeṣika) (47 mss.).

The Hamburg collection of about 500 mss. is an interesting counterpart in that it covers more or less the same geographic range (the very South of India) but has put much less emphasis on the local literary language, Tamil, only represented by some 20 mss., which will be taken up completely. An equally small number of mss. relates to other regional languages such as Telugu, while the vast majority covers specimens from a wide range of Sanskrit literary, religious and scientific traditions. One reason why Sanskritists have so far neglected the collection is that manuscripts in South India as a rule do not endure for a very long time, and so it was not expected to find especially old or text-critically relevant copies in Hamburg. But for broader studies of transmission history in a wider sense — for example on local libraries, producers such as scribes and copyists, scholarly networks and manuscript users — such a collection may be of great relevance. In this regard the goal is, on the one hand, to give a fresh impulse to the stagnating work of the VOHD and continue the process of identification and description begun by V. Raghavan in order to find paratexts and extend the database of South-Indian colophons started by the team members Ciotti and Franceschini. In addition, the project will, in accordance with the strength of the team, predominantly focus on philosophy/theology, grammar and poetics.

Besides handwritten lists and catalogues of mss. (below 3.3.2), which are part of the BnF collection of mss., as well as printed catalogues and lists (below 3.3.3), the mss. themselves offer ways to enrich our knowledge of the history of the collections through a study of their paratexts (e.g. colophons). The study of the paratexts coupled with palaeographical studies (cf. title-pages of several mss. from the Ariel collection seemingly from the same hand) will help further our knowledge about the history of the collections and the way the knowledge about India was informed in Europe by the availability of texts. The history of the collections will be dealt particularly by N. Balbir & J. Petit (BnF Jain mss.), J.-L. Chevillard (BnF Tamil mss.), H. David (BnF Bengal mss.), C. A. Formigatti (BnF Buddhist mss. from the Burnouf collection, originally copied for B.H. Hodgson and being the first nucleus of Buddhist Nepalese manuscripts to reach Europe), H. Isaacson (Sanskrit Kāvya), C. Muru (Christian mss.), M. Trento (collections/papers of Anquetil-Duperron and Ariel at the BnF, in collaboration with E. Francis for the latter), E. Wilden (BnF collection of Tamil grammatical works).

The unique BnF collection of some 45 mss. of Tamil grammatical and lexicographical literature contains specimens of almost all the major texts of the tradition, and as such raises questions as to the amount of knowledge still alive and percolating at the time Ariel was in India and bringing together his manuscripts. Moreover, many of the copies are well-preserved and early (17th and 18th century being early in the case of South India) and will play a more or less crucial role in a number of studies on the history of transmission and in the efforts of critical re-edition already underway (for example: Indien 202–203, Yāpparuṅkalavirutti, J.-L. Chevillard; Indien 185, the oldest known witness of Vīracōḻiyam, V. D’Avella; Indien 195, Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ, E. Wilden; Indien 205–206, Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram, D. Cuneo; Indien 181, 187, 198, 207, MTMs, G. Ciotti).

The Christian mss. attest the proselytic efforts of the Christian missionaries, in two different directions: (1) acquisition of a better knowledge of Indian languages and literature and (2) compositions (hagiography, confession manuals) and translations (scriptures) in these Indian languages. Some are in the form of palm-leaf manuscripts, that is an example of cultural transfer in the adoption of the traditional Tamil book (see Colas 2012), in the frame of the accomodatio strategy, which entailed also writing in traditional Indian genres. Christian mss. also have paratexts in multiple languages — Tamil as well as European — that point to their multiple networks of production and circulation. Moreover, they are of particular interest for the history of Tamil language, as some of the missionary works record early colloquial registers of the language not unattested elsewhere. Finally, missionary grammars and dictionaries are important for the study of the history of Tamil linguistics and the encounter between European/Latin modes and Tamil modes of language analysis. The BnF collection is crucial in this endeavour for its antiquity and diversity (Muthuraj 1985).

J.-L. Chevillard is already engaged in the study of the discovery and description of the Tamil linguistic complex by European scholars, both from the grammatical and the lexicographical point of view (see Chevillard 2015, forthcoming 2018). C. Muru, M. Trento and I. Zupanov will study the Tamil manuscripts that were produced in a Christian context (mostly from the BnF). They will work towards improving the catalogue of manuscripts containing missionary documents concerning language analysis (~40 mss.) as well as Christian literature in Tamil (~40 mss.). They will collect and characterise their paratexts (see Muru, forthcoming 2019). M. Trento will focus more in detail on the manuscripts containing works of the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680–1747) in order to understand the reception and circulation of his work and on the manuscripts of Catholic literary texts written in the Tamil genres of ballad (ammāṉai, Indien 484–486) and play (nāṭakam, Indien 492–493, 495). I. Zupanov will investigate the process and chronology of the domestication of Christianity in Tamil, focussing on Catholic missionary texts, often ‘conversion’ stories, which come with annotations in Portuguese, Italian, French, or Latin, and were mostly produced in collaboration with or by Tamil converts and catechists. She will especially target hagiographies, which fitted into supernatural and miraculous plots and required a particular linguistic labour to nativize them as credible Tamil narratives. C. Muru will focus on the grammars, dictionaries (bilingual and trilingual), and religious books. She will approach paratexts from the point of view of ‘pragma-philology’ (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 10, 13) and ‘diachronic/historical pragmatics,’ examining their contextual (addressers, addressees, their social and personal relationship; production, reception, and goals of texts) and linguistic aspects (communicative functions). She will be approaching paratexts as parameters for tracing the history of transmission of the manuscript and as socio-pragmatic devices for presenting, persuading, influencing the reader/public (cf. Framing text and Pragmatics on the Page). E. Francis will study syllabaries of South Indian scripts (Tamil, Grantha) found in Ariel’s papers (NAF 8883–8941), Sanscrit 1129, Indien 188a, 188b, 432, 528, 563b, 941.

In manuscripts from all over India and both the Tamil and the Sanskrit traditions a considerable share of texts is transmitted in MTMs of variable composition and with goals ranging from a single artefact representing the private copy of material brought together by an individual over school books representing a syllabus to whole series of manuscripts assembling a particular literary or religious corpus. The project intends to continue work begun in recent years on the structure, raison d’être and rationale of combining texts in one object. Special focus will be put on the multiplication of paratexts in the form of colophons and title-related marginalia that often accompany MTMs.

This area of research will mostly concern G. Ciotti (ilakkaṇam texts of the BnF, mentioned above under 2a, and śiksā texts of the Stabi, in particular cod. Palmblatt III 8/133), V. D’Avella (grammar MTMs, in Tamil and Sanskrit, combining texts of different schools), H. David (BnF Bengal mss.), C. A. Formigatti (Buddhist mss. of BnF Burnouf collection), H. Isaacson (Sanskrit Kāvya), I. Ratié (BnF Kashmir mss.).

Colophons, generally composed by scribes and specific to the text (manuscript, inscription, administrative document) they are found in, can be defined as short paratexts containing information about the production (date, place, scribe), internal organisation and storage of a particular manuscript. The information they supply is not only of a temporal and spatial nature, but also pertains to the identities of the scribes and owners of manuscripts, the religious environment of production, the language of the scribes and the literary genres. Marginalia are annotations by users of manuscripts. They have attracted very little scholarly attention to date (there is only one, hitherto unpublished monographic study on the topic to date, i.e. Formigatti 2015); yet they often include substantial quotations of texts that are no longer extant (Muroya 2010, Ratié 2017), so that they constitute a unique source enabling us to retrieve significant parts of lost works. These marginalia also often provide us with an opportunity to understand how certain texts came to be marginalized in the course of time despite their innovative character and the intense exegetic or critical reaction that they might have initially triggered; and they may afford us some rare glimpses into the practical aspects of intellectual life – particularly learning and teaching habits – in medieval India (Ratié forthcoming).

This research area concerns basically all participants to the project and especially the following. G. Ciotti and M. Franceschini will focus on the investigation of the syntax (i.e. the order of the elements) of the colophons found in manuscripts written in both Tamil and Grantha scripts and belonging to both collections. The colophons found in the “new” manuscripts (from both the BnF and Stabi collections) will enhance the long-lasting study on the Tamil/Grantha colophons that both have been carrying on in the last years, and will greatly enrich their database on the colophons found in the manuscripts of several collections in both Europe (e.g. Leiden, Cambridge) and India (e.g. IFP Pondicherry, EFEO Pondicherry). More specifically, their investigation will focus on language (specific linguistic and stylistic features found in colophons, multilingualism, etc.), time (interpretation and conversion of the dates and the calendric elements therein), space (connection between manuscripts and the places of their production/use/circulation), modes of and people involved in manuscript production, use and circulation (scribes, copyists, owners, sponsors, users, etc.). N. Cane & E. Francis will study paratexts in inscriptions and administrative documents that mention agents involved in the production of the document (redactors, scribes) or its validation (witnesses). Many such documents of the BnF come from colonial Pondicherry. Their study will be facilitated thanks to the Corpus of Pondicherry Inscriptions (G. Vijayavenugopal 2006, 2010) and existing collections of Tamil agrarian archives (EAP 314, EAP 458, EAP 689). It should be observed that parts of the Tamil manuscripts also come from the very same Pondicherry area. The paratexts in all these materials will enable us to identify redactors and scribes in order to assess if they had overlapping competences, or were exercising their writing skills for different types of written artefacts (drafting and writing inscriptions, administrative documents, and manuscripts). H. David will deal with the Sanskrit mss. from the Pons collection (BnF). Besides producing a full descriptive catalogue of the manuscripts sent by Pons, he shall pay special attention to the various hints (colophons, marginalia, etc.) that may allow us to infer the conditions in which the documents were produced and the historical circumstances surrounding the constitution of the collection. It is not to be ruled out that the collection contains autograph manuscripts by Navya-Nyāya scholars of the period. I. Ratié will work on the 45 Kashmirian Sanskrit mss. preserved at the BNF; many of them contain several works, some of which remain unidentified (or were wrongly identified), and she will correct and complete the existing catalogue. She will also study the marginal annotations in these manuscripts.

Mnemonic stanzas are the part of the satellite stanzas – the free-floating verses transmitted in manuscripts along with the main text, many of them meant for easy memorisation – that pertains to the preservation of crucial information connected with the main text, principally its content(s), author(s) and place in a corpus or school. Such verses form an open continuum with the prefatory materials crystallising, in particular in the case of Tamil, in various literary subgenres included in the preface (pāyiram) (Wilden 2017a+b). Such material, along with the quotations and references mostly found in commentaries, is the primary source for reconstructing Tamil literary history. This reconstruction process has so far been hampered by the fact that most of such information has been taken at face value without much attention to the sources and their provenance, as well as due to the ignorance of the underlying transmission processes. In particular, little notice has been taken of the fact that the amount and order of such information is in many cases variable in the individual manuscripts. An almost exclusive use of print sources has obliterated the variety, and has left the work of the last century with often arbitrary snapshots from much wider lines of transmission.

In the case of Sanskrit literature, the category of the preface has never gained the same impact as in the Tamil tradition, but very similar sorts of stanzas exist there too, and many an author name, family and birth place we know only by such a verse. One question of the current project will be whether we can observe an influence of the South Indian manuscript tradition as a whole on the transmission practices also of Sanskrit texts – as has already been shown to be the case with the colophons, which are often written in a register of Manipravalam (a mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil) in Tamil as well as Sanskrit mss. from the area.

An additional question common to both traditions will be the relocation of free-floating material from the end (i.e., often the colophon) to the beginning, a process that seems to have begun already in the pre-print era but which becomes part of established editor’s practise in the 19th century. Another issue to be considered is that by no means all of the free-floating material is of the type of a mnemonic stanza. Just as in many MTMs, verses seem to accumulate that are partly created for the occasion, partly quoted from elsewhere. The purpose and inner logic of such accumulations is at the moment hardly understood and we are in need of further material.

For the Tamil manuscripts, the goal will be to broaden our material basis of study which is currently restricted to early classical and part of the grammatical literature into a wider range of genres such as epic (T. Rajeswari and various versions of the Pāratam – the Tamil Mahābhārata), Tamil minor kāppiyam and purāṇam (E. Wilden), Vaiṣṇava devotional, commentarial and scholastic literature (A. Anandakichenin, E. McCann), Śaiva literature (U. Veluppillai), Kaumāra (E. Francis; see already Francis 2017) and medical treatises (I. Kędzia). For the Sanskrit mss., the project aims at establishing a parallel corpus from various regions of India, beginning with the South (H. Isaacson), but including also Northern Jain and various philosophical material (N. Balbir and J. Petit; H. David), as well as Śaiva literature (F. De Simini).

Any Indian text is expected to start with an invocation to a deity for a safe completion of the work (Minkowski 2008: 15). This is true for texts transmitted in the manuscript traditions (Kāvya, Śāstra, …), but also for inscriptions (especially at the beginning of their eulogical literary portions; otherwise we only find an introductory blessing, such as the ubiquitous svasti śrī in the Tamil area and beyond) and administrative documents. Inscriptions, which most frequently record pious donations, also end with curses, which damn those who would interfere with the recorded transaction, as well as benedictions (captatio benevolentiae) upon those who would protect it. Such formulae have a long history in the Indian epigraphical records. Curses, especially in the vernaculars, have received growing scholarly attention as markers of social values and their evolution, as new types of imprecations appeared in the course of time (Karashima 2009; Reddy et al. 2011). In manuscripts we also find instructions to scribes and to users, exhortations to take care of the manuscript (Petit 2012: 101).

N. Cane, E. Francis & G. Vijayavenugopal will scrutinise the BnF collection of inscriptions (original copper plates or transcripts) and administrative documents in order to document curses and benedictions across time and (geographical as well as social) space. In this investigation, the material at hand will be complemented by village documents (copper plates, palm-leaf and paper documents) in collaboration with Z. Headley, who has lead several projects of collection of such material (EAP 314, EAP 458, EAP 689). H. Isaacson will focus on invocations from Sanskrit Kāvya, U. Veluppillai on those from Tamil Śaiva devotional texts.