Manuscript folklore
DOMINIC GOODALL
THE WORD IS SACRED; SACRED IS THE WORD — The Indian Manuscript Tradition: B. N. Goswamy; Niyogi Books, New Delhi. Copies available from Vedams eBooks (P) Ltd., Vardhaman Charve Plaza IV, Building 9, K.P Block, Pitampura, New Delhi-110034. Price not mentioned.
The title of this book might seem to suggest a spiritual theme, but this is infact a colourful and attractively produced coffee-table volume, rich with illustrations, about Indian manuscripts. The text, which attempts to cover (at least briefly) every imaginable aspect of the subject, is bilingual, in English and German. And that is because the book was conceived as a catalogue for an exhibition of Indian manuscripts at the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2006, at which India was declared the "Guest of Honour".
History of writing
The whole history of writing in India — on clay, on copper plates, on palm leaves and leaves of other plants, on cloth, on birch bark and, of course, on paper — is projected before the reader, and the country's vast manuscript traditions are truly represented in terms of region and time span.
Truly this is a subject that wholly merits more than one display. The phonetic writing-system that developed in India later than the writing-systems of certain other parts of the Eurasian landmass transformed itself into a multitude of scripts to become a vehicle of Indian thought across an astonishing area. Among its modern descendants, are to be included not just such North Indian scripts as Devanâgarî and Gurmukhî, but also the scripts used for Malayalam, Thai, Khmer, Sinhala and Tibetan, to name just a few.
Also included are Indian samples of calligraphic art of the Islamic script tradition. Indeed it could be said that everything in the book is from India. Conspicuous omission among the countries of South Asia is Nepal, whose cool climate has contributed to the survival of a rich treasure of the subcontinent's most ancient palm leaf manuscripts.
Microfilm
Over the decades, heroic efforts have been made by the remarkable "Nepal-German Manuscripts Preservation Project" to microfilm all the manuscripts surviving in Nepal. India, until now, has not seen such a crusade, and we must welcome the creation in 2003 of "National Mission for Manuscripts" (NMM), co-organiser of the exhibition. (The collaborating body responsible for the exhibition was Frankfurt's Museum for Applied Art (Museum fuer angewandte Kunst).) Unlike in Europe, where the rapid spread of print-culture in recent centuries profoundly changed the transmission of written knowledge, such parts of India's vast literary production over 30 centuries that have survived reached us in manuscripts. But scribal transmission, for a variety of reasons, seems now everywhere to be dead or heading inexorably towards that end .
Apart from manuscripts, the tools of the scribe's trade — ink-wells, compasses, pen-holders, book-stands, types of stylus, and the like — are illustrated and described in an informative section entitled "The Making of a Manuscript" Some quibbles are inevitable. The descriptions, for instance, are at times somewhat too gushing in tone (though not in the German text, which is a great deal shorter); and it is clear to any reader that not all the information can be entirely accurate (how could there be, for instance, a 12th-century manuscript transmitting a text written in 1475 A.D. as the text on p.88 would have us believe?). But on the whole this is a pleasant book on a topical subject.
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