Manuscripts Don’t Burn

HOW IDEAS AND knowl­edge travel across coun­tries, and how they change as they move, is one of the fundamental ways in which society and culture are shaped. This was the subject of the recently concluded exhibition Manuscripts and Movements of Ideas across Asia that was held at the India International Centre (IIC) from October 17-26. Images of manuscripts, as well as fragments of inscriptions and paintings were on display panels in the Art Gallery of the IIC Annexe. It was a treasure trove for all those interested in history as there were also facsimiles of several original manuscripts on display.

One prominent manuscript—the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra, or the Lotus Sutra, part of the Gilgit Manuscripts from the 5th-6th century CE— was on birch bark. The originals are now in the National Archives of India. Another display which caught the eye was the Anwar-I Suhaili, a work depicting the translation of the Panchatantra by Emperor Akbar in the 17th century, now in the Tashkent Library. The accom­panying painting depicted a Sassanid minister presenting this translation to King Anushirvan in the 6th century.

This exhibition was part of the 20th edition of the IIC Arts Festival, which had as its theme, K’alpavriksha: The Nationalist Movement—Freedom and Identity.

The exhibition had been conceptu­alised by Sudha Gopalakrishnan, the executive director of IIC’s International Research Division. She says, “We have been influenced by so many cultures, that ours is now a meshed culture. There is an overarching connectedness that transcends boundaries, within and between India and Central Asia. We also wanted to explore the movement and exchange of ideas and religion, and how they travelled across borders.”

The exhibition also conveyed how texts from India travelled to all parts of Asia. The first section, ‘Early Textual Encounters’ went all the way back to the translations of the first Buddhist texts, including fragments of the Bahubuddha Sutra, the earliest known Buddhist manuscript recovered from Afghanistan in the 1990s. There was also a folio of the Ashokavadana, (the Story of Ashoka) on how Ashoka constructed 84,000 stupas. A fragment from the Lotus Sutra detailed the travels of Sudhana when he sought enlightenment. Gesturing to this panel Gopalakrishnan says, “These manu­scripts have travelled throughout Asia, as they were translated into Chinese, and its scenes were recreated in Borobudur, as well as in paintings in Japan.” This is the one of the earliest re­corded examples of the exchange of lan­guages, religions and cultures, and how they transcend political geographies.

The exhibition also includes works of Patanjali, namely the Yoga Shastra and Samkhya Pravachana. The exhibition’s curator and SAMHiTA’s (South Asian Manuscripts Histories and Textual Archives) project man­ager Niharika Gupta explains, “The earliest Yoga Shastra manu­scripts are dated from 5th century CE, but the tradition itself may well have been older.”

“Manuscripts deal with every subject under the sun, not only about faith, or cosmology. They are about lived lives. They are also about drama, sex, medicine, architecture, and children’s games,” says Sudha Gopalakrishnan, executive director, IIC’s International Research Division

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One fragment, Amarakosha by the Sanskrit grammarian Amarasimha (500 CE) is a ‘thesaurus’ comprising synonyms for different types of words. It can be noted that this is one of the first recorded examples of a thesaurus. Other examples in the exhibition were the Abithana Chintamani a compendium of synonyms in the 12th century and the Dhananjaya-kosa a compilation of Sanskrit synonyms and homonyms.

Another early example of how people played with languages and scripts was Raghavapandaviya by 12th-century poet Kaviraja. It is an epic poem, which is a narrative of the Mahabharata if read in one direction, and simultaneously a nar­rative on the Ramayana if read in another direction. As Gopalakrishnan observes, both narratives have been scripted with­out any error.

Apart from Sanskrit and the early Devanagari scripts, there were also several Persian and Farsi texts. Persian language expert Chander Shekhar, a senior professor at Delhi University contributed images digitised from major institutes from Tashkent, Tehran and Bukhara. One fragment was of an early dictionary, the Miftah-ul Fuzala or the ‘Key of the Learned’. This was a 15th-cen­tury Farsi illustrated manuscript that was likely used to help children starting to read. Also from the same period is the Kitab-i viladat-i Iskandar, the horoscope of Sultan Iskandar of Fars, which provides evidence of a long interaction between India, Europe and the Persian Empire. The densely detailed hor­oscope in blue and gold was compiled by Imad al-Munajiim, who cites Abu Ma’shar, a 9th-centu­ry Balkhi astrologer.

There is also the Nush­kha E-Nasikha-E Masnawi­at E-Saqime, dated 1622-23 CE. It is a part of the compilation of renowned Persian scholar and poet Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi’s verses in the 13th century by a minister of Jahangir. Interestingly, Rumi’s philosophical range encompassed Buddhism, possibly because he was a native of Balkh, Afghanistan, believed to be a major Buddhist centre in the past. Persian expert Shekhar says, “An official, Abdul Latif Gujarati, posted during Shah Jahan’s period in Kabul, collected many manuscripts there. He travelled from Kabul to Burhanpur. He collected sev­eral manuscripts belonging to Rumi, during his time in Kabul, and collated different texts.”

Gopalakrishnan emphasises, “Manu­scripts deal with every subject under the sun, not only faith, or cosmology. They’re about lived lives. They are also about drama, sex, medicine, architecture, and children’s games.”

At Manuscripts and Movements of Ideas across Asia each fragment could have in itself been the topic of a thesis. Yet the most poignant display was the last one, and this was perhaps deliberate. This was the Bhagnaprsta verse from the Krdantaprakriys. It is a message from the scribe, who mov­ingly states that his back and neck are broken, and his head is bowed from writing this work, and it asks readers to care for his labours. It is a tribute to the unnoticed scribes everywhere whose work changed the world.

About The Author

Antara Raghavan

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