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 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 scholars, and all those interested in history as there were also facsimiles of several original manuscripts on display.

One prominent manuscript– the Saddharmapundarika 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 Pancatantra 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.

These are records of exchange between ideas and cultures, and show how cultures gradually changed due to the interactions. The 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 itself had been conceptualised by Sudha Gopalakrishnan, the executive director of IIC’s International Research Division. Gopalakrishnan says, “We have been influenced by so many cultures, that ours is now a meshed culture. There 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 manuscripts and translations had been selected by SAMHiTA (South Asian Manuscripts Histories and Textual Archives) and other digital libraries.

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 Asokavadana, (the Story of Asoka) on how Asoka 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 Borabudur, 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.

Further down the exhibit, were some of the works of Patanjali, namely Yogasastra Samkhyapravacana. The exhibition’s curator and SAMHiTA’s project manager Niharika Gupta explains, “The earliest Yoga shastra manuscripts are dated from 5th century CE, but the tradition itself may well have been considerably older.” Pointing to the folio, she adds, “According to the oral tradition, it says that Vyasa’s bhaashya is critical to interpreting Patanjali. However, we don’t have in the manuscripts of Vyasa and his bhasha.” She then clarifies that ‘Vyasa’ does not mean the writer of Mahabharata here, it could just be a generic term to mean ‘writer’.

Language evolves, so that one word has different meanings. One fragment, Amarakosa by 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 example of a thesaurus, centuries before the word itself was coined in another language. Other examples in the exhibit were the Abhidana-cintamani compendium of synonyms in the 12th century and the Dhananjayakosa 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 Gopalakirishnan observes, both narratives have been scripted without any error.

Apart from Sanskrit and the early Devanagari scripts, there were also a number of Persian and Farsi texts. These compiled the fourth and fifth sections (central Asia) of the exhibition. 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 Fuzula 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 in the same period is the kitab-i-viladat iskandar, the horoscope of Sultan Iskandar of Farz, which is the evidence of a long period of interactions 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. Ma’shar studied in Banaras and drew on Indian, Greek and Persian sources in his work on Arabic science.

There was 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 Emperor Jahangir. Interestingly, Rumi’s philosophical range encompassed Buddhism, most likely as he was a native of Balkh, Afghanistan, believed to be a major Buddhist centre in the past. Persian expert Shekhar explains, “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 large number manuscripts belonging to Rumi, during his time in Kabul, and collated different texts.”

Gupta explains that the entire selection was made according to the pictorial or literary content. “Broadly we were thinking of manuscripts that could be highlighted, such as the Gandhara scrolls. Other manuscripts appealed to us for their literary merit. What was striking were the patterns that emerged by cross-referencing them to other similar works.” She adds, “The purpose of the exhibition was supposed to capture what SAMHiTA stood for, and the value of looking at the connections between these manuscripts. It was a way for people to look at parallel cultural processes and begin a more focused examination of the movement of Indian manuscripts across borders.” When asked how the exhibition tied to the festival’s theme of nationalism and freedom, she replies, “It was a way to examine the emergence of a cultural as well as national identity, as well as the emergence of the written word.”

For her part, Gopalakrishnan says, “Nationalism is not a single perspective, it has many aspects. It is not restricted in my understanding to defined borders. It’s all about the spread of ideas and how these ideas travelled to other countries and came back and got reinterpreted and revitalised. I think the whole idea of this festival is to define nationalism as not as something with boundaries but as the ideas that have shaped nationalism and what it has brought back to us and what we have given back to the whole.” Coming back to the subjects of the exhibition, she emphasises, “Manuscripts deal with every subject under the sun, not only about faith, or cosmology. They’re about lived lives. They are also about drama, sex, medicine, architecture, and children’s games.”

Manuscripts and Movements of Ideas Across Asia was densely comprehensive. The exhibition as a whole effectively conveyed how diverse ideas, languages, scripts have crossed boundaries through the millennia. 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.

art and cultureAsiacosmologycultureheritagelanguagemanuscripts