Sambodhi 2018 Vol 41

Author(s): J B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 14

Vol. XLI, 2018
Reflections on Manuscriptology:
knowledge systems of the country as captured in manuscripts. What is available in the form of Mss today, is only a fraction of what was once there. Historical, sociological, climatic and other factors have contributed to the depletion of a very vast and rich heritage. In the not very distant past, a major portion of India's Mss has been lost due to neglect by their custodians. Unfortunately, the situation remains unchanged and is a matter of grave concern for manuscriptologists, academicians, generalists alike.
The reason for this concern lies in the purpose of manuscripts. Of ourse, Sanskritists need no introduction to the famous saying t
h ay Haisha yada'. The underlying purpose of Manuscripts is to chronicle the society in which they are created. They are not only historical, geographical, sociological chronicles but are also chronicles of development of knowledge systems and are a tool of coming to grips with history of ideas. Which means that in order to understand the development of ideas and theories in a particular discipline or indeed the society at large, manuscripts are a potent instrument.
Periodisation applied to content analysis in manuscripts can provide insight in these areas. Though periodisation is integral to manuscript studies it needs to be effectively applied to studying development of theories and ideas also. For this purpose, benchmarking has to be done at two levels 1) The time when the text was originally created and 2) the time of the copy that is available to us. In the first instance it helps in deciphering the development of a thought and in the second, one is able to look into the sustainability of that thought through different periods in history. It might also lead to finding out the causes of interpolations generally found in texts, which could be as simple as a scribe copying mindlessly, to a new idea having been developed in the intervening period between the original writing and the copy being created. Comparing different manuscripts in a subject belonging to different periods can also be helpful.
The tradition of Indian knowledge systems has been preserved and propagated in two parallel streams, e.g. oral and written. We are all well aware of the rigour and scientific precision through which the Vedic texts have been preserved for the past more than five thousand years. I tend to agree with the date of the Rgveda as proposed by Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak in his acclaimed work Orion (1893). Besides the Vedas, there are the six Vedangas - shiksha, vyakarana, kalpa, nirukta, chhanda and jyotisha, other knowledge