Journey
Manuscript libraries & schools
Indian manuscripts were written on palm leaf and birch bark, which rot, so almost nothing survives unless somebody kept copying it. These are the places that did: a Jain bhandar, two Sanskrit scholastic centres, a Maratha king's library, and a shrine in Kashmir that was a university before it became inaccessible.
Stops (6)
- Jaisalmer Fort · Jaisalmer — the desert bhandar
Jain manuscript libraries in the fort's cellars, holding palm-leaf texts from the eleventh century onward and some of the oldest dated Indian manuscripts anywhere. Jain communities kept their books in stone chambers and recopied them on a schedule, which is why Jain libraries preserve Buddhist and Brahminical texts that those traditions themselves lost.
- Thanjavur Saraswathi Mahal · Thanjavur — Serfoji's Saraswathi Mahal
A Nayaka and Maratha palace library built up above all by Serfoji II, who read Latin, English, Marathi and Sanskrit and collected medical, musical and European scientific works alongside Indian manuscripts. About forty-nine thousand items survive, including his own marginal notes, so it is one of very few Indian libraries whose owner's actual reading can be reconstructed.
- Mithilā / Darbhanga · Mithilā — the Nyāya schools
Navya-Nyāya was taught here for six centuries and examined by oral disputation rather than written paper, which is part of why so little of it was printed. Manuscripts were held by teaching families rather than in a building, and the tradition's refusal to let texts leave is why the logic eventually moved to Bengal by memory instead.
- Nabadwīp · Nabadwīp — the logic capital
Raghunātha Śiromani is said to have memorised the Mithilā texts after being refused copies and written them out in Bengal, after which Nabadwīp became the centre of Navya-Nyāya and Mithilā never recovered it. It is also Chaitanya's birthplace, so one small Bengal town holds the most technical and the most ecstatic traditions of its century.
- Shringeri Śāradā Pīṭham · Shringeri — the maṭha as archive
The one Śankara maṭha whose succession can be checked against inscriptions, endowed continuously since Vijayanagara and still teaching Advaita in Sanskrit. Its records are therefore the best documentary series any Indian monastic institution has, running from the fourteenth century to the present without a substantial gap in it.
- Shāradā Peeth · Śāradā Pīṭh — the university that became a ruin
A temple and learning centre in the Neelam valley that gave its name to the Sharada script and drew scholars from across India; Rāmānuja and the Tibetan translator Vairotsana are both said to have come. It stands on the Line of Control and has been inaccessible from the Indian side since 1947. What its library held is unknown.