A member of The Royal family will be launching the three volume Jain Manuscript Catalogue of The British Library collection at Buckingham Palace on 15th May.
This catalogue has taken just over fifteen years to become a reality from when the idea to create one was conceived. Apart from the enormity of the task, the Institute had to overcome several problems. First one was the untimely death of Prof Chandrabhal Tripathi within two years of starting the project. Number of manuscripts in the collection was a gross underestimate - the workload increased four fold.
However, Professor Nalini Balbir, who took the project was more than a match for the task and with able assistance from Dr Kanu Sheth and Dr Kalpana Sheth she delivered the catalogue.
The Catalogue comprises of three volumes and a CD containing some of the outstanding illustrations scanned from the manuscripts.
A limited number of the illustrations are also included in the catalogues.
The CD also includes an image of a vjnapti-patra - an invitation letter from the mahajan of a town on cloth to an Acharya to spend the 'chaturmaas' (the monsoon season) in that town.
We have included here an edited excerpt of an article by
Michael O'Keefe, Head of South Asia Collections at The British Library that appeared in March 2007 Newsletter of Centre for Jaina Studies at SOAS. It outlines briefly the history of the project.
"This monumental catalogue was really conceived in 1992 when representatives of the Institute of Jainology inquired how they might help to raise the profile of the important collection of Jain manuscripts held by The British Library. The obvious answer was a descriptive catalogue, since many of the manuscripts had not yet appeared in published catalogues, while others had only cursory descriptions or none at all.
Prof Candrabhal Tripathi, recently retired from his Berlin professorship was invited to lead the project to compile the catalogue.. Tripathi's masterly Catalogue of the Jaina Manuscripts at Strasbourg (Leiden, 1975), building on the codicological methods of Hiralal Rasikdas Kapadia, set the standard for the description of Jain manuscripts. Professor Tripathi was happy to accept our invitation. Indeed he saw the proposed catalogue as a major step towards a full description of all the European collections of Jain manuscripts. His first visit to the Library to start work on the Catalogue took place in April 1994. Several further visits took place until his untimely death in March 1996 robbed the project of its architect.
There was a pause in the work for about two years from 1996-98, two hectic years during which the IoJ concentrated on the highly successful Peaceful Liberators exhibition which was held in Los Angeles and in London at the V&A.
The project was not forgotten, Professor Tripathi’s assistant during his life time, Professor Nalini Balbir undertook the work to see the catalogue through to publication. Professor Nalini Balbir started the second phase of compilation, ably assisted from 1999 by Drs Kanubhai and Kalpana Sheth of the LD Institute of Ahmadabad.
The illustrations in the body of the Catalogue and in the accompanying CD show for the first time the richness of the collection in this respect. From the refined style of the early Kalpa- and Uttaradhyana-.sutras to the vigorous, more popular imagery of the wonderful Sangrahanratna at Cat. No. 337, there is great scope to exploit and interpret the collection from both art-historical and educational perspectives.
The Catalogue contains many treasures, but among "firsts" the following are especially noteworthy: the most ancient manuscript in the Jain collections: the early 13th century palm-leaf Jitakalpacurni; the first Jain codex to enter a library outside the Sub-continent, the composite manuscript Harley 415, which contains no less than 25 individual texts; and the first (we believe) Jain invitation Scroll or Vijnapti-patra to enter a repository outside India, acquired just in time to take pride of place and fill the outstanding gap in the Catalogue (Or. 16192).
The Catalogue is itself the first in a series which will one day see the Jain manuscript holdings of all the major libraries outside India descriptively catalogued to the same high standard and available as both hard copy and internet-ready xml format. This would be the result of further collaboration between the authors of the present catalogue and the IoJ, and the fruition of Professor Tripathi's "visionary project", the Inventory of Jain Manuscripts in Europe, of which he first dreamed forty vears ago.