Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts: The Pandit Collection.

• Author: Zysk, Kenneth

Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts: The Pandit Collection. By HARTMUT BUESCHER. 2 vols. Copenhagen: NIAS PRESS, 2019. Pp. 1,040, illus. $275, [livres sterling]200.

It is particularly gratifying to examine a well-made and detailed catalogue of Indic manuscripts. This two-volume catalogue by Hartmut Bueseher, Buddhologist and graduate of the University of Copenhagen, treats the 1,157 Sanskrit paper manuscripts that make up the Pa??it Collection, which is housed at the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen. Sometime around 1924 Poul Tuxen, then professor of Indology at the University of Copenhagen, visited India for the first and only time. While in Maharashtra he purchased a collection of manuscripts that belonged to a single scholar residing there. It is not known from where they derive in Maharashtra, but both Mumbai and Pune are likely candidates. The importance of this collection is its known provenance. It is more than just a repository of Sanskrit titles, as is found in most Indie manuscript catalogues. The Pandit collection represents a learned man's library from the modern state of Maharashtra. Its significance is more than the sum of its parts, for it provides the basis to help define more precisely the intellectual history of a particular region. Provenance also plays a role in the University of Copenhagen's recent acquisition of 3,000 Sanskrit and Hindi manuscripts housed at the Centre for the Study of Indian Science. The collection, like the Pandit Collection, derives from private families but from the region of Varanasi in the current state of Uttar Pradesh. In this way, it too becomes a tool for understanding the intellectual history of that region. The two collections together, both located in Copenhagen, provide a unique opportunity to compare the types of knowledge that were studied and transmitted in Sanskrit in two important centers of intellectual life in premodern India.

The catalogue entries are arranged according to literary genre, beginning with Veda and ending with Vrksayurveda, followed by Miscellanea. Each entry bears two numbers: a...