A Catalogue of the Sanskrit and Other Indian Manuscripts of the Chandra Shum Shere Collection in the Bodlejan Library, vols. 2-3 (Reviews of Books).

• Author: Rocher, Ludo

A Catalogue of the Sanskrit and Other Indian Manuscripts of the Chandra Shum Shere Collection in the Bodlejan Library, part II: Epics and Puranas. Edited by JOHN BROCKINGTON. General editor, JONATHAN B. KATZ. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1999. Pp. xiii + 303. $105.

A Catalogue of the Sanskrit and Other Indian Manuscripts of the Chandra Shum Shere Collection in the Bodleian Library, part III: Stotras. Edited by K. PARAMESWARA AITHAL. General editor, JONATHAN B. KATZ. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1999. Pp. xvii + 240. $105.

In 1984 David Pingree completed the description of the jyotihsastra manuscripts in the first volume of the catalogue of the Chandra Shum Shere collection at the Bodleian Library. In the foreword to that volume the general editor, Jonathan B. Katz, told the fascinating story of how this collection of over six thousand manuscripts found its way to the Bodleian in 1909, "and made Oxford the repository of the largest known collection of Sanskrit manuscripts outside the Indian subcontinent." The collection first came to the attention of A. A. Macdonell in Banaras, in the possession of an as yet unidentified pandit. The chancellor of Oxford University, Lord Curzon, eventually "prevailed upon the Maharajah Sir Chandra Shum Shere, Prime Minister of Nepal, to buy the collection and present it in 1909 to Oxford" (pt. I, pp. v, vii). Since earlier attempts to catalogue the massive collection remained incomplete, it was decided to divide the cataloguing among specialists of different subjects. Fifteen years after Pingree 's first volume, Brockington and Aithal followed up with two volumes, on the epics and puranas and stotras. Note that, even though V. Raghavan was involved in an earlier survey of the collection, the Chandra Shum Shere manuscripts are not included in the New Catalogus Catalogorum. Whereas Pingree surmised that Dinabandhu Bhattacarya of Yasoharamallikapura, who copied four manuscripts between 1902 and 1906, "was most likely a personal acquaintance of the pandita if not identical with him" (pt. I, p. xvii), in the second volume Brockington proposes that the pandit-cum-owner of the manuscripts was Balamukunda Malaviya, also called Balamukunda Sarma Malaviya or Balamukunda Karmakandin, "who was a well-known scribe and manuscript collector in Varanasi in the 1870s" (pt. II, p. ix). Aithal does not add any new elements to the debate, but seems to lean toward Balamukunda rather than toward Dinabandhu (pt. III, p...