These three magnificent volumes encompass an admirably complete descriptive catalogue of the British Library's and associated collections of Prakrit, Sanskrit, and Gujarati Jain manuscripts, “in some ways the most significant … outside India”. The project was instigated and largely supported by the Institute of Jainology (Perivale, Middlesex and Ahmedabad). The publication brings to fruition work which was begun in 1994–96 by the late Candrabhal Tripathi who, having studied codicology under Ernst Waldschmidt, published the exemplary Catalogue of the Jaina Manuscripts at Strasbourg in 1975. It was continued by Nalini Balbir of Paris, together with K. V. Sheth, formerly of the L. D. Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad, and K. K. Sheth, both erstwhile students of the illustrious Harivallabh Bhayani.
A masterly introduction details the history of the manuscripts' acquisition and use. The former India Office Library collection comprises, besides a couple of manuscripts previously collected by William Jones, most notably those acquired or commissioned c. 1800 by Colebrooke in eastern India and Mackenzie in the south, and later by Bühler in the west and Burnell in the south. To these there accrued a relatively modern “Śvetāmbara monastic curriculum” of Gujarati works. This complements, in the Oriental Collections (formerly in the British Museum), a Harleian manuscript containing an anthology of Gujarati devotional texts from the early seventeenth century. The Oriental Collections include Wm. Erskine's largely Gujarati material, the Sanskrit and Prakrit rarities ascribed to one Ratnavijayasūri, Jacobi's systematic assembly of canonical, shastric, and devotional works, and a few of Bendall's valuable acquisitions. Also catalogued are two dozen isolated illustrated folios, etc., that are in the V & A or are still housed in the British Museum.
Special mention may be made of an extremely rare corpus of three palm-leaf MSS of Jītakalpa material from western India, one component of which bears a date corresponding to ad 1200–01. Sixteen large-scale coloured plates serve to illustrate the beautiful calligraphy and illustration of manuscripts, the range of scripts and manuscript formats involved, and the appearance of colophons, folio numeration, etc. An enclosed CD offers a wide sample of Jain iconography and narrative art, comprising 150 annotated images of illustrations from 32 MSS, devotional and narrative, plus a complete representation of a remarkable pictorial Vijñaptipatra or “invitation scroll”. Digital images were prepared courtesy of The International Dunhuang Project at the British Library.
The introductory volume stresses the importance of the material for the outside world's original discovery and subsequent study of Jain religion, literature, and art, and duly acknowledges the efforts of its main curators, Rost, F. W. Thomas, and Barnett, in facilitating access to it. A survey of other known holdings in England, Germany, France, Austria and Italy is added in the hope of furthering Candrabhal Tripathi's cherished project of a fully comprehensive inventory. In addition to all necessary indexes and concordances, there are studies of the format of multiple codices and discussion of dating and numeration systems, etc. Importantly, the socio-historical and geographical information contained in the often lengthy colophons are analysed, these being copiously transcribed, translated and annotated.
No misprint of any consequence has been observed in this hugely demanding work, although the Gujarati text consistently listed as Tantrākhyāla may be an exception: the transcript reads more plausibly tantrakhyāla (III, 312). A misprint “kūpa-tāḍaga-” in the decipherment of the creolized Sanskrit of the invitation scroll (III, 528) draws attention to the usefulness of its inclusion on the CD provided. Besides confirming kūpa-taḍāga-, the facsimile suggests that in the immediate vicinity one should rather read kḷptain[o]lavanaṃ … upāśrayasārdhaṃ [n]aikajanasahitaṃ mārjanasthānaka-: it is at least clear that -sahitaṃ and hence -sārdhaṃ are intended, and not “-sāhatarm” or “-sārdharm”, as diplomatically printed.
Michael O'Keefe, Head of South Asia Collections, BL, reveals (in Jaina Studies: Newsletter of the Centre of Jaina Studies (SOAS, London), 2, 2007, 35) that he had had in the end just three weeks to convert the inevitably corrupted Word Perfect software into immaculately formated print-ready PDF files, a task which was achieved with the help of Burkhard Quessel, Curator of Tibetan. He describes the publication as “the first in a series which will one day see the Jain manuscript holdings of all the major libraries outside India descriptively catalogued … and available in both hard copy and internet-ready xml format”. The prefaced four-page list of donors and contributors, and acknowledgements of enthusiastic material assistance, underline the importance of the present publication, and of its projected continuation.
