Archival Aesthetics: Framing and Exhibiting Indian Manuscripts and Manuscript Libraries

Abstract

Can the Indian manuscript and manuscript library be art? In what follows, I reflect on this question by examining a set of photographs I created for an art project called Manuscriptistan. I explain what it has meant for me to aestheticise Indian manuscript libraries and manuscripts, and I offer some insights about why it is important for scholars to bring sensual, spatial and artistic awareness to the things with which, and the spaces in which, they do their research.

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• archives
• art
• manuscript libraries
• manuscripts
• photography

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for awarding me a generous fellowship in 2015, which enabled me to conceive, develop, and ultimately produce Manuscriptistan as an art project. I would also like to thank Lynn Ransom and Benjamin Fleming, whose early support and sustained encouragement were crucial to the project’s realisation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names of people in this article are pseudonyms. Place and institutional names have purposefully been kept nondescript to maintain the anonymity of the people and institutions under discussion.

2. Morgan Pitelka, ‘Introduction’, in Jan Mrazek and Morgan Pitelka (eds), What’s the Use of Art: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), p. 2.

3. Stanley J. O’Connor, ‘Human Literacy and Southeast Asian Art’, in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 26, no. 1 (1995), p. 157.

4. There is a lot of research on the politics of the archive that could be cited here. Although the topic is beyond the scope of this article’s remit, it is worth pointing to Nicholas Dirks’ collection of essays that cogently tackle this topic in the Indian context. See Nicholas Dirks, Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

5. Anupam Sah, ‘Palm Leaf Manuscripts of the World: Material, Technology and Conservation’, in Studies in Conservation, Vol. 47 (2002), pp. 15–6.

6. B.S. Kesavan, The Book in India: A Compilation (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1986), p. 9. Most Buddhological scholars agree that the Pali Canon as we have it today was not put into writing until the first century BCE.

7. National Mission for Manuscripts, Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India [http://www.namami.org/national-survey.htm, accessed 26 Feb. 2020].

8. On the Indology Listserv, for example, on 19 March 2009, Dominik Wujastyk recounted a conversation in which the famous scholar of Sanskrit astronomical literature and a recognised authority on India’s manuscript history, David Pingree, postulated the number as around thirty million, though there are apparently no published sources to corroborate this [http://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology_list.indology.info/2009-March/032925.html, accessed 13 Sept. 2019].

9. In the same Indology Listserv post mentioned in note 8, Dominik Wujastyk came up with a rough calculation among existing manuscript corpora in India that have dated colophons, which number about 15 percent in a typical collection, and the median date for surviving Sanskrit manuscripts is 1830.

10. The NAMAMI website states that its original mission was to ‘unearth and preserve the vast manuscript wealth of India’. See National Mission for Manuscripts [https://www.namami.gov.in/history, accessed 10 Sept. 2019].

11. Benjamin Fleming, ‘The Materiality of South Asian Manuscripts from the University of Pennsylvania MS Coll. 390 and the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh’, in Manuscript Studies, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2016), p. 50.

12. In the same Indology post referenced in note 8, Wujastyk cites as an example the digital collection of the Directory of Oriental Manuscripts in Germany (Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland).

13. Flavio Marzo, ‘Digitising Books as Objects: The Invisible Made Visible’, The British Library Collection Care Blog (19 Feb. 2018) [https://blogs.bl.uk/collectioncare/2018/02/digitising-books-as-objects-the-invisible-made-visible.html, accessed 14 Sept. 2019].

14. Dot Porter led this project from the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with Alexandra Gillespie, Alberto Campagnolo and Conal Tuohy and the University of Toronto Libraries and the Old Books New Sciences Lab [https://github.com/KislakCenter/VisColl, accessed 14 Sept. 2019]

15. Benjamin Fleming’s study, cited in note 11, looks at the materiality of manuscripts, comparing research on South Asian manuscript cultures at the University of Pennsylvania and the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh. The article nicely illuminates some of the organisational differences and difficulties one finds in archival spaces that hold manuscripts from South Asia. See Fleming, ‘The Materiality of South Asian Manuscripts from the University of Pennsylvania MS Coll. 390 and the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh’.

16. Critique of Judgment (1790) followed Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, J.H. Bernard (trans.) (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1951), Book I, Sections 1–2.

18. Ibid., Book I, Section 5, pp. 210.

19. Michel Chaouli, Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 13.

20. Ibid., p. 116.

21. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Book II, Section 40, p. 14. One need not look very far to see that other artists have also been fascinated by the book as art and the library and archive as aesthetically pleasurable spaces. If there was one identifiable moment of inspiration that I can remember when Manuscriptistan bored into my head as something more than a hobby, it was in 2012, in Paris, when I came across Bernadette Genée and Alain Le Borgne’s mesmerising documentation of the national archives in northern France. The following year, Dayanita Singh published File Room, which appears to be indebted to Genée and Le Borgne (though Singh does not mention their work in the interview she published at the end of her book). These two books and Singh’s recent experiments with miniature art books as wall art, Kerala Box and Pothi Box, both released through her self-started publishing unit, Spontaneous Books, have also informed how I imagine the Indian manuscript and library as art. See Bernadette Genée and Alain Le Borgne, Archifolia: Documents (Paris: Filigranes Éditions, 2012); Dayanita Singh, File Room (Berlin: Steidl, 2013); Dayanita Singh, Kerala Box (New Delhi: Spontaneous Books, 2017); and Dayanita Singh, Pothi Box (New Delhi: Spontaneous Books, 2018).

22. Anthony Cerulli, ‘Manuscriptistan 01’ and ‘Manuscriptistan 04’, in Light, Vol. 7 (Fall 2018), pp. 10–1; Manuscriptistan, Kamin Gallery, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (Sept.–Dec. 2019: 62 pieces, solo exhibit); and Manuscriptistan, Chazen Museum of Art, Faculty 2020 Exhibition, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI (Feb.–May 2020: 4 pieces, group exhibit).

23. Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 18.

24. Ibid., p. 1.

25. Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids, dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, THINKFilm and HBO, New York, 2005.