Saving the Kashmirian Sanskrit Heritage

Introduction

The importance of Kashmirian Sanskrit Literature was realized by scholars only in the late 19th century, when the literary canon and historiography of Sanskrit Literature in the Indian subcontinent had already taken shape. Texts and whole genres that were unique to Kashmir, as political history, were not properly recognized and led to a distorted view of South Asian literature.

Current Challenges

Much has changed, especially in the last decades, but the latest exodus and dissipation of the Kashmirian Hindu community is bound to have a lasting negative effect on such studies. A major effort to rescue the still unpublished and often unknown highlights of Kashmirian Sanskrit literature from oblivion is warranted.

Project Overview

In the present project, a team specializing in editing Kashmirian texts will make a larger number of carefully selected texts accessible in first editions by utilizing the vast reservoir of manuscript scans that has sprung up online in recent years.

Previous Discoveries

Previous work on unknown texts from newly opened up archives has suggested that much more is to be discovered. One spectacular example would be a 17th-century piece of visual poetry from Kashmir, the "Wish-fulfilling Tree," which is breaking several international records (for instance, for using thirty languages in its intexts), but has remained completely unknown until very recently.

Expected Outcomes

The project will produce a careful selection of previously unknown Kashmirian Sanskrit works in ten volumes. They will be accompanied by studies of their literary, religious, or philosophical aspects, from which their significance for the history of Sanskrit Literature can be grasped.

Conclusion

The project is a bold attempt to drastically improve the basis of scholarship in Kashmirian Sanskrit, and we shall argue that as a result, new genres in Sanskrit literature need to be defined.