Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection

Introduction

This project offers an ambitious study of an important, yet mostly forgotten, collection of Himalayan texts and artifacts collected between 1920 and 1940. It will, for the first time, provide a view of the Van Manen collection through a study of its rare manuscripts, the material objects, undocumented marginal writings, and the unique Tibetan language autobiographies by ordinary Himalayan people commissioned by Van Manen.

Collection Overview

This collection, held in the Leiden University Library, contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts, collected by Johan van Manen who lived in India. After his death in 1943, a large part of his personal collection became housed at the university, totaling more than 1500 mostly Tibetan texts.

He also collected Himalayan artifacts, now stored separately from the texts, in Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden. The texts and artifacts reflect the collector's interest in the lived religion and the lives of Himalayan people.

Project Goals

The project's goal is the examination of the Van Manen Collection as a whole using historical, ethnographic, and philological methods, and by employing Digital Humanities methods through which the origins of the texts and artifacts can be traced, mapped, and made available. This will link them to other editions in online databases as well as to local Tibetan archives.

Research Focus

The main aim is to get an understanding of the proliferation, usage, and presence of religious and ritual literature and artifacts in the greater Darjeeling area in the first half of the 20th century and, by extension, their religious milieus:

1. Many of the texts are unica in Tibetan literature - and as they are mostly unstudied, they merit a thorough examination.
2. The broader question is how to 'read', and engage with, a multi-media collection curated by one single collector.
3. Understanding the 'collection formation' process is also a key aspect of the research.

Contribution to the Field

The project results will contribute to the analysis of multi-media collections of non-Western literature and material culture.