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Saiva manuscripts in Pondicherry

Inscribed 2005

What is it

This collection of 11,000 palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravalam focuses mainly on the religion and worship of the Hindu god Siva in southern India.

Why were they inscribed

It includes the largest collection in the world of manuscripts of texts of the Saiva Siddhanta, a religious tradition whose primary deity is the god Siva, which spread across the Indian subcontinent and beyond, as far as Cambodia, but which, from the 12th century, became restricted to southern India.

Where are they

French Institute of Pondicherry and the École française d’Extrême-Orient, Pondicherry, India

The Sanskrit scriptures of the Saiva Siddhanta were widely spread over the whole of the Indian subcontinent ten centuries ago. The influence of the Saiva Siddhanta can be found in Cambodia and Java and in the ritual traditions of all the Tantric and subsequent theistic traditions in India. After a period of wide-reaching influence, this religious tradition fell into abeyance everywhere but in Tamil-speaking southern India: there is no evidence of adherents of the Saiva Siddhanta outside that area after the 12th century. Surviving post-12th-century ritual treatises, commentaries and other religious literature of the school all appear to have been written in the Tamil-speaking area.

Two large collections of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts of Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravalam texts are preserved in French research institutions in the south Indian town of Pondicherry. The 1662 palm-leaf bundles at the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient belong to a single collection from the Tirunelveli district in the south of India. More than a third of this material (about 650 bundles) relates to the cult of the Hindu god Visnu and at least sixty of these Vaisnava manuscripts transmit texts that have never been published. The major collection, however, is that of the French Institute of Pondicherry, which includes 8187 palm-leaf bundles and 360 paper codices. The manuscripts have been collected from every area of the Tamil-speaking south of India and the collection contains texts of every branch of pre-colonial Indian learning. Nearly half of the material relates to the worship of the god Siva. The surviving texts, the majority of them unpublished, were originally written from the 6th century to the colonial period.

Although some of the texts are of very great antiquity, these South Indian manuscript copies belong for the most part to the 19th century. Palm-leaf manuscripts kept in South India can perish extremely rapidly and no surviving examples are known to be older than three centuries. As for the paper manuscripts of the collection, they have tended to be much more regularly consulted, being much easier to read, and the most used are now very fragile.

An example of a palm-leaf manuscript showing how the text is written on to palm leaves and how the bundles of leaves are joined together.