Aims and objectives
Over the past decades, scholars of the early history of Śaivism have recovered a wealth of manuscript data that has revolutionized our understanding of the place of Śaivism in the religious history of South Asia. Vīraśaivism, in contrast, still suffers from a lack of text-critical scholarship, particularly regarding its Sanskrit sources. As a result, many at-risk sources remain virtually unstudied, bearing the potential to significantly enhance our understanding of the tradition’s variegated textual and institutional history. This project aims to preserve the multilingual textual history of Vīraśaiva monastic traditions, beginning with the collections of the Kashi Jangamwadi Matha library.
During the one-month project, systematic cataloguing of the three-story holdings of the monastery library will take place resulting in a handlist not as a publication but as a digital file that will be made accessible online to researchers interested in accessing the holdings. A hard-copy printout will be stored at the monastery for consultation by visiting scholars. Titles and publication details of printed books as well as titles and authors of manuscripts are the priority for this handlist, but some annotation will be made for works that stand out as high priorities for digitisation.
