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Saving the Kashmirian Sanskrit Heritage

The importance of Kashmirian Sanskrit Literature was realised 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 recognised and led to a distorted view of South Asian literature. 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 A major effort to rescue the still unpublished and often unknown highlights of Kashmirian Sanskrit literature from oblivion is warranted.

In the present project a team specialising in editing Kashmirian texts will make a larger number of carefully selected texts accessible in first editions by utilizing the vast reservoir of Kashmirian manuscripts in India and Europe, but also scans that appeared online in recent years. 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" (kalpavṛkṣa), which is breaking several international records (for instance, for using thirty languages in its intexts), but has remained completely unknown until very recently. 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. 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.

The project homepage can be found at https://www.kasaharaksa.de