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Librarian at the Bodleian Library

(I know, it is not Wednesday, but due to the close dead line I thought of posting this ad immediately.)

John Clay Sanskrit Librarian

Bodleian Libraries, Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford

Grade 7: £30,434 – £37,394 p.a.

We are offering the rare opportunity for someone passionate about Sanskrit literature to work with the Bodleian Libraries’ world-renowned manuscript and printed book collections based in the Weston Library as a Librarian.

You will be enthusiastic about working with scholars to help communicate your knowledge of Sanskrit’s rich literary heritage to a broad audience in accessible and engaging ways. You will also be committed to building the Bodleian’s historic collections for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations. Working under the Head of Oriental Collections you will curate collections, stimulate research in and promote appreciation of Sanskrit literature.

You will have a degree in Sanskrit studies or similar and a professional qualification in librarianship or information science and/or academic library experience in the Sanskrit subject field. You will also have experience of working with Sanskrit manuscripts at a professional level, and of the promotion of library collections through organising outreach sessions, exhibitions or seminars.

This is a full-time, fixed-term post for 1 year.

Due to the nature of this post, candidates will be required to undertake a Disclosure Scotland check as well as a financial background check. The possession of a criminal record or poor financial background will not necessarily prevent an applicant from obtaining this post, as all cases are judged individually according to the nature of the role and information provided.

You will be required to upload a supporting statement as part of your online application. Your supporting statement should list each of the essential and desirable selection criteria, as listed in the further particulars, and explain how you meet each one. CVs will not form part of the selection process.

For further details about the role, including the job description, and to apply please click here or copy and paste the below link into your web browser:

https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/pls/hrisliverecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=119208

Only applications received online before 12.00 midday on Friday 18 September 2015 can be considered. Interviews are expected to take place on Wednesday 30 September 2015.

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An Open Access journal on Transcultural Studies

Birgit Kellner recently mentioned on the Indology mailing list the last issue of Transcultural Studies and this prompted me to visit their website. The journal appears to have hosted articles on various topics, ranging from literature to the visual arts, from politics to the history of sciences, across times and countries but with a strong focus on South, South East and East Asia.

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Collating manuscripts

As part of my current project, I am collating some South Indian manuscripts. So far, I have been collating a recent Telegu transcript on paper and a Grantha one on palm leaf.

1. At the end of the training phase, I was able to collate one folio per day of the former (written in a modern notebook with 38 lines per page). This means that I will be able to collate it in full in 66 days, almost three working months. Supposing that I just register variants in a file which has already the text I am editing, I will probably save one third of the time, so let me settle for two months but the last pages of the manuscript contain an unpublished text, so that these needed to be collated anyway.

2. I just measured the time I need for the Grantha palm leaf manuscript after the training phase: 90 minutes for each side of a folio. Since the manuscript has 58 folios, this means I will need 174 hours to collate it, which means 43,5 working days (I can only collate for about 4–5 hours a day, since I cannot focus for longer than one hour on collating and I need to do something else in between), which means little more than two months. If I forget about a separate collation and just insert variants, I will probably need less, perhaps one month and ten days.

3. Next I will collate a damaged palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha containing 35 folios, which will take me little more than one month or two and a half weeks.

4. Then, a further palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha counting 153 folios, which amounts to little less than six months or four months.

5. Then, a last palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha counting 22 folios, which amounts to less than one month or two weeks.

6.–7. Last, I have a two transcripts on paper, written in Grantha in a modern notebooks, summing up to 638 pages. This risks to mean that I will have to invest 4 years on them (!). They contain an unpublished text and the collation cannot be avoided in their case.

This being said, collating in full is better than registering variants (since the latter process inclines one to read what one has in the model instead of reading the manuscript afresh) and preparing critical editions is better than accepting published texts uncritically. Still, it is extremely time-demanding (unless one enjoys collating and does it as her hobby). How important must be the text in order for a scholar to engage in a critical edition? How flawed the edition, in case of published texts? How important must be the text in order to engage in the collation of several manuscripts of an unpublished work?

Part of the problem lies also in the fact that some answers are only found while working on the manuscript(s) and the edition(s), so that an a priori answer is impossible. Thus, I test each manuscript by:

  1. collating some folios at the beginning, middle and end
  2. collating in any case the maṅgala and the colophon(s)
  3. preparing a (keyword) description of the manuscript
  4. comparing it with further manuscripts in order to detect possible transcripts, which can then be left out
  5. comparing it with the extant editions in order to check whether they have already been used (which makes the possiblity of adding something significant through their collation dependent on the quality of the edition)

What are your strategies? When do you decide that collating is worthwile?

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Textual reuse in South Asian texts: Some resources

A basic bibliography on textual reuse can be found at the end of my Introduction to the Reuse of Texts in Indian Philosophy, available Open Access on Academia.edu and on the website of the Journal of Indian Philosophy. Apart from these titles, you might want to know about a few others which have been published thereafter or are now forthcoming:

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TOC of Adaptive Reuse of Texts, Ideas and Images

What does it mean for a Sanskrit author to reuse previously composed texts, concepts or images? What does (s)he want to achieve by doing it? On these topics, I am currently in the process of finishing a volume I edited together with Philipp Maas namely, Adaptive Reuse in premodern South Asian Texts and Contexts (or perhaps Adaptive Reuse. Reflections on its Practice in Pre-modern South Asia), to appaear in the series ‘Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes’, Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden. 

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What happened at the beginnings of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta?—Part 2

Several distinct component are constitutive of what we now know to be Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and are not present at the time of Rāmānuja:

  1. 1. The inclusion of the Āḻvār’s theology in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
  2. 2. The Pāñcarātra orientation of both subschools of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
  3. 3. The two sub-schools
  4. 4. The Vedāntisation of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
  5. 5. The impact of other schools
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What happened at the beginnings of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta?—Part 1

The starting point of the present investigation is the fact that between Rāmānuja and Veṅkaṭanātha a significant change appears to have occurred in the scenario of what was later known as Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta (the term is only found after Sudarśana Sūri). The Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as we know it was more or less there by the time of Veṅkaṭanātha, whereas in order to detect it in the oeuvre of Rāmānuja one needs to retrospectively interpret it in the light of its successive developments. This holds true even more, although in a different way, for Rāmānuja’s predecessors, such as Yāmuna, Nāthamuni and the semi-mythical Dramiḍācārya etc.

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Working together? A short checklist

I am a passionate fan of co-working, since

  1. I believe that working with other people (especially if one works with always new people and not always with the same group) helps one becoming aware of one’s implicit presuppositions
  2. working with other people allows me to achieve more ambitious goals (in my case, an example are the volumes on the Reuse of texts in Classical Indian philosophy I edited for the Journal of Indian Philosophy—I would not have been able to achieve that target alone, since I lack the relevant expertise in many fields of Indian philoosophy)
  3. working with other people is more fun, and fun motivates one whenever one is stuck in a difficult situation