The Indic Manuscript Collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) consists of approximately 3,000 manuscripts, with around two-thirds in Sanskrit and one-third in Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages, collected from the Indian subcontinent. The collection includes several subcollections, each with its own unique provenance. It is remarkable for its diversity, spanning various genres and languages from across South Asia.
The Sanskrit collection consists of 1,878 manuscripts in Sanskrit and Prakrit languages, primarily written in Devanagari, Bengali, Grantha, and Telugu scripts, on Indian paper or palm leaves (ôles). This collection also includes grammars and lexicons authored by missionary fathers and European scholars.
The Pali collection contains 885 manuscripts in the Pali language, some in Burmese, Thai, Khmer, or Sinhalese scripts, with the majority written on palm leaves.
The Indian collection comprises 1,064 manuscripts in languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Sinhala, Hindustani, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, and Bengali. Initially classified by language, the collection was later unified into a single set and cataloged by Antoine Cabaton. This collection also features epigraphic documents, including inscriptions on copper plates (Indian 574) and copies of inscriptions (Indian 790-795).
Manuscripts date from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, covering all areas of the arts and knowledge, from philosophy and science to literature and religion. The definitive identification of certain manuscripts in these collections remains to be done.
In collaboration with the BnF, the goal of this initiative is to consolidate the metadata of 300 Tamil manuscripts and add them to the SAMHiTA digital repository as well as PANDiT.