Series RAS COLL5/5 - Manuscripts

The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded by the eminent Sanskrit scholar Sir Henry Thomas Colebrooke on the 15th March 1823. It received its Royal Charter from King George IV on the 11th August 1824 'for the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia'. It continues as a forum for those who are interested in the languages, cultures and history of Asia to meet and exchange ideas.

The British Library was created on 1 July 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972. Prior to this, the national library was part of the British Museum. The library is located on Euston Road, London, The British Library is a major research library, with items in many languages and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library's collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC. The library maintains a programme for content acquisition.

Jacqueline Filliozat has been a librarian, a lecturer and a research fellow during forty years in Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, working in Pāli philology. She dedicated herself specially to cataloguing Pāli manuscript collections in Europe and Southeast Asia as well, searching for new texts to be distributed to students and colleagues preparing romanized editions. Now retired, she is currently feeding the EFEO PALI Database available in EFEO Paris Library for consultation and compiling a Vocabulary of Pāli codicology (Abhidhānasadda pāḷipotthakañāṇa). (Information taken from academia.edu website: https://independent.academia.edu/jacquelinefilliozat.)

John Dargavel Smith is a former professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge. His studies primarily focused on the language/literature/culture of Rajasthan including a major project on the hero-deity, Pabuji, a book on which was published in 1991 as The epic of Pabuji (Cambridge University Press). He earned a BA degree in Oriental Studies (Sanskrit and Hindi) in 1968 and a PhD in 1974. He was appointed Lecturer in Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1975; University Lecturer in Sanskrit at Cambridge, 1984, and became promoted Reader in Sanskrit, October 2001. He retired in September 2007. In 2009 he published an abridged translation of the Mahabharata with Penguin Classics.

Professor J. Clifford Wright is an Emeritus Professor at SOAS, University of London with a specialist interest in Jaina Studies.

Paul Dundas was a British Indologist, an honorary fellow in Sanskrit language and Head of Asian studies at the University of Edinburgh. His teachings and research focused extensively on understanding Jainism, Buddhism, Sanskrit literature and Middle Indo-Aryan philology. He was regarded as one of the leading scholars in Jaina and Prakrit studies and he served on the Council of the Pali Text Society.

Evrim Binbaş received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago. After seven years at Royal Holloway, University of London, he moved to the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. He studies early modern Islamic history with a particular focus on the Timurid and Turkmen dynasties in the fifteenth century.

Edeltraud Harzer in a Senior lecturer in the Asian Studies department, University of Texas specialising in Sanskrit Language, Indian Philosophy and Literature, and Material Culture.

Simon Everard Digby was born in India in 1932 and was educated at Stowe School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He travelled in India and Pakistan before returning to England to complete a PhD at the School of Oriental and Africa Studies. He returned to India in 1961-1962 and continued to make trips to India throughout his life. He was Honorary Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1968-1984. During this time he worked to identify some of these documents. In 1972 he was appointed to a post in the Department of Eastern Art of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He also taught and examined post-graduate students at SOAS. He died in Delhi in 2010 from pancreatic cancer.