Series RAS COLL5/5 - Manuscripts

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.

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.