Saving the Kashmirian Sanskrit Heritage

The importance of Kashmirian Sanskrit Literature was realised by scholars only in the late 19thcentury, when the literary canon and historiography of Sanskrit Literature in the Indiansubcontinent had already taken shape.

Texts and whole genres that were unique to Kashmir, aspolitical history, were not properly recognised and led to a distorted view of South Asianliterature.

Much has changed, especially in the last decades, but the latest exodus and dissipationof the Kashmirian Hindu community is bound to have a lasting negative effect on such studies.

Amajor effort to rescue the still unpublished and often unknown highlights of Kashmirian Sanskritliterature from oblivion is warranted.In the present project a team specialising in editing Kashmirian texts will make a larger number ofcarefully selected texts accessible in first editions by utilizing the vast reservoir of manuscriptscans that has sprung up online in recent years.

Previous work on unknown texts from newly openedup archives has suggested that much more is to be discovered.

One spectacular example would be a17th century piece of visual poetry from Kashmir, the ``Wish-fulfilling Tree'', which is breakingseveral international records (for instance, for using thirty languages in its intexts), but hasremained completely unknown until very recently.The project will produce a careful selection of previously unknown Kashmirian Sanskrit works in tenvolumes.

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 isa bold attempt to drastically improve the basis of scholarship in Kashmirian Sanskrit, and we shallargue that as a result new genres in Sanskrit literature need to be defined.