Dominik Wujastyk and Madhusudan Rimal have been involved with an exciting CosmoLocal sub-project called “Early Science Manuscripts” as part of the PANDiT (Prosopographical Database for Indic Texts) initiative and with thanks to the University of Alberta.

“Early Science Manuscripts” is a research project about the scientific heritage of South Asia in the pre-colonial period.  One of the foundational issues facing researchers in the history of science is that of access to “the archive.” The documentation generated by Europeans in India offers an extraordinarily rich source for research. But the documentary archive of indigenous Indian-language materials is equally, if not more voluminous, diverse and informative. Scientific treatises on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, alchemy and other sciences were composed in Indian languages from the fifth century BCE onward, and this literature grew and specialized until the eighteenth century. However, finding aids for the indigenous archive are far less developed that those for European-language sources.

The aim of the present project is to document the archival manuscript sources for the history of indigenous science in India and Nepal, beginning with the rich manuscript collections identified by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project.