Thread by @shrikanth_krish

Spitzer
Bower
Bakshali

What's common?

These are the names of three of the oldest Indian manuscripts from 1st millennium

Spitzer dates to 2nd/3rd cen CE
Bower 4th-6th cen
Bakhshali - 3rd cen

Yet none of them are in India

They reside in Berlin, Oxford, and Oxford respectively

Here's @blog_supplement on the Spitzer manuscript - I couldn't find anything more comprehensive than this elsewhere on the net

manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/a-b…

Here are the wiki pages of Bower and Bakshali -

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bower_Man…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakhshali…

To my mind, the Indian awareness of these historic documents is abysmal!

Imagine a scenario where all the manuscripts of Magna Carta exist outside of Great Britain, but none in the UK.

This is very much like that ridiculous scenario

One admires the role played by Bodleian, Oxford and the State Library of Berlin in preserving these pieces of heritage

But to my mind, we need to have a signature campaign of sorts to get them to India.

These need to be bought from their current owners!

Right wingers in India often have this refrain - "Kashi, Mathura, Ayodhya" pleae - Bas, yeh teen de do.

I have another triplet for them - "Spitzer, Bower, Bakhshali" :D

This is worth an online campaign

It's interesting that none of these three manuscripts were originally discovered in what constitutes India today

Spitzer was discovered in 1906 on the Silk Road in Xinjiang, China
Bower was found circa 1890 in Xinjiang
Bakshali was discovered near the Khyber Pass in 1881!

The three manuscripts are unique in their own way and cover different topics

Spitzer is perhaps the oldest of the three. A philosophical text that includes discussion of Buddhist philosophy, a summary of Ramayana, and an enumeration of Mahabharata's Parvas

The language is Sanskrit and the script in Brahmi

To my mind, it is important historically as it solves some of the perennial dating issues surrounding Ramayana and Mahaharata

Eg - it is fashionable in some quarters to claim that the two epics reached their final stage by the Gupta era

This manuscript proves that the epics were well established in canonical versions long before 2nd cen CE - at the very least

The Bower manuscript is a mix of Sanskrit and Prakrit, written in Late Brahmi script, and a couple of centuries younger than Spitzer

Its content is primarily focused on medicine and Ayurveda and apparently has content that overlaps with Charaka Samhita

Bakhshali manuscript is of mathematical character and is in Sharada script

While parts of it go back to 3rd cen CE, other parts of it are from the 9th cen. It is supposed to contain one of the early uses of place-value system and "zero"

To my mind these are invaluable texts that ought to command visitors in droves in Indian museums

Yet we are mostly ignorant of them

I propose a campaign of sorts to buy them from their current custodians. It is worth the diplomatic effort