South Asian
Collection

The unique tradition of recovering the meaning of original texts through commentary originated in this part of the world.

Commonly known among traditional Sanskrit authors was the proper role commentary played in bringing to life what was inherent in an original manuscript.

Within Indian knowledge systems—and all forms of literary expression—is the inter-nesting of narrative with meaning in the mode of expression that conveys them.

The literary text was intended to only have meaning in the context of its commentary; in this sense, the commentary must not only be present, but present itself as part of the original, based on a logic that operated upon the recovery—rather than the discovery—of meaning.

The role of commentary has two main implications for the work of preservation. First, a text’s necessary openness to interpretation led to a rich diversity of interpretive systems. Second, premodern works of South Asia cannot stand alone or be understood without consideration of how a text was relevant to its physical community. This creates a tension between the conservative reliance upon lineage and therefore orthodoxy, and the emphasis on innovation within the guise of renaissance based on new discovery of timeless truths.

There is no other place in the world where the oral tradition and the physically documented tradition are represented in such a unique way.

South Asia is home to the world’s oldest spiritual poetry, the Vedic hymns “seen” by poets in the very fabric of creation and addressed to personified forces of nature and the cosmos. First compiled some 1,500 years before the Common Era, these Sanskrit collections were transmitted orally without being committed to writing for another millennium. A strong “literary” tradition in the narrow sense of writing did not develop in India until the 1st century BCE.

Similarly, the diverse spiritual traditions of this extraordinary region share an emphasis on oral transmission through highly developed memory cultures. India’s wisdom traditions—Vedism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, to name a few—emerged out of a dynamic interplay between the written and spoken word. Even as literary culture became increasingly widespread from the beginning of the Common Era, works that were composed in writing maintained the pretense of speech.

So while India transmitted knowledge and culture through manuscripts for around 2,000 years before the advent of print culture, the written word was never divorced from the living context which gave rise to it.