C P Brown: Palm Leaf Manuscripts

13. PALM LEAF MANUSCRIPTS

All literature in India existed in palm leaf manuscripts for centuries and even millennia in cases. Telugu was already a well-developed language into which hundreds of great Sanskrit works were translated and written in palm leaf Mss. CPB said they would have been destroyed but for his collecting them, and the biographers concur with him The fact that they were venerated, kept in Puja rooms, and not allowed to be otherwise disrespectfully dealt with is common knowledge. Mahabharatam for instance was translated over 800 years prior to arrival of CPB. Srinadha wrote 400 years earlier. Their Mss were in existence for centuries and were read in yearly congregations so that even the common people could appreciate them. These facts ought to have been brought to the notice of the readers of the biography before making 'shameful' statements that the literature would have died, or the manuscripts would have been eaten away by white ants. These ideas are a distortion of the truth and insult the people who preserved them for centuries.

The condition of Andhra from 1600AD to 1800A D had been one of tremendous strife as the Vijayanagar Empire crumbled, but the society did not sink into an abyss of ignorance as presented by CPB. The evidence is the existence of a large number of libraries, and the very fact that he could collect over 600 manuscripts. There were authors who could flourish in that region when CPB pompously pronounced his judgement that the literature was dying.

Manuscript collection is not a novel activity for the colonialists. It was not known, nor will it ever be known as to why thousands of manuscripts were collected and taken to London. It was a criminal loot of sorts. Wherever they could get, numerous copies of the same works were taken and shelved away in corridors of offices. How many were destroyed surreptitiously or thrown in the seas will never be known. It was one way by which the British destroyed our treasures of knowledge. In a way they did what the Muslims did Destruction, but in a clandestine manner.
We know now that Education in India was universal and every Village / Town had schools as ascertained by the census by Collectors in Madras / Bengal / Bombay Presidencies in 1821. One of the ingenious ways of denying access to knowledge was by buying off, whatever manuscripts were available! Two birds at a shot! Poverty made people sell and the British authority helped the acquisition. It is time we investigate at a national level the motive behind this 'Collection Spree' of the British, and claim all of them back. The UNESCO should be approached for this purpose.

We are made to think that the manuscripts have been saved from getting eaten by white ants as if the owners who bought, or got copied by paying to scribes did not know where and how to maintain them. And these CPBs were talking to a nation whose paintings on walls of caves are preserved for over 2000 years! And whose manuscriptsare still available. If people knew what the British were doing with them, may be they would have hidden them somewhere as was done during the Muslim invasions. But the pity is there was no one watching these depredations of collectors and many merrily participated in the collection melas.

The idea of destroying the manuscripts is not more preposterous than carrying thousands of manuscripts to London. In the first place why carry them to London? What exactly were their motives? Were there Sanskrit scholars or multi linguists in London, in 1830s to decipher them? Who is funding the studies? That CPB was asked to take back to India a collection, bought by East India Company from Dr Leydon and lying in the corridors of India house is a case in point.

A word about them straight from the horse’s mouth: -
“This collection was discovered in the India House Library by Mr. Charles Philip Brown, of the Madras Civil Service, in 1837. The Manuscripts comprising it are mainly in the Telugu, Tamil, and Canarese characters, and had lain in the library many years unexamined and unnoticed due to the want of scholars in England, learned in the languages current in Southern India. Mr. Brown formed catalogues and at his suggestion, the whole store was transferred in 1844, on the application of the Madras Literary the collection was chiefly made by Dr. Leyden, whose Manuscripts the Company had purchased at his death”. (D. F. Carmichael). [Dr. WILSON requested CPB, who was on leave, to catalogue them and not Discovered by CPB].

That CPB did a great service to the ANDHRAS turns out to be a lie because Dr Leydon collected MORE SANSKRIT works well before 1811, 30 years before CPB. Leydon Ji also collected 634-Telugu / Canarese mss as against 1134 of CPB. Overall his collection is about the same number as that of CPB!

They all rotted in various verandahs to the eternal shame of CPB. Why do the biographers not try to find out how much Leydon spent and how much he got from the EIC? Why did not Bangorey make or collect a list of all the manuscripts given by CPB so that we could know what are they, and what motive was there for their collection? Is it not a basic thing to do in a research of this type?

Dr Rai of BHU writes: in Bharatiya Prajna Sep 4,2004
“The concept that the British tampered with our Dharma Sastras has also to be looked into.” I think some devoted group of even five scholars can do it by going through the publications by Westerners in late 19thc century. There are thousands of original Palm leaf books lying in UK, in a totally neglected condition, which should be brought back and studied. I believe that such palm leaf originals are in 40 countries!!

On 5 Feb 2005, a news item on manuscripts says, “In Bihar and Orissa, in 5 days 7,00,000 or seven-lakhs manuscripts have been found.” Poor white ants couldn’t trace them! A national commission is working to piece together the country’s unknown, inaccessible and intellectual heritage .The point to note here is but for the wisdom of the people not selling away to the prowling British and their agents, these manuscripts would have been rotting in corridors of IOLs or dumped in the sea.

Dr. Bezwada Gopala Reddy writes a free verse on white ants eating manuscripts! It is such picturisation of manuscript holders as moribund peoples that I object to because this results in the present generation carrying poor and false image of their forefathers, whose deep love for knowledge is belittled. It makes them lose whatever self-esteem is left after 2 centuries of Colonial Rule. This is precisely the aim of the colonialist, which is to rob you of your pride in your Past, and that of the communist to whom all Past in feudalism.

Rao could not have missed the book Good Old days of John Company in which we find: "On the 4th May 1799 Seringapatam was taken by assault. Tippoo Sultan fell in the battle; two of his sons and many of the principal Sirdars falling into British hands as prisoners. A very copious and curious library was found in the fortress of Seringapatam; the books were in chests, each having its particular wrapper, and generally in good preservation. Some were very richly adorned and illuminated, in style of old Missals found in monasteries. The collection was very large, and consisted of thousands of volumes, and must have proved a very great acquisition to Europe of oriental history and literature".

Notice that even in an intense war condition, how thousands of books were wrapped and put in boxes, saving them from getting damaged. Rao doesn’t want even to quote this significant Para lest the reader knows the Truth. Is it difficult to imagine the effort that had gone into to save them?, and infer the tremendous love for literature etc? Incidentally where are these books now? Why is it the Universities are silent when such information comes to light?

Final Fate of the Manuscripts

Bangorey calls the library of manuscripts a living monument! Ironically it is one such monument. In their craze for collection of Mss on one pretext or other a total of 5751 manuscripts were dumped in GOML. They were lying in the verandas of the library at Madras and later transferred to the Director of Public Instructions, who put them in a go down in his office compound in Nungambakkam; Look at their fate, further.
Rev. T. Foulkes, chaplain of Vepery in Aug. 1867, reported to the government on the damaged condition in which the manuscripts were stored. CPB left in 1854 only. Where did he dump them? Why are this question and an answer to it not raised by Bangorey? What was CPB doing or had done to preserve them? After knowing all this tamasha, how can the authors say the literature was saved by this collection. See the Tamasha further?

1. The Manuscripts were removed from the Director's compound to the new Presidency College.
2. From there they have been shifted to the Government Secretarial Buildings.
3. Again in 1896 the manuscriptsLibrary appears to have been shifted to the compound of the Museum Building in Egmore.
4. In 1939 it was again shifted and is now housed in the Madras University Library buildings where these are kept.

It can be seen therefore instead of say 600 owners in different places looking after their own books, the whole lot got centralised by indifferent WHITE people saving them from WHITE ants, who have no love for them since they do not belong to them. And we call this collection craze a literary service.

Cost of collection - a great fib

Let us now see another fact from the letters from Cuddapah. Krishna Reddy had been accounting for every fraction of a rupee received during 1828 – 1838 followed by Subbanna till 1850. There was NO MENTION OF ANY MONEY GIVEN AGAINST ANY MSS TO ANY INDIVIDUAL. How then can the biographers mislead the people with such preposterous statements that CPB spent all his money on books and their procurement etc?

Unfortunately for the biographers, there is some internal evidence to call this bluff. In one letter CPB himself says that he was buying the books at very low rates, at another place he says he may give if need be 10Rs for a book, supposed to be rare. At another place wholesale purchase of a set of 342 Nos. at 230Rs. was mentioned. Borrowing, copying and returning was also in practice. Above all Taylor stated in unambiguous terms that CPB plundered by putting a large number of books collected by Mackenzie in his own name. If all these are properly looked into, it can be seen that CPB’s figures are pure fiction.