The Rigveda of Kashmir

• Applicant: Dr. Jeong-Soo Kim
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Asian Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560804875

In spring 2023, the applicant received 419 digitized photographs of the leaves of a Kashmir manuscript written in Śāradā script from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, which has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage since 2007. This high-resolution color photo data contains the complete Saṃhitā text of the Rigveda (RV) of the Śākala recension. This Kashmir manuscript, discovered by Georg Bühler in 1875, was sent to Max Müller in Oxford, who commissioned his assistant “Dr. Wenzel” to collate the Vālakhilya songs into the RV. The manuscript (Ms.) later came into the hands of Isidor Scheftelowitz, who produced two important publications (1906 and 1907) on the basis of his study of the Ms. An extensive reading of the ms. as the applicant's own preliminary work led to the preliminary conclusion that neither Müller (actually Wenzel) nor Scheftelowitz had thoroughly studied the Kashmir ms. The Kashmir ms. is valuable with regard to the variants and revealing due to the characteristics of the Śāradā script. Numerous indications suggest that we are dealing here with a text that belongs to a subtradition of the Śākala recension. These include, for example, the exclusion of the Vālakhilya songs from the Saṃhitā, but above all the fact that the Kashmir ms. in the 10th Maṇḍala has two more stanzas than the text by Müller and Aufrecht. The printed editions by Müller and Aufrecht are to be considered unsatisfactory according to today's text-critical criteria. They are based on sources from Indian regions where the Devanāgarī script predominated. The misjudgment of the Devanāgarī script as a "Sanskrit script" is related to the fact that Sanskrit printed editions were almost exclusively produced in this script and thus found international distribution. These standard editions, which were largely standardized in terms of printing technology, blurred many of the linguistically highly relevant traces that had been preserved in other writing circles through an extraordinarily precise, differentiated orthography. This also applies to the phonetic articulation in RV recitation. This preservation of the Rigvedic pronunciation, based on the finest hearing, applies in particular to the writing circles of the far north (Śāradā script). Historical linguistics is therefore confronted with the problem of having to continue to use unsatisfactory editions as the basis for its research and ignore materials of actual relevance, despite knowing that valuable but unexplored manuscript RV sources exist. The project proposed here is intended to close this gap in knowledge and to provide linguistic research with easy access to the RV tradition in Kashmir in order to later be able to place its text in the larger context of the overall tradition.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants