Weber’s French connections: acquiring, cataloguing, and editing Sanskrit manuscripts
Résumé
History of Indian manuscript collections is a transnational history. In the mid-19th century, collections in Oxford, London and Berlin overshadowed the Paris collection which was being during a century the first of this kind in Europe. Engaged in many orientalist institutions in France and aboard, Eugène Burnouf asked the ministry of Public Instruction to reinforce the Indian collections by acquiring corpuses of Sanskrit manuscripts through the Asiatic societies in Paris and Calcutta. Meanwhile, Berlin acquired the extensive Chambers collection which was described without delay by Albrecht Weber. To feed his personal collection and his teachings on the Veda at the Collège de France, Burnouf employed Theodor Goldstücker to take copy of some manuscripts held in Berlin. These copies are now kept at the National Library of France. Weber himself was a disciple of Burnouf and worked in Paris on manuscripts acquired thanks to him, particularly for his edition of the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa. The comparison and study of these original and copied manuscripts, as well as the reading of archives of the French administration, shed light on this crucial period when Indian studies received strong philological basis.
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