There is a vastness of material that remains to be investigated, an ocean of rivers of stories that remain latent, that need to be reactivated and brought into the present. The corpus of pre-print Indian manuscripts is mind-bogglingly vast and still mostly unexplored. The scholar Dominik Wujastyk writes:

The National Mission for Manuscripts in New Delhi works with a conservative figure of seven million manuscripts, and its database is approaching two million records. The late Prof. David Pingree, basing his count on a lifetime of academic engagement with Indian manuscripts, estimated that there were thirty million manuscripts, if one counted both those in public and government libraries, and those in private collections. For anyone coming to Indian studies from another field, these gargantuan figures are scarcely credible. But after some acquaintance with the subject, and visits to manuscript libraries in India, it becomes clear that these very large figures are wholly justified.⁴²

The library at Koba in Gujarat, for example, has about 250,000 manuscripts. The Sarasvati Bhavan Library in Varanasi has more than 100,000 manuscripts. “A one-year pilot field-survey by the National Mission for Manuscripts in Delhi, during 2004–2005, documented 650,000 manuscripts distributed across 35,000 repositories in the states of Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and field participants in that project report that they only scratched the surface.”⁴³ For scale, one may compare the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, one of the biggest repositories in Europe, which contains about 40,000 mediaeval manuscripts in Latin and Romance languages.⁴⁴

The Indian manuscripts are not fragments; they are full works “typically consisting of scores or hundreds of closely written folios, most often in Sanskrit, and containing works of classical learning on logic, theology, philosophy, medicine, grammar, law, mathematics, yoga, Tantra, alchemy, religion, poetry, drama, epic, and a host of other themes.”⁴⁵ A very small fraction of the manuscripts have been cataloged — I have heard numbers ranging from 5 to 7 percent, but nobody really knows because there is no reliable count of the total; a rough calculation by Wujastyk shows “half a million catalogued manuscripts out of a minimum total of 7,000,000.”⁴⁶ There is an urgency to this Big Data problem. Palm leaf — the most common material — can last more than a thousand years under ideal conditions, but it does deteriorate. The ancient and mediaeval texts have survived because the manuscripts have been copied and recopied, but this practice has died out over the last two centuries. “The future survival of this Indian literary and intellectual heritage today depends on the discovery, conservation, preservation and reproduction by digital means of the last generation of Indian manuscripts,” Wujastyk writes. “A back-of-an-envelope calculation based on estimated figures and attrition rates suggests that several hundred Sanskrit manuscripts are being destroyed or becoming illegible every week.”⁴⁷

The poet Vidya lived in the seventh century CE. Rajashekhara called her the “Saraswati of Kanara” (a district in South India). We have thirty of her poems in Sanskrit. This is one of them, in Andrew Schelling’s translation:

Black swollen clouds

drench the far

forests with rain.

Scarlet kadamba petals toss on the storm.

In the foothills peacocks cry out

and make love and none of it

touches me.

It’s when the lightning

flings her bright

veils like a rival woman—

a flood of

grief surges through.⁴⁸

And also:

“To Her Daughter”

As children we crave

little boys

pubescent we hunger for youths

old we take elderly men.

It is a family custom.

But you like a penitent

pursue a whole

life with one husband.

Never, my daughter,

has chastity

so stained our clan.⁴⁹

And — Shilabhattarika lived in the ninth century CE, or perhaps the eleventh. She was perhaps an intimate of the poet-philosopher-king Bhoja, who built a temple to poetry and learning. We have only six of Shilabhattarika’s poems. One of them is among the most famous lyrics in the Sanskrit tradition:

Nights of jasmine & thunder,

torn petals,

wind in the tangled kadamba trees—

nothing has changed.

Spring comes again and we’ve

simply grown older.

In the cane groves of Narmada River

he deflowered my

girlhood before we were

married.

And I grieve for those far-away nights

we played at love

by the water.⁵⁰

To think that tomorrow, or perhaps yesterday, a manuscript will disintegrate, has disintegrated, taking with it one more poem by Vidya, one more poem by Shilabhattarika — this is maddening.

Shakti is female, Shiva is male. As Ardhanarishvara, they come together in one androgynous, half-female, half-male form, to signal that the primordial reality is beyond gender. But for the most part, gender seems inescapable, a lens through which we always interpret the world and ourselves. Entire races and nations can be gendered. Sir Lepel Griffin thought that Bengalis were “disqualified for political enfranchisement by the possession of essentially feminine characteristics.” The Indian subcontinent itself has often been figured as female by the West. “The masculine science of the West,” wrote an American in 1930, “has found out and wooed and loved or scourged this sleepy maiden of mysticism.”⁵¹ Another observer pointed to the common belief that India’s irrationality required “a stern man who will impose on her the discipline she is too feckless to impose on herself.”⁵² In Indian editorial cartoons, the United States often shows up as a gun-toting cowboy or large-stepping Uncle Sam (sometimes appropriately sinister, with his halo of drones).

Memory too can be gendered. If the past is a foreign country, in modernity’s view it is a feminine one. In that essential text of literary modernism, Heart of Darkness, as Marlow steers his boat up the river, he goes backwards into the past and into a teeming, liquid fertility that is enormously dangerous and seductive. The figure most emblematic of this womb-like wilderness is the “wild-eyed and magnificent” woman who guards Kurtz, “the barbarous and superb woman” who stands “looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.”⁵³ Of course, in Conrad’s story, she does not get to speak. Chinua Achebe pointed out that Conrad does not give Africans the faculty of speech, they make “a violent babble of uncouth sounds,” and even among themselves they communicate with “short grunting phrases.”⁵⁴

So we are at a point of origin, a state of lesser development. The irony here is that apart from the African languages that Conrad reduces to “babble,” the frightening “throb of drums” that Conrad refers to several times contains a sophisticated artificial language rich in metaphor and poetry. The drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages. James Gleick tells us that this language of the drums metamorphosed tonal African languages into “tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours.” The drum language let go of the consonants and vowels of spoken speech and made up for this information loss by adding on additional phrases to each word. “Songe, the moon, is rendered as songe li tange la manga—’the moon looks down at the earth.’”⁵⁵ Listeners would hear entire phrases; the drum language dropped information but “allocated extra bits for disambiguation and error correction.”⁵⁶ “Come back home” would be rendered as: